The Boats Never Came Back

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Quick note before we dive in: I was on vacation last week and the daily brief went quiet — sorry for the gap. We’re back on schedule starting today. Thanks for sticking with me.

One hundred fifty-three years ago today, nine Gloucester fishing schooners sailed onto the Grand Banks and never came back — 128 men gone in a single storm. Today we’re talking about why fishing is still the deadliest job in America, the one piece of gear that turns a sinking into a rescue, and two things landing on safety leaders’ desks right now. Pull up a chair.

Gloucester is a fishing town, and in 1873 it was the fishing town — the schooners that worked the Grand Banks and Georges Bank off New England and Nova Scotia sailed out of that harbor by the hundred. Fishing families measured the year not in seasons but in who came home.

On Sunday, August 24, 1873, a gale came up over the Banks and caught the fleet in the open. When it was over, nine Gloucester vessels were gone and 128 men were dead — drowned, or lost with their boats far from any shore that could help them. The Cape Ann community still names it “The Terrible Gale of Sunday, August 24th, 1873.” That year would go into the books as one of Gloucester’s darkest ever: 174 men from that one port lost to the sea in twelve months. A local publisher, George Procter, was so shaken he compiled The Fishermen’s Memorial and Record Book that same year — a roll of every Gloucester vessel and crew lost since 1830, “including those lost in the Gale of August 24th, 1873.” He needed 296 vessels and 1,437 names to do it.

Here’s where you slow down and think like a safety person instead of reading it as an old sea story. It’s tempting to file this under “act of God — nothing you can do about a storm.” That’s the lazy read, and it’s the same read that kept fishermen dying for another century. The storm wasn’t the whole failure. These crews sailed with no reliable way to call for help once the weather turned, no survival craft built to keep a man alive in cold water, and no immersion suit to buy him the hours a rescue takes. A man in the North Atlantic without a raft or a suit has minutes to maybe an hour before the cold takes his hands, then his mind, then his life. The sea supplied the hazard. The missing layers of protection supplied the body count.

Name it and cite it. Commercial fishing vessels aren’t under OSHA’s 29 CFR — they answer to the U.S. Coast Guard under 46 CFR, and the modern rulebook is the Commercial Fishing Industry Vessel Safety Act of 1988, built out in 46 CFR Part 28. That’s the law written in the wake of a hundred years of gales like this one. Part 28 is where the layers the 1873 fleet never had became required equipment: immersion suits for everyone aboard when you work cold water (defined as a monthly mean low water temperature of 59°F or less), EPIRBs — emergency beacons that broadcast your position, the Category I type deploying automatically if the boat goes down — for vessels operating offshore, inflatable liferafts and survival craft, and, under 46 CFR 28.270, mandatory safety drills every 30 days for boats beyond the boundary line: abandon ship, launch the raft, don the immersion suit, make the MAYDAY call, fight fire, fight flooding. 46 CFR 28.210 even requires crew trained in first aid and CPR.

Translate it to the deck: the ocean doesn’t care how good a fisherman you are — it kills the careful and the careless the same way, and the only vote you get is what you’re wearing and what’s strapped to the rail when the boat goes over. An immersion suit you can find and don in the dark in under a minute. A raft you’ve actually launched in a drill, not just read about on a placard. A beacon that’s registered and in date. That’s the difference between “nine boats lost with all hands” and “Coast Guard pulled the crew out of a raft at first light.”

And the numbers say it plainly. NIOSH — the folks who actually count this — put commercial fishing’s fatality rate at 114 deaths per 100,000 workers across 2000–2017, against about 4 per 100,000 for the average American job; in 2019 fishermen died at a rate more than 40 times the national average. From 2000–2019, 878 fishermen died on the job, roughly 43 a year, and 47% of them — nearly half — died in a vessel disaster: a sinking or a capsizing, the exact way the 1873 fleet died. The gear in Part 28 exists because we kept re-learning 1873 the hard way for a hundred years.

The Full EHS Picture

Most of what we cover is the “S,” but the story is almost never just safety. Environmental: be honest — a storm that sinks fishing boats isn’t a chemical release, and there’s no poisoned creek here. But the environmental thread is real and it points the other way: by the 1870s the inshore grounds were fished out, which is exactly why Gloucester schooners had to run far offshore to the Grand and Georges Banks, into the worst weather, to fill a hold. A depleted resource pushed men into more dangerous water — the environment shaped the risk. Health: in a cold-water sinking the killer isn’t usually the wave, it’s hypothermia and drowning — the cold steals dexterity in minutes and consciousness soon after. That’s not old history: Coast Guard and NIOSH data out of Alaska found crew who reached a liferaft were far likelier to live, and that after 30 minutes in the water your odds jumped several times over if you had an immersion suit on. The line that ties it together: one failure wore three hats — an environmental pressure (fished-out grounds) put men in harm’s way, a health hazard (cold water) did the actual killing, and a safety gap (no raft, no suit, no beacon) removed every chance to survive it. Fix the layers and you answer all three.

1. Three dead at one plant, and OSHA calls it “repeated.” On August 20, 2026, OSHA’s Chicago region announced findings against a Wisconsin food manufacturer that it says repeatedly exposed workers to safety hazards following two separate incidents that left three workers dead. So what for safety leaders: the word that matters in that release is repeatedly. A “repeat” citation means the hazard was known and flagged before it killed anyone — the system had already told them, and the fix didn’t stick. That’s the whole HOP lesson in a headline: the second and third fatalities aren’t a people problem, they’re a corrective-action problem. When you close out an incident, ask the uncomfortable question — is this fix strong enough to survive a bad day, a new hire, and a rushed shift? — because a control that only works when everyone’s careful isn’t a control.

2. OSHA and the Coast Guard just formalized a maritime handshake. In late July, the Department of Labor and the U.S. Coast Guard signed a Memorandum of Understanding to coordinate maritime safety work in Northwest Oregon — clarifying who has jurisdiction over what on the waterfront and how the two agencies share it. So what for safety leaders in and around the water: the old dodge of “that’s Coast Guard, not OSHA” (or vice versa) is getting closed. If you run dock work, seafood processing, vessel loading, or any job that straddles the line between the pier and the boat, don’t wait to find out which agency owns your hazard after someone’s hurt — map it now, because the two of them are increasingly comparing notes.

Shared blamelessly, because that’s the only way anyone learns from it.

A deckhand on a small offshore boat is doing the pre-trip check and goes to pull the immersion suits for the manifest. They’re in the locker, right where they belong — but one’s still in its factory plastic, never opened, and the zipper on another is corroded stiff with salt and won’t move past the knee. Nobody had ever actually put one on. The suits “were aboard,” so every checklist for two seasons got a tick in the box. The deckhand flags it, they pull both suits, dry-fit every one on the crew right there at the dock, and swap the two that failed before the lines come off.

Here’s the HOP read, and it matters: nobody was lazy. The suits were present, the box got checked, and “present” felt like “ready” — that’s not negligence, that’s how a checklist quietly drifts from verify to glance. The defense that saved that crew wasn’t a hero; it was a habit of testing the gear instead of counting it, and a deckhand close enough to the work to notice a zipper nobody had ever pulled. The lesson isn’t “be more careful.” It’s that survival gear you’ve never donned is a prop, not a defense.

Got a fail or a near-miss? Hit reply, or scan the QR below — we’ll feature it anonymously — no names, no company, no blame. Just the lesson, so the next crew doesn’t learn it the hard way.

Before the next trip — or the next shift in any job where your last line of defense is gear you’d have to grab in a hurry — don’t inventory the survival equipment, exercise it. Actually put the immersion suit on and run the zipper to the chin. Actually pull the EPIRB and confirm it’s registered and in date. Actually walk the raft launch, hands on the painter, so it’s muscle memory and not a diagram. A suit still in its plastic and a beacon with a dead battery will pass any headcount and save exactly nobody. The 1873 fleet didn’t have the gear. You do — so make sure it works before the water tells you it doesn’t.

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Please stay Safe & Hydrated!!!