THE accident which killed five Japanese fishermen off the Galway coast last week would not have happened if procedures for working on the vessel's refrigeration system had been followed, a Cork inquest was told yesterday.
Mr Finbarr Cotter, a marine surveyor attached to the Department of the Marine in Cork, said, the refrigeration unit should have been shut down before the chief engineer on board the tuna boat, the Taisei Maru, began working on it.
He said there was an estimated 3.8 cubic metres of liquid freon gas in tanks on board the vessel, standard procedure was for this gas to be "pumped down" and isolated before repairs were attempted.
Instead, he said, it appeared the chief engineer, Mr Toshiyuki Kikuta (56), began working on valves without first ensuring that the liquid freon had been isolated.
Mr Cotter told the Cork City Coroner, Mr Cornelius Riordan, that when he boarded the ship and examined the unit's piping in the, engine room, he found a valve had been partially opened and two of four bolts holding it in place had been dismantled.
Two others had been slightly opened. The unit had been giving trouble for some time, and engine room staff had been taking it to pieces to find the fault.
Once pressure on the valve had been released, he said, the liquid would have escaped and become gaseous, preventing "any human life to exist".
Giving evidence of performing post mortems on the bodies of the dead crewmen, the Mallow based pathologist, Dr Margaret Bolster, said each had died from acute oxygen deprivation. In each case, an examination showed the lungs contained fluid. When the liquid freon escaped the crewmen would have "walked into a wall of no air", she added.
The No 1 oiler on the vessel, Mr Kiyoshi Yoshikiyo, said the chief engineer was working on the refrigeration unit's valve system in the engine room when the accident occurred.
He had noticed gas was beginning to fill the engine room. He ran to the bridge to warn that something was wrong but found no one there.
He then ran back to the engine room and saw that the captain, Mr Koji Sato (48), had collapsed there. He tried to lift him up the ladder leading from the room but could only manage to get him up three steps.
Mr Sato said he temporarily lost consciousness and, when came to, found five of the crew lying close to each other in the engine room.
The jury returned a verdict in accordance with the medical evidence.