Family member appeals for help

We have received the following letter from Gaul family member Mrs Amanda Broom.
She asks that all who read it take a copy of it and send it to their own local MP, Then, she feels, the families would be listened to. She has forwarded the letter to Mr Kevin McNamara, a Hull MP, and awaits his response.

I am writing to you regarding the investigation into the MV Gaul and the recent dive, in the hope that you can give me and the other families the help we so desperately need.
My husband, who is the brother of Sidney Broom the 2nd mate on the Gaul, and myself attended the meeting at the Guildhall in Hull for a debriefing by family representatives ie: our experts who accompanied the dive.
The dive was made using ROV's and other special equipment that had been developed on the instruction of the DTER and the MAIB.  All the equipment that they had developed should have been tried and tested before the end of March, according to a letter received by Max Gold the solicitor who works on our behalf.  I took notes through the whole meeting and have referred to them for this letter.
Firstly, I would like to say I couldn't believe my ears at what we were being told.  From what we were told most of the special equipment dismally failed, and although we had been told it would be STATE OF THE ART TECHNOLOGY, it could not achieve the specifications previously agreed to.
Things went as far as a piece of ordinary scaffolding being taken to the seabed by a ROV to use as a lever to attempt unsuccessfully to gain entry into a cabin where human remains had been located.  In my opinion to have to resort to this is an absolute disgrace.
Most of specially commissioned ROV's failed over the duration of the survey as they suffered water penetration at the depth at which they were expected to work.  This meant in effect that when certain things had been seen within the wreck it was effectively impossible to return to take another look.
The equipment intended to be used to cut through the hull into the interior of the wreck was quite useless and any holes that were made, had to be made by joining up a couple of smaller holes.  The electro-magnets intended to hold the cutters against the hull didn't work, so chains and weights were used. When new permanent magnets were sent out to the survey ship, the larger more essential cutter still wouldn't work even with the new magnets.  It was impossible throughout the survey to cut the large holes that were necessary to let the larger ROV's into the wreck to recover human remains, as promised.
Even when they managed to cut one of these smaller holes through the hull, for example into the engine room, there were large pipes full of fuel barring the way, so they still could not gain entry. Neither the engine room nor the steering gear was ever examined as, by this point, the survey was running out of workable equipment, having only one mini-ROV still serviceable and this had to be kept for what the MAIB considered low risk projects.
Our experts discovered that two of the mini-ROV's being used (LBV's)  were two of only three such mini-ROV's which were actually in production, and it appeared that they had not been tested at the depth at which the now had to operate. One of these LBV's actually imploded when touched.  After these LBV's had both failed, a third was brought on board, complete with its own engineer and, for the last four days of the survey, this was effectively the only serviceable mini-ROV on board.
Everything the DTER did was at a slow pace.
A special large rig had been built to fit over and examine the outboard side of the Gaul's port funnel, which the MAIB's 1999 Report said had suffered massive wave damage.  This rig had to placed over the funnel on two separate occasions before the work could proceed, as it required extensive adjustment before the measurement could begin.  Although specially designed and built for the job, not a large enough measurement range had been built into the system. This wasted precious time.  This equipment was not able to measure the damage to the inboard side of the same funnel, although the families were told at the May meeting in Hull that this would be done.  Eventually this was measured by photogrammetry.
When the bow of the wreck was examined using photogrammetry methods, much time was frustratingly wasted when the magnets attaching the photogrammetry targets, to be photographed by the special BLOM camera, proved to be too weak to prevent the targets constantly falling off the bow and dropping to the seabed where they had to be recovered, time after time.
The system of photogrammetry also had to be used to measure the pitch of propeller because the specially designed measuring device promised in Hull couldn't be used in practice.
The methane sniffer they had to measure the gas pockmarks on the seabed didn't work.
After twenty days of a survey (planned to last sixteen days), nothing had been achieved about the recovery of human remains, and on that day an explosives expert was flown out to the survey ship to use explosives to blow a hole into the cabins.  On arrival he said it shouldn't be done, as it would cause much damage to the interior of the cabins, destroying any evidence inside.  This is the opposite of what the families were told by the MAIB at a meeting in Hull in May this year.
Our three family representatives were excluded from planning meetings on board, and although later it was proposed that two family representatives could attend de-briefing meetings it was made clear that Norman Fenton would be excluded from those meetings.  Our other two representatives refused to attend the meetings until Mr Fenton was allowed to attend, which is what eventually happened.
But when, during his overnight watch on Day 20 of the survey, Mr Fenton saw a skull in the officers' mess - the first sign of human remains - he was asked to move away from the discussion taking place a few feet away from him, as the MAIB team discussed what to do about this discovery. 

This was immediately after the skull was seen.
To get any human remains out of the ship at all, suction hoses, put through the smaller holes, had to be used at the very last minute. This, I might add, was done well into the extended time for the survey during the last 24 hours before leaving.  You might think, as I do, as an afterthought.
Referring to the cable that Norman Fenton had seen when he located the wreck in 1997, the one Keith Dixon of the MAIB, after the survey in 1998, had said was a communications cable: the MAIB searched for it for two hours and 40 minutes and then, after not finding it, called a stop to it.  The Seisranger then did circular searches using Gaul as its centre and although repeating this in larger and larger circles around the ship nothing was found, other than a length of abandoned trawl wire, in an entirely different area of the seabed.
In the MAIB report of the 1998 survey, there is a chart and photograph showing the cable laying just under the Gaul's bow and extending from there, so it should have been there.
Without any consultation with the family representatives, the trawl wire was later specially lit and photographed resembling the cable seen in 1997 and 1998, and a sample was taken from this wire.  When Mr Fenton (off watch) discovered that this was happening, he told the MAIB that this was a total waste of time as the trawl wire being sampled was located in the wrong area of the seabed, and lay in the wrong direction.  His protest was ignored and the sample of the trawl wire taken.   After the survey had officially finished, other samples of this same trawl wire was taken without any consultation with the family representatives.
I am sure by now you are as shocked as we and the rest of the families were when we heard this report. I am begging you to help us to put a stop to this FARCE that has in my opinion been set up to put an end to the Gaul investigation.
I am requesting that all of the dive is investigated and the enquiry be halted until answers have been given.
I am requesting you bring this up in Parliament before the Government departments involved put a closed order on it.
I am sorry for giving you this dreadful task, but we do not know where else to go with it, so I am entrusting it with you and hope you will do the right thing for all the family and extended families.
Yours sincerely,
Mrs A. Broom