i have been very impressed with HKKF and their handling of cargo since the bookcase incident before summer. the crew have been proactive in ensuring the exits are not blocked, even moving cargo to the cargo area or removing cargo off the ship. they have also been ensuring it is secure. i have thanked the pier manager several times for the companies professionalism. so i was rather upset tday to see the exits blocked on the 1550 service to lamma on 9 october. As you can see in the photo above the exit was blocked with a trolley of commercial cargo. i have talked to the Lamma pier manager who was less than happy when i showed him the photo, and he went straight onto the ship to see what was going on. I have also let 1823 know what happened. Yes perhaps i should have left it with HKKF pier manager and not called 1823, but I want to stop this straight away so we do not go back to the crazy situation we had in June.

Sorry, thats not the emergency exit. If the vessel is sinking you will not be able to open that door, even with every man on the boat pushing on it.

Emergency exits on the ferry are fore and aft (front and back for you lubbers) these doors have dogs on them to secure them water tight and they open inward so that water pressure will not be holding them close.

The boxes in your picture will not cause you any hindrance in exiting a sinking vessel. they may delay your exit when you reach the dock.

This has been noted in other posts on these forums.

Dear pnwxplant. Thanks for your reply you are very correct these exits featured on the photo are not emergency exits, and you will see the word emergency was not used in the post you have responded to. You are also correct the exits would not aid evacuation in a sinking event and in fact as has been pointed out before would be the worst exits to use in such a situation. However the health and safety regulations that form part of this vessels license are very clear that cargo must be stowed in the designated cargo areas. These cargo footprints and volume of the cargo areas also form part of the vessels public license and are available on request for inspection by the public at the Marine department. The captain has ultimate responsibility for ensuring his vessel operates within the defined safety parameters and all the terms and conditions of the license are followed. As we have seen with the ferry sinking a few years back the company is more than happy to let the crew face proceedings alone if they do not adhere to these guidelines despite what their managers have instructed them to do.

Every exit is an emergency exit when the boat is sinking or in fire. It would depend on the situation would you be able to open it or not.

The door opens outwards, hinged at the bottom.
It would be impossible to open if the ferry was sinking.

These doors are for use on piers only.

Go for the windows if you can't get to the exits at the ends or better, upstairs.

Depends on which side the boat is tilting, how fast, are the doors already submerged or not. In case of fire surely they can be used. My general impression is that the ferry design is not really good for quick evacuation of almost 400 people.

If the boat was tilting up the boxes would have slid away and the door would be accessible.
But you still couldn't get it open.

At least if the boxes were stowed, and secured, in the proper areas people would have more chance of getting to the emergency exits rather than having additional obstacles in the way.

Reading comments like these makes me sit outside on our old-style YSW-Pak Kok-Aberdeen Tsui Wah kaito ferries, hot 'n' humid but much safer.

But going most days twice over almost the exact spot where 39 people died in an almost identical kaito makes some of us feel a bit uneasy. Not sure if any changes at all were made to these small kaito ferries after the disaster, even though the several severe structural problems contributed to the deaths of so many.

See the GPS tracking of my recent kaito ferry ride from Aberdeen to Pak Kok (after coming up from Mo Tat Wan to Aberdeen with my bike). That big detour is the ferry avoiding one of those container ships that take about 2 miles (?) of hitting the breaks full-power to come to a standstill.

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This is one of the container ships our Aberdeen ferry avoided in the GPS map above (photo from a Pak Kok rooftop).

It's a bit of a cat and mouse game crossing the Lamma East Channel, especially on a little rented sampan after midnight from Aberdeen. Last time I did that, years ago, two of these container ships crossed each other a few hundred metres in front of us while we stopped and waited....

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