A review of the major propeller safety events in 2011 including safety meetings, accidents, legal cases, deaths of those involved in the movement, statistics, patents, articles published, public service announcements, anniversaries, and other related events. 2011 is not yet over, but we have already started capturing some of the major 2011 propeller safety events here.

  • 13 January 2011 Guy Taylor’s Boat Propeller Shield patent application (U.S. Patent Application US 2011/0009018) was published by the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office.
  • 14-16 January 2011 86th Meeting of NBSAC (National Boating Safety Advisory Council) at Arlington Virginia. CED presenting their propeller guard testing program results from the circular tank testing at SUNY (State University of New York at Buffalo).
  • 4 February 2011 Gabby deSouza, 14 year old girl, was caught in a boat propeller off Palm Beach, Florida when she and a friend were boarding a boat near shore. Her recovery was closely followed by the press. We later “wordled” some of that coverage to show the phases of coverage a propeller accident passes through.
  • 17 February 2011 Accident Mitigation Meeting at Miami International Boat Show. CED reported on the circular tank testing, Guy Taylor showed his flip up rear screen guard, there was a discussion of on the relevance of the SUNY testing not including a boat hull.
  • 1-2 April 2011 87th Meeting of NBSAC at Arlington Virginia. Much of this meeting focused on mandatory wear of life jackets.
  • 27 May 2011 U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals found for Brochtrup in Brochtrup v. Mercury Marine and Sea Ray propeller case (upholding the $3.8 million award).
  • 7 June 2011 the Jury rendered a $30 plus million verdict in the Robert Bell v. MasterCraft Boat Company case in which two women were struck by the propeller. The case focused on the design of the boat, the large number of people on board, and rated capacity of the boat (the small boat had a rated of 18 people).
  • 8 June 2011 U.S. Coast Guard published an advanced notice of proposed rulemaking for Engine Cut-Off Switches. They are considering requiring new boats to have them and making their use mandatory on vessels equipped with them. Public comments are being sought through September 6, 2011.
  • 10 June 2011 Brunswick petitioned for a rehearing of the Brochtrup case in front of the U.S. 5th Circuit Court of Appeals.
  • 20 June 2011 we launched the all new Propeller Guard Information Center at PropellerSafety.com
  • 30 June 2011 Alexis Angelopolous, 12 year old girl, was trapped in a twin propeller off Virginia Beach. Rescue workers spent about 90 minutes trying to get her leg out of the propellers. Eventually, they were able to take the propeller off the boat.
  • 8 July 2011 we posted a notice on the public release version of BARD 2010 (the U.S. Coast Guard Boating Accident Report Database) being short all the data from over twenty states and several territories.
  • 12,13 July 2011 we posted information on several Florida propeller accidents that appear to be absent in BARD (or at least not labeled as propeller accidents in BARD), including a propeller fatality. After generating a discussion with USCG and Florida FWC we discovered some of those accidents were in fact missing from BARD or misreported in BARD, including at least one fatality accident. The bulk of the rest of them were not actually new accidents. They were generated by a glitch in Florida’s system which was double counting some accident sequences. Florida was happy to find and correct the glitch.
  • August 1911 100th anniversary of John W. Anderson, then 25 years old, being struck and killed by the propeller of his boat in Boston Harbor. He fell overboard, was drawn into the propeller, struck, knocked unconscious, and drowned before he could be rescued by his companions in August 1911. USCG is still discussing whether or not to require new boats to include engine kill switches a hundred years later.
  • 26 August 2011 we supplied our public comments on USCG-2009-0206 Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking on Emergency Engine Cut-off Switches.
  • 27 August 2011, Dr. Stephen Keller, a San Jose dentist was killed by a propeller strike on Lake Tahoe. He was beloved by hundreds and his death generated an unusual outpouring of condolences online.
  • 29 August 2011 we posted a series of five PGIC invention disclosures on RFID Boat Kill Switches.
  • 10 September 2011 Dr. Lawrence E. “Larry” Thibault passed away. He was a long time biomechanics expert witness for propeller accident victims.
  • November 2011 we blogged the Robin Listman vs. Outboard Marine Corporation (OMC) trial live daily for the last several days of the trial. It ended 21 November with a jury verdict in favor of OMC>
  • November 24, 2011 supplied our public comments on USCG-2011-0497 Advanced Notice of Proposed Rulemaking titled, Recreational Vessel Propeller Strike and Carbon Monoxide Casualty Prevention.
  • In November 2011 we established a research project category on our blog to encourage Senior Design, Senior Thesis, Masters Thesis and Capstone projects in areas of interest to propeller guard designers. Our first post after establishing the area and outlining some previously posted projects still in need of work, included a series of projects to generate a better understanding of the drag associated with meshes and screens often used in constructing propeller guards.

We still need to add the propeller accident mitigation meeting dates, NBSAC meeting dates, say something about BIRMC and Google adwords frequency of the most popular term associated with propeller guards, and the release date and basic statistics from the annual boating statistics report.

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