May 15, 2018 — A review team today released a long-awaited report that criticizes NOAA Fisheries for not doing enough to investigate the unusual deaths of three fisheries observers, saying in one case there had been “an information vacuum.”
While all three observers were lost in the line of duty, the causes of their deaths remain inconclusive, and the agency should have done more with other federal agencies to determine what went wrong, the 545-page report concluded.
“While aware that NOAA Fisheries is not an investigative agency, and that jurisdictional and geographical issues were very complex in two of the three cases, the review team believes that more could have been done in cooperation with other agencies involved to pursue more comprehensive and transparent closure of these tragic incidents,” the report said.
Members of an external review team that conducted the study found during field visits that many observers were not even aware that three of their colleagues had died in a single year.
“It remains troubling that three observers … were lost in the line of duty over the space of a year, yet there has to date been no official closure or systematic analysis of lessons learned with respect to any of them,” the report said.
The observers are assigned to fishing vessels, collecting data and making sure fishermen follow federal rules. NOAA has roughly 900 observers and at-sea monitors, who have college degrees and are professionally trained.
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