Damn the torpedoes! Full speed ahead.

This blog post about the Superferry debacle by Jan TenBruggencate aptly applies a popular military aphorism:

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

Source: http://raisingislands.blogspot.com/2009/03/admiral-farraguts-torpedoes-and-hawaii.html

Admiral Farragut’s torpedoes and the Hawai’i Superferry

There is a point at which a commander throws caution to the winds and orders, in the words of Admiral Farragut, “Damn the torpedoes. Full speed ahead.”

It worked for David Farragut in the Battle of Mobile Bay in 1864. He defeated the Confederate fleet-largely because most of the tethered mines, then called torpedoes, were duds. They bounced off the ships’ hulls and didn’t explode.

Damning the torpedoes is always risky. It doesn’t always work. Indeed, it seldom does. Take the Hawai’i Superferry (I know, you’re tired of the Superferry).

Early on, when there was still plenty of time to perform a proper environmental study without holding up the ferry at all, someone made that call.

To paraphrase the classic line from “The Treasure of Sierra Madre:” “We don’t have no EIS. We don’t need no EIS. I don’t have to show you any stinkin’ EIS.”

Never mind that the Councils of three of the four counties, representing 100 percent of the ferry’s destinations from Honolulu, asked for environmental studies.

Today’s it’s popular to blame the “environmentalists” for the Superferry’s failure. But County Councils are hardly hotbeds of environmental furor. They mostly get blamed for representing the interests of power, not the radical vegan community.

Someone, at some point, made the Farragut call, although we don’t know whether it was in Governor Linda Lingle’s office, Superferry president John Garibaldi’s office, a Superferry lawyer’s or state Attorney General’s office, a public relations consultant’s office or perhaps a state Department of Transportation office.

The call was wrong. The Hawai’i Supreme Court said so, although the court’s position in this is widely misunderstood. It required the Department of Transportation conduct an EIS-not that the Superferry prepare one.

In late August, 2007, a 15-year-old kid on a surfboard was among four dozen swimming and paddling protesters in Nawiliwili Harbor, preventing the Superferry’s entrance. When Coast Guard officers used boat hooks to try to snag him and arrest him, he insisted they arrest the ferry captain as the real lawbreaker.

Technically, the Kauai kid on the surboard was wrong. Arguably, he should have been protesting at the state Department of Transportation office-or at the office of the person who made the Farragut call, if anybody could figure out who that was.

And technically, the Superferry was right as it sailed into the minefield. But clearly, the Farragut call in this case was catastrophic.

For Farragut, the mines didn’t go off. For the Hawai’i Superferry, they did.

©2009 Jan TenBruggencate