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Good morning the subcommittee will come to order the subcommittee is convening today to examine the fatal sinking of the u.s. flag cargo ship SS El Faro and on a second panel the Coast Guard's failed efforts to implement electronic health records system on October 1st 2015 the 790 foot US flag cargo ship SS El Faro sank in the Atlantic Ocean about 40 nautical miles northeast of acklin's and crooked Island Bahamas an unusual storm path reliance on outdated weather reports and failure to implement proper bridge resource management techniques resulted in El Faro sailing almost directly into hurricane Joaquin a category 4 storm with an estimated sustained wind speed of 115 knots the loss of the US flag cargo vessel El Faro along with its 30 three-member crew ranks as one of the worst maritime disasters in US history and resulted in the highest death toll from a US commercial vessel sink in almost 40 years the last comparable u.s. maritime disaster was the sinking of the u.s. bolt carrier Marine Electric off the coast of Virginia in February 1983 in which all but three of the 34 persons aboard lost their lives the Coast Guard instituted major changes following that tragedy to improve safety and prevent similar events from occurring in the future despite those efforts to improve safety tragedy befell the El Faro on October 31st 2015 a u.s. Navy vessel located in the main wreckage of El Faro and the vessels voyage data recorder was successfully recovered it contained 26 hours of bridge audio recordings another critical navigation data that were used by the Coast Guard and then NTSB investigators to understand the causes of this horrible incident and develop recommendations to prevent future tragedies the Coast Guard marine board of investigation made 31 safety and for administrative recommendations to address the causes of the El Faro sinking in December 2017 the Coast Guard excuse me the Commandant of the Coast Guard released his final action memo on the marine boards recommendation the Commandant concurred with 29 of 31 safety recommendations and three or four administrative recommendations the National Transportation Safety Board launched an investigation as as soon as the sinking of El Faro was confirmed ultimately providing numerous recommendations for responsible entities including the Coast Guard the International Association of classification societies and the owner of El Faro the nation relies on our merchant mariners and the US flag ships they sail critical that policies are in place and adopted as standard practice to ensure Mariners safety in order to do so we must learn from the loss of the El Faro I look forward to discussing how this tragedy occurred and what steps are being taken to prevent another such incident incident from occurring notwithstanding the importance in gravity of the El Faro tragedy on panel 2 we will examine the Coast Guard's apparent inability to implement an electronic health record system to manage data for it's only 56,000 Coast Guard members