Louisiana copy birth certificate

Mighty Mississippi: River pilot system rife with abuse

FEATURES

Teal Grue was the poster boy for our lead story about what's wrong with Louisiana's archaic system of selecting and overseeing Mississippi River pilots.

Grue dropped out of high school after 10th grade. He pleaded guilty to drunken driving in 1990. He tested positive for marijuana use in 1998 and was forced into drug rehab. And he didn't get his first maritime license until 1999, less than two years before his father helped him join the elite ranks of Louisiana's river pilots.

We didn't write about Teal Grue because someone tipped us off. His stunning resume was simply one of many we reviewed and typed into an Excel spreadsheet after The Times-Picayune decided to investigate what some believe is the ultimate good-old-boys club in Louisiana.

River pilots have one of the most dangerous jobs in the state. They operate on the most treacherous waterway in North America. And under state law, they are free to elect and regulate themselves - a privilege shared by none of their peers in the United States.

The idea of Teal Grue steering a 100,000-ton oil tanker down the lower Mississippi upset a lot of people. So did the rest of "River Barons," a four-day series by maritime reporter Keith Darce and myself. State legislators called on the governor to hold a special session to deal with the issue. The governor, who stayed out of previous reform efforts, has finally agreed that the system needs fixing.

We didn't think the issue was that provocative when we first decided to take a look at the people who guide foreign-flag vessels along the Mississippi River. At the time, we wanted to find out if two rumors were true: that Louisiana pilots are some of the highest paid mariners in the country and that widespread nepotism makes it virtually impossible for nonrelatives to join the ranks.

Low-key approach

The first task was relatively easy. Since their pay is typically decided by a public agency, pilot compensation is a matter of public record in many states. To fill in the blanks, we called around to various pilot groups and interviewed experts who had conducted compensation studies. We found out that Louisiana pilots, who earned about $321,000 each last year, were near the top of the heap.

The second task was much harder. Unlike most states, which regulate pilots through independent state agencies, Louisiana leaves that job to the pilots themselves. That means most of the records we needed to document the prevalence of nepotism, and investigate other pilot practices, were in the hands of the pilots, who are legally considered state officials.

We knew that the quickest way to kill our project was to file a voluminous public-records request at the beginning of our reporting. In the past, the pilots have vigorously resisted outside scrutiny. One group even refused to give a copy of its bylaws to the National Transportation Safety Board when the federal agency was investigating an accident involving one of the group's pilots.

To avoid litigation, we took a low-key approach. We contacted the leaders of the three pilot groups that operate on the Lower Mississippi and asked them to help us understand what they do and why they're paid so much money.

The groups were happy to cooperate. They had just taken a bruising in the press over the huge raises they had won from the Louisiana Public Service Commission, and they also were smarting from a failed legislative effort last spring to shift pilot oversight to the state.

The pilots let us ride with them on ships, bunk at their stationhouses and interview anybody we wanted in their organizations. Two months later, when we filed our first records request, the pilots were unhappy but still cooperative. By then they understood that we were as interested in what they do and how they do it as we were in nailing them for their mistakes.

The main records we wanted from the pilots were their job applications and the accident reports they filled out if one of their ships clipped a bridge or smashed into a fleet of barges.

None of the pilot records was available electronically. We wound up with six boxes of documents, and it took us about three weeks to type everything we needed into Excel spreadsheets.

The applications were rich with revealing personal information. All applicants were required to furnish a birth certificate, and many also were asked to supply the names of their siblings and spouses. That proved invaluable in documenting nepotism, as well as tracking campaign contributions (many of which were made by pilots' wives). To help us summarize the data, we added yes/no fields indicating whether an applicant's father was a pilot, or whether any other family member was a pilot.

The results were irrefutable: Of the 100 people elected to become river pilots in recent years, 85 are related to other pilots, with some able to trace their family connections back five or six generations.

The applications also yielded surprising information about the criminal and educational backgrounds of many of those selected to become pilots. We created separate, standardized fields for each type of data. On education, for instance, we used four descriptive phrases: "didn't grad HS," "HS grad," "some college," "college grad." Anything interesting, like the fact that someone dropped out of school after 10th grade, we threw into an all-purpose "notes" field.

Filling in the blanks

One of the most unexpected findings of our series involved pilot discipline. Originally, we didn't think public safety would be a major factor in the series. But to make sure we didn't miss anything important, we asked the groups to provide accident and pilot misconduct records, which are investigated and judged by the pilots themselves.

The files were a mess. Names were frequently abbreviated, and rarely spelled the same way twice. To solve dirty data problems, and make it possible for us to combine data from various spreadsheets, we assigned each pilot a unique identification number. That made it easy analyze the data - to calculate, for instance, which pilot had the most collisions on the river.

The records contained several bombshells. First, we discovered that two pilots were allowed to keep their jobs after testing positive for cocaine use in 2000. Second, we found that one group racked up nearly 100 accidents yet failed to discipline a single pilot in a decade - a fact that dismayed even the group's staunchest supporters in Louisiana.

Considering that there is an average of 30 accidents involving large ships on the Lower Mississippi each year, the data we created for this project will continue to pay dividends. With just a few clicks, we can look up the safety record of any of state's 230 river pilots, allowing us to add context to stories that previously depended on a friendly and talkative pilot.

Ironically, the only records we're still waiting for involve the U.S. Coast Guard, which has been extraordinarily unhelpful in this project.

Though we submitted a Freedom of Information Act request for investigative records from the Coast Guard last September, the agency has yet to produce most of the documents we're seeking.

We were forced to write our series without the records and file an additional FOIA request to get the kind of basic information (such as the number of accidents investigated by the Coast Guard on the lower Mississippi River in recent years) that we expected to obtain in interviews. We hope to write an additional story when those records are ultimately released to us this year.

By JEFFREY MEITRODT

THE (NEW ORLEANS) TIMES-PICAYUNE

Jeffrey Meitrodt is the special projects editor of The Times-Picayune in New Orleans. He is the co-author of "River Barons,"' which won a 2002 National Headliner award for investigative reporting. Meitrodt joined The Times-Picayune in 1993 as a business reporter More details on the computerassisted reporting techniques for this story appear in the March/April issue of Uplink.