cruise ship sinking 1994

A Sea Story

One of the worst maritime disasters in European history took place a decade ago. It remains very much in the public eye. On a stormy night on the Baltic Sea, more than 850 people lost their lives when a luxurious ferry sank below the waves. From a mass of material, including official and unofficial reports and survivor testimony, our correspondent has distilled an account of the Estonia’s last moments—part of his continuing coverage for the magazine of anarchy on the high seas.

A fter midnight , in the first hours of September 28, 1994, the ferry Estonia foundered in the waves of a Baltic storm. The ship was the pride of the newly independent Estonian nation, recently arisen from the Soviet ruins. It was a massive steel vessel, 510 feet long and nine decks high, with accommodations for up to 2,000 people. It had labyrinths of cabins, a swimming pool and sauna, a duty-free shop, a cinema, a casino, a video arcade, a conference center, three restaurants, and three bars. It also had a car deck that stretched from bow to stern through the hull's insides. In port the car deck was accessed through a special openable bow that could be raised to allow vehicles to drive in and out. At sea that bow was supposed to remain closed and locked. In this case, however, it did not—and indeed it caused the ship to capsize and sink when it came open in the storm and then fell entirely off.

On the night of its demise the Estonia had 989 people aboard. It departed from its home port, Tallinn, at around 7:15 P.M., and proceeded on its regular run, 258 miles and fifteen hours west across open waters to the Swedish archipelago and Stockholm. For the first several hours, as dusk turned to night, it moved through sheltered coastal waters. Passengers hardy enough to withstand the wind and cold on deck would have seen gray forested islands creeping by to the north, and to the south the long industrial shoreline of Estonia giving way to a low coast darkening until it faded into the night. Gentle swells rolled in from the west, indicating the sea's unease—with significance probably only to the crew, which had received storm warnings for the open water ahead but had not spread the news. There were various forecasts, and they tended to agree: an intense low-pressure system near Oslo was moving quickly to the east, and was expected to drag rain and strong winds across the route, stirring up waves occasionally as high as twenty feet. Such conditions were rare for the area, occurring only a few times every fall and winter, but for ferries of this size they were not considered to be severe. Surviving crew members later claimed that a special effort had been made on the car deck to lash the trucks down securely—exemplary behavior that, if it occurred, probably had more to do with concern about vehicle-damage claims than about the safety of the ship. No other preparations were made. The main worry was to arrive in Stockholm on time.

That night the ship knifed ahead at its full 19 knots, with all four main engines fully throttled up to their combined output of 23,500 horsepower, driving the hull across the gently accumulating seas. The vessel's motion was at first barely noticeable to the passengers. Inside the Estonia , the public spaces had the look of a coastal casino designed around a nautical theme—completely serviceable but over-decorated in red, a bit worn, a bit out of date. Though many couples and a few groups were aboard, collectively it was a ship full of strangers, with little time to make new friends or, as people do on longer passages, to fall even temporarily in love. The experience of the sinking therefore turned out to be lonely and highly atomized. Observers who later claimed that a social breakdown had occurred failed to take that into account. Still, at first that night there was something of a cruise-ship atmosphere on the Estonia, as passengers dropped off their bags in their cramped, Pullman-style cabins and emerged to explore the possibilities for whiling away the hours. Their choices ranged from visiting the sauna and pool on Deck 0, deep below the waterline, to stopping by the various bars, entertainment spots, and restaurants on Decks 4, 5, and 6. Deck 7 contained the crew cabins, but it had an outside promenade for passengers who wanted to feel the wind and watch the ocean surge by. An external staircase led to additional outside space on Deck 8, from which the lifeboats hung on davits. Because of the wind and the cold, only a handful of passengers ventured outside. Turned inward from the sea, the others lingered over their drinks and meals and, as the evening drew on, talked, read, gambled, or watched dancing girls and listened to Estonian rock in the big Baltic Bar, on Deck 6.

By 10:00 P.M. the Estonia had passed north of a lighthouse called Osmussaar and was moving through the open ocean in deteriorating weather, with rain, strong winds, and an overcast scudding low and fast across steep seas. The ship was still running at full power, but it was slowed now to 17 knots by the impacts of the waves, which rose regularly to ten feet and higher. Sheets of salt water were torn loose by the plunging and driving of the bow. They swept as heavy spray across the foredeck, and rained against the window-lined superstructure, as high as the upper decks and the navigation bridge. Though the motions of the hull were complex, the ride was rough mostly just in pitch and not in roll, because the waves, unlike the winds, came from nearly straight ahead. The ship heaved upward and vibrated in the heaviest water, and slammed down into the troughs, sometimes with a crash. The motions were difficult to predict even for the crew. Some passengers grew seasick, and retired to their cabins to suffer in private. This was not the best tactic, since most of the cabins were located forward in the ship, where the motion was most violent. For anyone feeling sick, just getting to them would have been a trial. The interior hallways of the accommodation sections were windowless, fluorescent-lit passageways, smelling of aluminum and plastic, and barely wide enough for two people to pass. They ran fore and aft, and had branches from side to side. With their twenty-four-hour lighting and long rows of anonymous, closely spaced cabin doors, they gave those parts of the ship an institutional allure not much different from that of modern prison galleries. Moreover, the cabins themselves were smaller than cells, and though this must have been unimaginable to even the most miserable of their occupants that night, many soon turned into traps and then coffins.

B y around 11:00 P.M. the restaurants had closed. In the Baltic Bar a Swedish passenger named Pierre Thiger lingered over a single Irish coffee, enjoying the show. Thiger was a Stockholm-based ship broker, age thirty-two, who had gone to Estonia to look over a small freighter, and was traveling home alone. He had taken the Estonia several times before, but never in weather so rough. As something of a mariner himself, he believed that the ship was being driven too hard, but he was not particularly worried. Earlier in the evening he had run across an acquaintance in the crowd, and the two men had dined together before proceeding to the bar; now they listened to the band.

As the weather grew worse and the ship began to roll more heavily, the waiters had trouble moving among the chairs with their trays, and a speaker on wheels began to move back and forth dangerously on the stage; at one point a dancing girl fell into the band. The show was called off at 12:30. Thiger and his acquaintance headed down one deck to the Pub Admiral, where festivities were still going strong. The Pub Admiral was a long, narrow room aft of midship on the starboard side. There were perhaps fifty people there. It was karaoke time. The crowd was loud and drunk. The sound system was turned too high. Thiger and his acquaintance sat at the back of the pub at first, but then moved forward for a better view, and perched on two high stools near the stage. Neither man ordered a drink. Thiger liked to sing, and he joined the pub's paid entertainer on the stage for a song; then he took his seat again. Several other passengers went to the stage to sing. At the entertainer's urging, the crowd sang too. Just before 1:00, when the show was scheduled to end, the entertainer, as Thiger later remembered, said, "We have such an amusing time tonight, so I think I should extend the time a little."

It was soon afterward that Thiger heard a heavy, metallic-sounding blow that reverberated sharply through the ship's structure. At first he thought it must have been caused by a heavy wave, but it didn't quite feel like ordinary "slamming." He wondered if a truck might have overturned on the car deck—but no, the impact was too strong for that; it was almost as if a whiplash had run through the bulkheads. Thiger did not express these thoughts, and his acquaintance said nothing either. A murmur may have rippled through the crowd, but the noise level was too high to tell for sure; the mood remained determinedly festive. Thiger heard a clear comment from only one passenger, a man nearby, who joked, "Ha! Now we have sailed against an iceberg!" and took another gulp of beer. The singing continued unabated.

About half a minute later there was another impact, identical to the first. Thiger got the distinct impression that the ship was swerving. He said to his acquaintance, "Do you feel it? We are swinging longitudinally now." His acquaintance said, "Yes, we are." Thiger felt a little unsettled, and reassured himself with the thought that the ship must have turned directly into the waves, perhaps to lessen the rolls while the crew lashed vehicles or cargo more securely to the decks. Suddenly, however, the ship shook with a strange back-and-forth movement and began to wallow. It rolled to port and starboard a few times, and then rolled steeply to starboard and came back a little, but never returned to level. The initial list was enough to cause glasses to come crashing off a shelf, and a speaker to rumble across the floor and collide with a railing.

The singing stopped.

Thiger felt butterflies in his stomach. To his acquaintance he said, "Now there is something completely wrong. Now let's get out of here."

"Yes, as you say," his acquaintance said.

The two men jumped up, and had taken only a few steps toward the exit when the heel increased to an angle that Thiger estimated to be about 30 degrees. There was immediate panic in the pub, with much shouting. The bar counter stood along a wall on the pub's port side. The bartender had braced herself behind it, but she collapsed screaming under a deluge of bottles and glasses. Refrigerators came loose, and stools slipped out from under the patrons who clung to the countertop to keep from falling. Others slid across the floor in a confusion of tumbling tables, chairs, and sound equipment, and they piled up in tangles along the ship's starboard side, across and downslope from the exit. The bar counter itself broke loose. Many people were injured and subsequently died. Pierre Thiger and his acquaintance managed somehow not to fall. But movement across the pub's open spaces toward the exit was now extremely difficult, even for men who were both agile and sober.

At the receiving side of the Pub Admiral's deadly collapse, along the starboard wall, sat another Swede of about the same age, a recreational diver named Rolf Sörman, who turned out to have prodigious reserves of calm, and great presence of mind. He was a member of a small "human resources" group that was making a round trip from Stockholm in order to hold a shipboard seminar in the Estonia 's aft conference room—an alternative to holding the seminar in a hotel, and a common practice on Baltic ferries. As a young man Sörman had toyed with the idea of going to sea, and indeed had spent some weeks as an officer in training on a Swedish ferry before deciding that law school would provide a better life. Like Thiger, he had disapproved of the speed with which the Estonia was being driven into the waves, and he had contrasted this handling, as he later said to me, with the policies he remembered from his Swedish ferry service, during which ships had been slowed early for passenger comfort in the expectation that people would maintain their spending in the restaurants and bars. The Estonians were evidently not yet appreciative of such capitalistic subtleties. Earlier in the evening Sörman had watched as the officers pushed their ship past another ferry in a typically brutish Soviet manner. At dinner many of the people in his seminar group were sick. They consumed a pre-ordered three-course meal nonetheless, and three bottles of wine for twelve. Afterward they broke up for the night, but Sörman and four female colleagues headed up to the windward promenade on Deck 7, portside, to look at the sea. When they got there, the doors to the outside were swinging open and shut, apparently because a latch had broken, and the carpet leading from the stairwell was soaked with saltwater spray. Three of the four women grew nervous about going outside.

Eventually they all found shelter in the Pub Admiral. They ordered beers, and for a while sat too close to the speakers to be able to talk. Well before 1:00 A.M. they retreated from the noise to the farthest reaches of the pub, which happened to be across from the exit, along the ship's starboard wall. During that short walk Sörman felt two or three distinct shocks on the deck under his feet. These appear not to have been the heavy blows felt by Thiger and others, because there was time afterward for leisurely conversation. The women sat on a sofa that was bolted to the floor. Sörman sat facing them on a chair. There were windows in the wall, black with the ocean night. Five minutes before 1:00 A.M. one of the women excused herself over Sörman's affable objections. She left the pub, walked forward past the information desk and up the main staircase, and went directly to her cabin, on Deck 6. When, shortly thereafter, the ship heeled over, her door popped open and she fell backward in her cabin and was pinned by gravity against the far wall. Because she was determined and nimble, however, she managed to emerge from the trap, to negotiate the tilting hallway, to climb to Deck 7 and the outside promenade, and ultimately to survive.

Rolf Sörman and his three remaining companions moved even faster. As the Pub Admiral collapsed into chaos and screams, they jumped onto the sofa to avoid the sliding debris. A wave lapped against the windows beside them and then covered the glass with solid green water lit by the light of the ship's interior. When the ship rocked back from the steepest angle, Sörman and his group seized the opportunity to gain the exit doorway nearby. They waited there briefly for another cycle, and then lunged across an open space and dashed through a lateral corridor toward the aft stairway, which was just beyond the center line of the ship on the port side. During that dash a falling refrigerator nearly hit Sörman, and smashed into a wall. A man emerged from a forward corridor, shouting, "Don't panic! The crew has everything under control!"

They did not panic. On the other hand, they believed that the ship was out of control. They came to the aft stairway. Using the railings and brass banisters, they hauled themselves rapidly up two levels, encountering only a few other passengers along the way. At around this time there was a weak announcement in Estonian: " Häire! Häire! Laeval on häire! " meaning "Alarm! Alarm! There is an alarm on the ship!" Sörman and his companions did not hear the announcement. At the top of the stairway, on Deck 7, they found that some of the crew had formed a human chain to help people up the sloping floor to the promenade doors. Then the ship heeled more steeply, however, and the crew disappeared onto the open deck outside. Sörman and his group made it to the doorway nonetheless, and by grasping the frame they pulled themselves through. They were among the first passengers to reach the promenade. After failing to open one of the life-vest boxes, they succeeded in opening another. Still functioning as a group at that time, they helped one another to find life vests with no missing straps, and to put the vests on.

Pierre Thiger and his acquaintance were slower to escape from the Pub Admiral, though not for want of trying. The brief opportunities provided by the rolling motion—the cyclical moderations of the starboard heel that Rolf Sörman had exploited—were spoiled for them by the distance to the exit and the presence of other passengers ahead who were either too shocked or too drunk to move quickly or get out of the way. Afterward the floor angles grew so steep that even crawling was ineffective. Here again, though, people formed human chains. Thiger and his acquaintance were able to reach the hallway outside. With the further use of human chains they struggled across the ship amid scenes of bedlam and fear, and they arrived at the aft stairway. By then the stairway was crowded with fleeing passengers, many of whom were hanging on to the railings as if paralyzed. Thiger and his acquaintance tore loose their hands and shouted in their ears to get them moving, and after an agonizingly slow climb they finally arrived on Deck 7, somehow negotiated the steepening floor, and moved through the double doors to temporary safety outside. They were among the last to make it there. Since the first catastrophic heel maybe eight minutes had gone by. The list had increased by now to 40 degrees. When it got to 45 degrees, two or three minutes later, escape from the ship's interior became all but impossible.

S urvival that night was a very tight race, and savagely simple. People who started early and moved fast had some chance of winning. People who started late or hesitated for any reason had no chance at all. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of getting dressed was enough to condemn people to death, and although many of those who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of the ultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in their underwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of this race, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7 promenade without delay. There was no God to turn to for mercy. There was no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history, Europe a faint and faraway place. Inside the ship, as the heel increased, even the most primitive social organization, the human chain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clock was running. The ocean was completely in control.

Oddly enough, the relative distance that people had to travel seems to have made little difference. In the crew cabins on Deck 7, whose windows gave directly onto the portside promenade, divers later spotted the bodies of twelve victims who had gone down with the ship. Conversely, the people with the longest escape route fared surprisingly well. These were the occupants of the ship's claustrophobic basement—the cramped economy section that filled the forward half of Deck 1, below the car deck and the waterline. Because of their proximity to the bow, they turned out to have had a double advantage: an uncomfortable ride that kept many of them awake, and an early warning in the form of strange watery noises and metallic crashes, which for as much as half an hour before the list aroused their curiosity and concern. This combination helps explain why the hands-down winner of the entire race came from Deck 1. She was a Swedish woman, age thirty, who expressed concern to her companions, and climbed the stairs fully clothed to Deck 7, where she arrived presumably quite calmly and took a seat at least fifteen minutes in advance of the rush. Others on Deck 1 who were less alert to the danger were nonetheless well primed, and those who ultimately survived sprang into action immediately when the ship heeled over with a screech and a howl and an impact so violent that people were thrown out of bed, or against the walls. Up and down the hallways doors popped open and people emerged. As the leaders fled, they saw water in various forms: running in rivulets on the floor, or rushing as a river, or spurting from fittings on a wall, or cascading down from overhead. Their escape routes led by six short stairways to a common passageway inside the car deck's center casing, from which separate stairways then led upward, primarily to the Estonia 's large entrance foyer, which spanned the ship at the base of its main staircase, on Deck 4. The center casing was still mostly dry, but floodwaters sprayed at the fleeing passengers through gaps around the car-deck access doors.

Those left behind had a hard time. From what little is known about conditions on Deck 1, panic broke out as soon as the windowless world began to turn onto its side. The shouting was very loud. People were trapped in their cabins, either too weak or too badly injured to overcome the increasing list. In one doorway a tough old woman hung on determinedly, trying to pull herself out. People ran back and forth in the main hallway, colliding with one another in apparent confusion about where to go. Movement soon became difficult. As the angle increased, many who had found their way to the stairs realized that they lacked the arm strength to keep climbing. One woman dressed in a nightgown stood at the base of the stairs screaming hysterically. Others who had stalled partway up seemed passive and resigned. They were overtaken by people who could not help them, and who, although still capable of movement, were themselves losing the race to escape.

"Häire! Häire! Laeval on häire!"

On the upper passenger decks—4, 5, and 6—in the extensive accommodation sections, the hallway scenes were just as rough. People who had emerged from their cabins were trying to escape along the fore-aft corridors, which at the regulation width of 3.9 feet were tight even under upright conditions, and became extraordinarily difficult to negotiate now as they began to rotate onto their sides, shrinking vertically and forcing people who were starting to walk on the walls to crouch as they attempted to proceed. Some crew members were seen trying at enormous personal sacrifice to help them along. But all was confusion, congestion, and noise—raw terror contained in those fluorescent-lit prison galleries. The starboard cabin doorways now became chasms that had to be jumped across. Passengers who failed fell into the cabins, and some did not emerge. The transverse corridors became dangerous shafts, dropping away to the starboard side. Though no witnesses of this survived, after seawater began to enter through breaking windows, those shafts became deadly wells. A particularly vicious trap was an apparent escape route provided by a small stairway at the forward end of the superstructure, which led upward through the stacked accommodation sections from Deck 4 all the way to Deck 7 on the ship's high port side. It could be reached on each deck only by crossing the forwardmost of the transverse corridors, but before the list grew too steep some quick-thinking passengers succeeded. These were people who should have survived, and a few of them who were ultra-fast did; but there was a catch to this route, and it was lethal. The principal stairways on the ship were built in a fore-aft direction—an orientation that allowed them to be scaled (by strong people, using the railings) at relatively steep angles of heel. This little stairway, in contrast, was built in a transverse direction—side-to-side—a detail which meant that as the list increased, the stairs went vertical and then inverted, cutting off the possibility even of retreat. Months later divers found so many bodies there that they could not get through to take a complete count.

Most of the passengers fled toward the main staircase at the center of the ship, emerging into the large open spaces that surrounded it on every deck, and then crawling or lunging as best they could to gain the banisters and railings. Handrails gave way from the start. As more people arrived, and the list increased, passengers began to slide and fall, and some were crushed by toppling equipment. The scenes of loss and bedlam defied coherent description by the survivors who witnessed them. On Deck 4 two women who had reached the staircase lost their grip and fell fatally against a wall. Others had already been badly injured, and some were lying apparently dead. Emotions among those unable to climb varied widely, with some people screaming incoherently, others seemingly listless and confused, and still others rational, self-contained, and brave. One of the survivors, a young man who had been trying to guide his parents and his girlfriend to safety, got separated from them in the chaos while gaining the stairs. When he looked back to find them, it was obvious that they would be incapable of negotiating the open space, across which increasing numbers of people were fatally sliding. His parents shouted at him to save himself, as did his girlfriend. It was practical advice. There was no time to linger over the decision. He turned and continued on alone.

On higher decks hundreds of similar tragedies unfolded, as the gathering crowds struggled up the main stairways and people exhausted their strength against the ever more difficult heel. Those no longer capable of movement clung to the railings or sat on the landings, just waiting for the end. People fell onto one another. One woman lost her husband to another woman that way. Among married couples the strong were delayed by the weak. It is evident from the rarity of single spouses among the survivors that many couples decided consciously to die together. These were not the sad, sweet moments one sees in the movies. There was no music playing. There was a strange, coded alarm announcement, "Mr. Skylight, to number one and number two," which was difficult to hear over the screaming. On every level the view from the main stairways was of carnage and confusion. People lay in the mouths of the hallways, unable to figure a way across the open spaces.

From the stairway some of the survivors saw a row of gambling machines fall onto passengers emerging from near the shop. The injured seem to have begged for help, but conditions simply did not allow the witnesses on the stairways to intervene. The calculation was instinctive. To release one's grip on the railings for even a moment now was to fall, and to fall now was to perish. Up on Deck 7 at the top of the main stairways, where an open foyer spanned the ship, a few extraordinary people—both passengers and crew—were trying to help those emerging from the climb to get through the double doors to the high, portside promenade. People who failed to catch the doorframe slid on the carpeted deck and were killed or injured, or ended up on the starboard promenade, on the low side, from which they were washed into the sea early as the ship continued to topple. At least one of them survived. In any case, the race to freedom was nearing an end. At some point someone secured a rope to the portside promenade and dangled it down into the stairway. It was found in the wreck by divers, and probably came too late, since none of the survivors mentioned its use. The last known attempt on the doorway was made by a woman who lay hanging on to the threshold before losing her grip and sliding away.

At the rear of the ship on Deck 5, in a café called Neptunus that adjoined the Pub Admiral, the ocean was flooding into the starboard side. A man there had been fighting hard to save his mother. He had removed his shoes and socks for a better grip, and was dragging his mother upslope by bracing against the tables, which were mounted on pillars and bolted solidly to the floor. The two had managed to stay out of the encroaching water, and, with periods of rest, had struggled to within two tables of a portside door that gave onto an open deck at the stern. At that point, however, his mother lost the last of her strength, and announced that she could go no farther. She was paralyzed not by fear or lack of will but by a simple physical fact: no matter what her mind said, her muscles would not perform. This was a reality her son now needed to understand. She lay on the floor, hanging on to a table with the ocean lapping up at her from behind, and insisted that he leave her. At first he refused, and shouted at her to keep going. But she could not, and as his mother she ultimately prevailed. He disappeared through the door, and found railings and fixtures that let him scale the ship's outside structure at angles of heel that by then were too steep to allow escape for even the strongest of the 700 people left inside.

T he promenade decks , port and starboard, were lined with life-vest bins and cradles holding heavy life-raft canisters, and they were overhung by the large fiberglass lifeboats suspended from davits. Between difficulties caused by the angle of heel and the lack of coordinated action by the crew, none of the lifeboats were lowered. There were ten in all, five per side. Nine of them broke loose as the Estonia sank, and they floated to the surface as flotsam—damaged, overturned, swamped. For now, as the list steepened to 45 degrees, the starboard promenade tipped ominously toward the reach of the waves, and the port promenade did the opposite, tilting upward until its floor and Deck 7's exterior wall between them formed a perfectly balanced right angle, open to the sky like a V. Though initially the V stood on the ship's protected downwind side, as the capsize continued, the incline of the sheltering wall diminished, and the promenade grew increasingly exposed to the wind and spray. That wall rose only one level, to the open, rooflike expanse of Deck 8. It became a floor when the starboard list increased beyond 45 degrees and the Estonia lay fully down to die. But even such imperfect shelter was preferable to the horror inside, and nearly all the escapees took refuge there, on the port promenade. In total there were perhaps 250 people. Some of the crew struggled individually to live up to the responsibility that had been vested in them. The situation nonetheless was beyond salvation, and chaos on the promenade was intense. The collective screams of the victims trapped below rose through the stairwells like a cacophony from hell, a protest that for some of those on the outside near the doors drowned out even the roar of the storm.

Some of the escapees panicked, crawling around on the promenade and adding to the screams from below, or begging hysterically for life vests, or sitting apathetically against the walls, or rushing to and fro without purpose like terrified creatures losing the last ground in a flood. Such reactions, however, turned out to be the exception. Despite the unusual danger that confronted them on the ship's outsides, most of the escapees seemed to keep their wits about them. A brutal selection was at play, by which those who had succeeded in reaching the promenade tended by definition to be precisely the sort of people who could best handle the threat that awaited them there. They were fast and strong, and capable of quick calculation. Though their actions once outside were largely self-centered, with personal survival predominating over other concerns, many of the escapees proved able to work together to achieve that end—preparing and deploying the heavy life rafts, for instance, or attempting to free the lifeboats, however impossible that turned out to be. A few went further, and became genuinely altruistic. One man in particular comes to mind. He stood on the promenade looking completely composed, reassuring passengers around him that they would survive, patiently instructing people on how to don the life vests, and setting up an efficient system for the vests' distribution. Others played equally powerful roles. It was as if human society, having been torn apart, was starting to remake itself already—as if with time there could have been kings and queens on that drifting hull, and maybe even priests. But then the ocean washed them all away.

There was criminality, too, perhaps because among the various admirable characteristics being selected for, the less admirable traits of opportunism and raw aggression lay inextricably entwined. Indeed, some of the first people to follow Rolf Sörman and his three female companions outside onto the nearly empty promenade were brazen thieves—a band of young Estonian men who took advantage of the confusion to tear a gold chain off Sörman's neck and to strip cash and jewelry from the women. With startling speed they robbed others on the deck and then disappeared inside, apparently to work through the crowds that were just beginning to surge up the staircases. They were confident, as criminals tend to be, and they must not even have considered that the ship might then trap them, though the best evidence is that it did.

Sörman was angered by the assault. Still, preoccupied with finding adequate life vests for himself and the three women, he was soon confronted with aggression of a more dangerous kind. The problem started as fighting that broke out among passengers competing for life in the aft stairwell—violent behavior related to panic, but more focused and productive, which had the effect of intensifying the selection process under way and, especially toward the end, of delivering predators onto the port promenade, who had managed to come from behind and would stop at nothing to survive. A group of these people emerged from the stairwell as the list approached the cutoff of 45 degrees, and having fought their way to the promenade, they lunged at passengers already there, wrestling life vests from their grasp or tearing them off their backs. People fought back, of course, but some lost. It was not known what happened to the victims, but if they went into the water without flotation gear, as some passengers did, it is fair to say that they were murdered. The effect of the fighting on Sörman and his companions was less direct, but serious enough. They were separated into two pairs—two women on one side, Sörman and the third woman on the other—and because of the risk of being attacked, they were unable to join up again. The first pair disappeared, and did not survive.

Sörman's sole companion now was a middle-aged Swede named Yvonne Bernevall, who had participated in the seminar with him but was not a close friend. Like Sörman, she was physically strong. To escape from the aggressors on the promenade, the two of them clambered up to the open expanse of Deck 8. It was quieter there. The deck (which, again, essentially served as the ship's roof) was like a steel beach angling down dangerously toward the oncoming waves. Its slopes, however, were covered by nonskid rubberized mats, and were interrupted by life-raft cradles, pipes and protuberances of various kinds, and the walls of higher structures, including most notably the captain's quarters and the navigation bridge above it, and the large midship funnel—all of which allowed for adequate purchase. As the ship continued to capsize and flood, its movement softened, with the unfortunate effect that the waves reached higher against the decks, plucking off victims in small groups or one by one. When the auxiliary engines failed and the lights flickered off, a new round of screaming erupted, but it quieted when the emergency generator kicked in. Increasing numbers of people arrived on Deck 8 (actually now climbing down to it), because the formerly upward V formed by the promenade had rotated so far to starboard that the alternative escape route, across its rails and onto the ship's port side, had risen beyond their reach.

The storm was howling, generating waves as high as twenty-eight feet. The ship was visibly sinking at the stern. Already the aft starboard corner of Deck 8 had gone under. Crew members and passengers were deploying the automatically inflating life rafts but having trouble with the wind, which blew unsecured rafts entirely away, and jammed others against railings and edges. The wastage was enormous. The ship had safety equipment for more than 2,000 people, but it was clear that among the few hundred escapees outside, many would go wanting. Desperation mounted. Getting the rafts into the water and then getting into them proved to be just about impossible. Many rafts when activated turned out to be underinflated anyway. There weren't enough good ones to keep up with demand. An apparently perfect raft suddenly inflated—complete with a tentlike canopy and a little flashing light—and in response a large crowd rushed it, far too many people to get in. Yvonne Bernevall wanted to rush it too, but Sörman was afraid of the crowd, no less for its mood than for its size, and he persuaded her to stay away. He was struggling with a life-raft container of their own, and had hopes of getting it open in time.

When the list was 80 degrees, as loud crashes came from inside the ship, a hatch popped open on the side of the funnel, and Sörman saw a terrified crewman emerge, having climbed up an internal escape ladder from the engine room. The crewman started shouting in English, "Water is coming in on the car deck!" until another crewman, having emerged beside him, smashed him in the face to calm him down. They disappeared down-deck together. The bridge windows were now breaking in the waves. The rubberized mats were coming off the decks, piling up in jumbles, falling onto swimmers in the water. Then the funnel reached the ocean's surface, marking a list of 90 degrees, and a cloud of acrid steam enveloped the ship as seawater touched the hot exhaust pipes inside. The electricity generator failed, and people screamed, but the batteries kicked in, illuminating fluorescent emergency lights. A rocket flare arced into the night. The ship's horn blew a loud and mournful good-bye. The hull began to invert. Faced suddenly with the prospect of the ship's rolling over on top of them, scores of people still hanging on to Deck 8 began to drop into the water and attempt to swim clear. They were on the dangerous, upwind, up-storm side. Some got tangled in wires and cranes, or were dragged down or killed by the impacts of the waves. At midship the heaviest waves crashed nearly to the top of the deck, and aft they surged entirely over it. Sörman had to abandon his hopes for the life raft in the container. He had no faith that his life vest would keep him alive. He sought the hand of Yvonne Bernevall for her company, and together they fell into the sea.

P ierre Thiger took the alternate route to the water that night, as did about half of the people on the promenade. When the deck's angle reached 45 degrees, and the promenade took the form of a perfectly balanced V, he climbed over the rail, and perched outside of it on an edge above the ship's portside surface expanse—the window-lined superstructure immediately beneath him, and the heavy steel hull farther below. Though the storm was growing worse, the moon emerged through a break in the clouds and lit the scene with its reflected light. A man lost his grip trying to cross the rail, and having won the race to freedom, having made it this far, he fell back and passed directly through the stairway doors, which gaped open like jaws to receive him. There were many such horrors that night. Nonetheless, crouched safely on his perch outside the rails, Thiger remained composed. Since he had left the Pub Admiral perhaps ten minutes had passed, or maybe twelve, but certainly not more. He had lost track of the acquaintance with whom he had spent the evening and then escaped, and in a strange way he was in his element now, a man who knew ships, acting logically and alone, with no need to explain himself and nothing to do but survive. He rode the ship as others might ride a horse. He was steady. He was patient. Even when the list grew to 80 degrees, he kept waiting to see whether the hull would find its equilibrium and stabilize. When it did not, and he saw the funnel lie down and go under, he had the evidence he needed that the Estonia was inverting, so he left the railing and began to walk toward the keel across the superstructure's outsides. The ship no longer rocked much in the waves. Surf crashed over its stern, to his left. The steel underfoot was wet. He was careful not to fall through the windows into the darkened quarters below.

It is not known whether victims trapped in the cabins and common spaces saw Thiger or the others who navigated the superstructure while the hull was horizontal. From below the escapees would have seemed like shadows in a dream, passing overhead against a pale night sky. They would have seemed like fugitives on the run. One of them put his foot through a window and was injured but not caught. There was no communication between the two worlds, which had grown impossibly far apart. Altogether perhaps a hundred people made the trip across the outsides. By the time Thiger got to the lower hull, most of them had already arrived. A large group was bivouacked around a stabilizer fin, where it was possible to delay for a few minutes while the ship hesitated, lingering on its side. Soon, however, the movement resumed, and the group broke up as people joined the chaotic migration—chased forward and across the curvature of the bottom by the settling at the stern and the ship's continuing roll. The heel grew to 110 degrees, and later to 120 degrees and more. Some of the escapees had managed to drag life rafts with them, but they were having the standard problems of getting them launched—troubles that were compounded by fights that broke out, and by the desperation that drove people to pile into rafts that were still too high on the hull. Those people were difficult to dislodge, though some fell out when the rafts eventually tumbled or slid into the water. Many of the canopies did not erect. Many of the rafts flipped upside down. One riot stands for others in those apocalyptic moments: after ten people threw themselves onto an inverted raft near the aft end of the hull, and others attacked en masse, trying to get on too, the entire assembly went sliding uncontrollably into the ocean, upside down, with people clustered in the middle and hanging on to the outside. This was a poor way to survive the Baltic in a storm on a September night.

So was every other way, however. What difference did it make to be altruistic and brave—indeed, what difference to be grasping? These were the people who had led the race, and it was as if they had been deceived, suddenly abandoned to chance. Their lives had been reduced to a rolling sliver of steel, a whaleback, the outside curvature of a bilge dissolving into the sea. Between the force of the wind and the waves and the nearness of the end, there was no possibility for even the sort of embryonic society that had flickered on the Deck 7 promenade. Empty life vests and rafts both whole and ruined littered the water. People were scattered up and down the overturning hull—walking, crawling, lying down—and though some seemed to cluster, each of them in effect was alone. A couple was separated when the husband jumped into the water and beckoned to his wife, and out of terror she refused to go. As one by one they were picked off by the waves, Pierre Thiger got the impression that the ocean was reaching up to fetch them and drag them down. His own turn was coming soon. The ship had rolled to 135 degrees, halfway from prone to fully inverted, and the waves were surging all around. The water was so close that when a lifeboat that had broken loose smashed against the hull, Thiger was showered by pieces of shattered fiberglass.

The wave that took him caught him by surprise, hitting so quickly that he didn't see it coming, and he had no chance to draw a breath. He was pulled below the surface, came up, and was pulled below again on what seemed to him to be a long, long trip. The ocean bubbled and roared around his ears. Then he rose, and though he seemed to be drifting upward forever, and though he swallowed water several times, he did not breathe the water in, and eventually he arrived on the surface. Empty life vests floated in abundance there, and he caught hold of several, along with a wooden plank for good measure. Driven by the wind, a line of life rafts disappeared behind the hull—like a string of pearls, Thiger thought, or a saint's-day procession. The waves would have seemed mountainous from his swimmer's height. They bore down on him with speed, carried him upslope to the crests, and then dropped him behind as they rushed on hissing into the night. Many of them were breaking, throwing powerful white cascades down their forward slopes, leaving scars of foam on their trails. The air was full of spume and spray. Thiger heard a frightened swimmer nearby, calling for help. Encumbered by his vests, he paddled over to assist him as best he could. Later he spotted a life raft, swam to it, and got in. It was characteristic of Thiger that he did not cower in fear but sat up to look outside. The Estonia was showing its keel and slowly sliding below the surface on a steep angle, stern first. It had raised its bulbous nose so high that parts of the bridge remained clear of the ocean's surface. Ever the observer, Thiger noticed that there was something very wrong with the front end—that the ship's openable bow had somehow fallen off. Thiger was face to face with the cause of the Estonia 's demise.

S urvival in the water was a desperate affair. The night was rent with the cries of invisible victims pleading for help, growing weak with the cold, moaning, going silent, and losing the fight to stay alive. Nothing could be done for them. Those without life vests simply slipped away. Those with life vests died on the surface, alone among the waves. Many who found their way to life rafts could not get in. Many who got in were then washed out, and had to get in all over again. Some did not succeed. Some did succeed, only to die once inside. The horror aboard the life rafts was compounded by anonymity and confusion. Twenty-two life rafts were occupied. They were not the protective cocoons one might imagine but flimsy assemblies of inflated tubes, half collapsed, that were flipped repeatedly by the breaking waves, flushed with frigid water, and often indistinguishable from the pandemonium of the sea.

Rolf Sörman never found even such shelter in a raft. When he took Yvonne Bernevall's hand and dropped with her from Deck 8 into the ocean, he knew the temperature of the water was lethal. He gave himself a few minutes at the most before he would succumb to the cold. But he was so keyed up that the water felt neutral when he plunged in. In Baltic terms that means it felt warm. When he hit the water, he kept holding Bernevall's hand. They went deep, and Sörman cleared his ears twice before the life vests prevailed over the momentum of their fall, and they started floating upward. Near the top Sörman was hit in the head by the foot of a frantic swimmer, and he yanked his hand from Bernevall's grasp in order to protect himself. For some seconds after he surfaced he thought she might have drowned, but then she appeared nearby. He swam over to her, and they clung together for a moment to keep from being driven apart by the force of the waves. They spoke. They had a sense of being tugged at from below, as if they were in the clutches of a vertical drift caused by the hull's subsidence. Staying close together, they swam away for about twenty-five yards, against the oncoming seas, until the sensation diminished. Again they held each other and spoke. It was essential that they find something to float on. Their position upwind from the Estonia gave them no chance of reaching the life rafts, which could not be secured or delayed on this, the storm-bashed side of the ship, and which once released went scooting downwind to the east. The situation was not entirely hopeless, however, because the Estonia itself was drifting eastward, slowing as it sank, but continuing to litter the waves in its trail with waterlogged, wind-resistant debris. Sörman and Bernevall struggled through the flotsam, hoping to discover an object large enough to serve them as a raft—furniture, for instance, or a section of wooden planking. It later turned out that one survivor had ridden a wooden cupboard for a while. But Sörman and Bernevall were not so lucky. They found nothing of use, and instead came suddenly upon a scene of the dead and dying—a cluster of corpses lying facedown in the waves, and among them several people still alive but thrashing violently during the final throes of drowning. In their haste to avoid entanglement Sörman and Bernevall split apart—he striking to the left, she to the right. Minutes later, when they tried to join up again, they could not. Sörman saw Bernevall floating high on top of a wave when he was at its bottom. He swam for her, but when he saw her next she had drifted farther away. After that she was lost.

Sörman turned to swim back toward the Estonia , when suddenly his life vest came off, the flotation collar peeling over his head. He jammed it back on and tightened the straps, but it came off again. Five times this happened in rapid succession, reducing Sörman to near panic, until he realized that the wind from behind was to blame. He faced away from the Estonia and toward the wind, which solved the problem. He then tried to build a raft by stacking up ten squares of the rubberized deck matting that he found nearby. The squares were not designed to float, and they barely did, offering little more support in combination than alone. Sörman had to give up on his raft. At that point, however, an overturned lifeboat came into view, riding bow-down and low, with its keel just a few inches above the surface. The front end was completely smashed in. Sörman had the impression that the lifeboat had just emerged from the depths. He swam to it and squirmed up onto the keel, emerging partially from the water. As many as seven others did the same. Sörman helped several of them up onto the keel. The most vulnerable was a young dancer who had a nasty head wound and was frightened and weak; Sörman grabbed her by her jacket and began his second losing fight for the life of a woman that night.

Conditions on the overturned lifeboat were extraordinarily tough, with wind-driven rain and ocean spray as cold as sleet, and breaking waves that kept sweeping across the hull. The man who had found the safest position, at the stern, made no attempt to help the others, and clung with both hands to the propeller shaft in a full-blown panic, wailing prayers and loudly calling to God. For the sake of his own nerves and the courage of others, Sörman shouted at him repeatedly to stop, but the man was beyond reach, and he did not. The overturned lifeboat drifted directly toward the mutilated front end of the Estonia 's hull, now heavily inverted and in the last stages of sinking into the sea. Aboard the lifeboat nothing could be done but to go for the ride. At the last moment, just when it seemed they might be smashed against the hull, they were swept slightly forward and began to pass directly under the ship's front end. An instant later, in the confusion of a nightmare, they passed into the flooded entrance of a huge dark tunnel that was swallowing the surging waves. It was the open end of the car deck, the gaping wound left when the bow fell off. Sörman realized that he had not escaped the Estonia after all—that it would catch him now and take him down. Unable to endure the sight, he turned his head away in fear. When finally he found the courage to look again, the Estonia was gone.

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1994 Baltic ferry disaster: new dive finds no evidence to back alternative theories

Discovery of hole in wreck fails to disprove official report, Estonian and Swedish investigators say

A new research expedition to the wreck of a ferry that sank in the Baltic Sea 27 years ago has not provided fresh evidence contradicting the official accident investigation report, the Estonian and Swedish accident investigation boards said on Tuesday.

In one of Europe’s deadliest peacetime maritime disasters , the MS Estonia, en route from Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, to Stockholm in Sweden, sank in heavy seas on 28 September 1994, killing 852 people, most of them Swedes and Estonians.

Only 137 people on board survived. The fate of the vessel has sparked several conspiracy theories, including that it collided with a submarine or that it was carrying sensitive military cargo that played a part in the sinking.

The 1997 official joint investigation by Estonia, Finland and Sweden concluded that the ferry sank when its bow door locks failed in a storm. That separated the bow door from the vessel, opening up the ramp to the car deck and causing extensive flooding of the decks, sinking the vessel in just 30 minutes from the initial distress call.

However, others questioned this amid increasing evidence that there was a large hole in the ferry .

Presenting the preliminary results of a dive by underwater robots in July, Rene Arikas, head of the Estonian safety investigation bureau, said the dive showed that the wreck did have a hole, about 22 metres long and four metres high. The wreck was resting on a slope on the seabed, and its original position had changed over the years because of changes in the seabed, making the hole and other damage more visible, he said.

Despite this, he emphasised, researchers have no evidence proving the official report on the sinking to be incorrect.

New underwater surveys are scheduled in March-April, when visibility is considered the best, Arikas said.

Jonas Backstrand, deputy director general of Sweden’s accident investigation board, said researchers were surprised to find the seabed wass substantially rocky, and this could well have been the reason for the hole. “We don’t know how this damage [to the vessel] occurred,” Backstrand said, but it was likely it happened when the ferry fell on to the rocky seabed. More investigation was needed, he said.

A separate, privately funded expedition commissioned by relatives of the victims of the MS Estonia conducted a dive in September. Initial results are expected to be published early next year.

The wreck lies on the seabed about 80 metres (265ft) below the surface in international waters off a Finnish island, and is considered a graveyard, which gives the area protection under the law.

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This Day In History : September 28

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Passenger ferry, Estonia, sinks, killing 852

On September 28, 1994, 852 people die in one of the worst maritime disasters of the century when the Estonia , a large car-and-passenger ferry, sinks in the Baltic Sea.

The German-built ship was traveling on an overnight cruise from Tallinn, the capital city of Estonia, to Stockholm, Sweden, when it sank off the coast of Finland. Estonia, a former Soviet republic that gained its independence in 1991 (the last Russian troops left in 1994), was a popular and affordable travel destination for Swedes. The Estonia was a type of ferry known as a “ro-ro,” which featured a smorgasbord, live music, dancing and drinking and allowed people to drive vehicles onto one end of the ship and drive off on the other end.

After hitting stormy weather, with waves reaching an estimated 15 to 20 feet, the Estonia went down in the middle of the night. Many passengers were trapped inside the ship, while others, even some who managed to make it into lifeboats, later drowned in the frigid water or died from hypothermia. Helicopters were used to rescue most of the 137 survivors.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, a joint Swedish-Finnish-Estonian government committee ruled it an accident and blamed it on stormy weather that caused water to pour through an open bow door and into the Estonia’s car deck, destabilizing the ship and capsizing it in less than an hour. However, there were others, including some family and friends of the Estonia victims, who believed the sinking was the result of a pre-existing hole caused by a collision or explosion.

Two years after the sinking of the Estonia , the Bukoba , a passenger steamship, went down in Lake Victoria near Tanzania in May 1996, leaving an estimated 1,000 people dead. In September 2002, a Senegalese passenger ferry, the Joola , sank off the coast of Gambia, resulting in at least 1,800 casualties. By comparison, when the ocean liner Titanic sank after hitting an iceberg off of Newfoundland on its maiden voyage in April 1912, approximately 1,500 lives were lost.

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Fear of landing, the art of not hitting the ground too hard, the ms estonia 1994 ferry disaster revisited.

On the 28th of September 2020, a Swedish documentary called Estonia–The Find That Changes Everything made headlines around the world when they claimed to have found new evidence on the 26-year-old case of the sinking of the MS Estonia .

On the 28th of September 1994, The MS Estonia , a cruise ferry operated by Estline, sank while crossing the Baltic Sea on route from Tallinn to Stockholm. The ferry was carrying 989 people (186 crew and 803 passengers). The crew declared an emergency and various vessels in the area went to offer assistance but the weather was rough and the other ships on the Baltic were unsure of Estonia ‘s position.

You can hear the complete radio exchange with subtitles here:

The ship disappeared from radar around 01:50. The first of the ferries that had diverted to help arrived at 02:12 and quickly made the seriousness of the situation clear. Meanwhile, although life rafts had been released, they were “wet” which meant that the passengers had to jump into the storming sea and swim to the rafts. In all, 138 were rescued from the Baltic; with some spending over six hours in 11°C water.

The sinking of the MS Estonia was the largest maritime disaster to happen in the Baltic Seas during peacetime and the second-largest European maritime disaster in peacetime, with only the Titanic holding a higher death-toll. Only 94 bodies were recovered of the 852 who lost their lives.

This took a political toll on the country which was only just beginning to find its feet after fifty years of Soviet occupation. The Estonia was referred to as Death ferry and many questions were raised about Estline’s operations and Estonia’s oversight.

The president of Estonia, Lennart Meri, was only the 2nd president Estonia had ever had, the first having held office from 1938 to 1940. In the weeks after the disaster, he expressed his frustration with the media portrayal of the situation. “Estonia is the most successful state in central Europe. Is the fact of this ship going down somehow a symbol of our nation’s fate? No.” And then, more chillingly, “The sea from time to time needs sacrifices. This is very deeply rooted in our culture.”

When I first arrived in Estonia, I was immediately intrigued by this case and, although there were no planes involved, I decided it would make for an interesting post for Fear of Landing. Within a week, I’d realised that this might not be possible. Here’s what I wrote to a friend at the time:

I’ve only started looking at this but the outline is already vast — this isn’t a post, it’s a book! There are multiple causes (design flaw, mechanical issue, bad decisions by crew, rescue failure) which led to over 850 fatalities (138 rescued). There’s political issues galore, especially considering that it was just three years after Estonia regained independence. And the case is surrounded by AMAZING conspiracy theories, made worse by the fact that it is illegal to dive at the wreck or even approach it, but only if you are Estonian, Finnish, Swedish, Latvian, Polish, Danish or British. This means that it isn’t illegal for me as a German citizen. It makes me want to charter a boat and go see!

The sinking of the MS Estonia turned out to be pivotal for maritime safety, initiating changes which had existed in the aviation world for decades, including passenger manifests, improved crew training, ramp inspections (although they aren’t called that) and a closer look at evacuation procedures.

Estonia, Finland and Sweden formed a Joint Accident Investigation Commission to investigation the disaster, which concluded that what we would call the probable cause was the failure of the bow visor locking devices which failed in the stormy conditions as a result of faulty design. Contributing factors were slow reactions from the crew, lack of clear evacuation alarms and instructions on the listing ship and a slow rescue response.

The Swedish Accident Investigation Board and the Accident Investigation Board of Finland also released their own reports that same year.

In 2004, Sweden commissioned an investigation after rumours that the ferry had been secretly and illegally transporting Soviet military equipment to Sweden. A retired customs officer said that he had been given specific orders not to inspect specific vehicles on the ferry. It was known that Russian troops departing Estonia were selling military equipment, weapons and ammunition to anyone with the money to buy it. The last Russian units left Estonia in August 1994, a month before the disaster.

The Swedish investigation confirmed that non-explosive military equipment had been onboard the ship on the 14th and the 20th of December 1994. The Swedish Ministry of Defence stated that there was no military equipment on the ship on the 28th.

In 2006, Estonia held a further investigation to answer open questions about how the ship managed to list so badly and sink so rapidly. The wreckage has been designated as a final place of rest for victims of the disaster , which means that it should not be disturbed. Dives to the wreck are explicitly prohibited. This is fairly common for wrecks and mass graves; the Geneva Convention stipulates that the dead should, where possible, be buried in individual graves that are properly maintained and marked. However, where that is not possible, customary international humanitarian law holds that  all possible measures will be taken to prevent the dead from being despoiled.

The report concluded that it was not possible to confirm what caused the Estonia to sink without direct access to the wreck, which lies between the Estonian island of Hiiumaa and the Finnish archipelago of Turku.

I started collecting additional material, including many many studies on maritime safety and the survival aspects (interestingly, the disaster is a large part of the evidence that men are far more likely to survive a maritime event than women ), PTSD , indications of blasting on shipbuilding steel , Crisis Intervention in Finland and the human factors which link the Titanic , Estonia and Costa Concordia .

This was obviously way beyond the scope of a Fear of Landing post and although I was briefly tempted to spend a year or two or three investigating the case thoroughly and writing a book on it, I regretfully decided that I was not the right person to take on the project, especially as a number of books and documentaries already exist.

Earlier this year, an Estonian petition was put forward to change the treaty barring access to the site so that the official results could be investigated. Almost two thousand people signed the petition. Many of the relatives of the victims, both in Estonia and in Sweden, question the conclusion from the original investigation.

The Estonian government formed a working group to deal with the petition. They were to report back by the end of March… but by then, of course, the world found itself in the grips of a pandemic. A twenty-five year old wreck was no longer a priority.

That brings us to the present. The Swedish documentary team have shown footage that they took of the wreckage. The first episode of the documentary was released on Monday to coincide with the 26th anniversary of the disaster.

The footage was taken using an autonomous underwater vehicle which explored the site much like the devices used to map the seafloor during the search for Malaysia Airlines flight 370.

About a year ago, the Finnish Border and Coast Guard said that a coast guard vessel had confronted a vessel, the Fritz Reuter , which they believed had dispatched a diving robot into the sea. The site is in international waters although within Finland’s economic zone. The press reported that under international law, disturbing the site is punishable either by a fine or a two-year jail sentence.

However, the dive was carried out from a German registered ship. Germany did not sign the 1995 treaty to maintain the sanctity of the site, which means that German ships are not bound by the treaty. The documentary team argues that they were not prohibited from visiting the site or diving at the wreck. However, two of the crew were Swedish nationals, including Henrik Evertsson , the director of the documentary. They may still be prosecuted for violating the sanctity of the grave.

The footage from this dive clearly shows a four-metre hole ripped in the ship’s hull.

Over the years, there have been continual accusations that the governments involved have colluded to cover up the truth about the disaster. There are a number of English language pieces on this, such as Lies and Truths about the M/V Estonia Accident , The Sinking of MS Estonia : The Swedish Radical Right’s Favourite Conspiracy , MS Estonia – Still Doubts Over Official Story 24 Years After the Biggest Maritime Disaster in Europe Since WW2 and Ill-fated Estonia Ferry used for Weapons Transfers

Some of the survivors have said that they heard loud bangs about half an hour before the ship sank, which has been taken to mean that there was an explosion on the ship, which the official report denies took place.

The documentary claims that this hole in the ship was the true cause of the disaster, rather than the failure of the broken bow visor.

Margus Kurm, who led the Estonian investigation in 2009, says he thinks the hole must have been caused by a collision with a submarine. The hole is under the water line. The ferry was not off-route. There were no other boats known in the area and no reports of damage. None of the survivors mentioned seeing any other vessel. His theory leads to a number of hard questions. What was a submarine doing there? Why was this never reported? And did the investigators at the time know about it?

The senior Estonian foreign ministry advisor, Mart Luik, on the other hand, argues that the hole in the hull most likely happened when the ship struck the seabed. The documentary describes the seabed in the area as sandy but Luik says he’s seen the unedited footage where it is clear that the area near the hole in the wreckage is in fact very rocky. In the new footage, you can see the word Estline. In the description of the divers’ footage taken in December 1994, Luik says there is a reference to damage and a crack near the E of Estline. He has asked the filmmakers to show the entire underwater footage so that people can see the context. However, he agrees with Kurm that a full inquiry is needed.

The interior minister, Mart Helme, believes that the MS Estonia collided with another vessel and says that the only way to put the speculations to bed is to study the ship in detail. It would cost over €100 million to recover the wreckage, while an extensive underwater survey would cost only between €5 and €20 million, depending on whether they use robots or human divers. The ship lies 80-85 metres underwater (around 275 feet) and could be scanned using sonar and followed up with an autonomous underwater vehicle. This is more likely to be within Estonia’s budget although they are hoping to combine forces (and costs) with the Swedish government.

Conspiracy theories are taken rather more seriously in Estonia than in other places that I’ve lived and, it has to be said, often with good reason. There are valid concerns that the original joint investigation was sloppy with little or no public oversight. Some believe that the investigation was simply there to confirm the original theory that the disaster was caused by the broken bow visor. There’s evidence that the 1994 video footage was edited to remove sequences which included human remains. It is certainly true that the original VHS tape was copied badly, leaving many images murky and unclear. Although the official government line is that they have full confidence in the final report of the International Commission of Inquiry into the incident, everyone agrees that this time, the conflicting evidence cannot simply be ignored as not relevant.

The prime minister, Jüri Ratas, has said that he’s informed Finland and Sweden that an underwater investigation must be carried out. Estonia, Ratas said, will take the lead in ensuring that a supplemental investigation is independent, transparent and trustworthy.

It may be that the original report was correct in its conclusion, if not in its investigative techniques. Certainly, there is plenty of evidence of what could and should have been done better, both in terms of the maintenance of the ship and the ability to quickly and safely evacuate the ferry in the open seas. But there are enough open questions to make it worth another look at the seabed. I find it hard to believe that the relatives of the victims, many of whom signed the petition asking for more information at the beginning of the year, will feel that this is disrespectful.

I am planning on revisiting the original reports and following the new investigation as it progresses. I hope you will indulge my intermittent ferry posts interspersed with our usual aviation fare.

16 Comments

A diversion from the usual aviation material. Sylvia has laid a link, though: she is making a comparison between the oversight of shipping, both nationally and internationally, and the much stricter regulations that aviation is subjected to. The international treaty seems to prioritise the sanctity of a shipwreck as being the grave of crew and passengers over the need to analyse the accident in order to find the cause, and finds ways to prevent a reoccurrence. Not to mention the possible political ramifications. An interesting article!

I hope you will indulge my intermittent ferry posts

Yes, this is fine. Your posts are always well researched and written, and interesting reading.

Somehow it doesn’t really feel like a diversion. Sylvia’s writing has always been more about making the hazardous safer than about aviation in particular.

She can just call the next book “Why Planes Crash and Ships Sink”.

Why Ships Sink does have a certain kind of ring to it…

Then perhaps the title should rather read “Why Planes Fall and Ships Sink?”

Harrow, That is exactly what I meant. Sylvia has diverted from her usual aviation topics, but she makes the connection by pointing to the safety aspects, accident investigations, and the differences between the way they are conducted in aviation- and shipping accidents. Personally, if I ever were to die in a ferry accident (I hope not !!), I would not worry about my “watery grave” being disturbed if it were necessary for the investigation. Certainly not if it could help to prevent another similar accident from happening.

I don’t understand the stance that avoiding disturbing the dead is more important than doing everything we can including sufficient research to protect he living from having the same thing happen again. That sounds ridiculous to me.

If private people were alowed to “investigate”, a lot of stuff would simply get stolen and sold off. These rules don’t stand in the way of an official investigation, but they’re meant to be able to prosecute private people who go down there and just take whatever of value they can find. You won’t be able to prove any of the thievery or prosecute on that, but you can deter them from going down to the ship in the first place.

I am really appalled with the non-formal approach to ship radio communications when compared to the rigid structure and wording for plane communications. Often without call sign, some with irrelevant information… probably this is an interesting point to dig into. This chatting (even in case of a Mayday situation) is general in the ship industry, or was it particular to this area? I will try to find the Costa Concordia comms

I will be interested to hear what you find. My general observation is that ships are larger-but-fewer (e.g., I was on a “small” cruise ship that carried 930) than airplanes; they also move much more slowly, and can slow down (or even stop if there’s an anchorage) without falling. Another question: are ships at sea subject to anything like the positive control and constant monitoring of planes over or near land? An absence of transmissions from en-route centers would leave a lot of airtime free for more-casual communications.

Back in 1994, AIS (the naval equivalent to ADS-B) was not yet in widespread use, so it would’ve been difficult to monitor marine traffic for traffic control. Marine radio transmissions suffer from the fact that there’s usually not a direct line of sight between the stations (much easier to achieve in air-to-air or ground-to-air). As a consequence, a ship near the accident assumes control of the radio traffic. Most aircraft accidents occur over land, within a clear jurisdiction; much of marine traffic happens in international waters, where it’d be difficult to impose any sort of authority on the captains.

This week, the blog becomes “Fear Of Sinking”. ;-) The NTSB in the US also investigates maritime accidents, so there is a lot of common ground here, and I’m sure Sylvia is well equipped to write on it.

A professional video back then should have been recorded on Umatic, not VHS.

The claim that there was a collision with a submarine that hasn’t been acknowledged is extraordinary. It means that the nation operating that submarine has managed to keep this collision a secret, and has had a good reason for doing so; and that the crew were neglecting basic precautions. This claim requires extraordinary evidence; personally, I’m more inclined to see that tear in the hull as the result of the ship hitting the sea floor. But it would definitely be good to have a NTSB-style investigation and report on the exact sequence of events all the way to the ship’s final position.

In Germany, not too many years ago, a badly inspected fishing vessel (there were holes cut in the deck that were just covered up for the inspection) sank in the mouth of the Weser river with the owner’s son on it; and when the investigation team finally managed to send divers down, the computers on the bridge were missing. There are a lot of secrets buried under the waves.

https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hoheweg_(Schiff,_1974) Der offizielle Untersuchungbericht ist unten auf der Seite verlinkt.

Well Mendel, you certainly are right. But not only ships, aircraft too have disappeared over water, not to be found ever again – or in some cases decades later. Sylvia certainly has chosen a challenge for her readers. Very few of us are competent to voice expert opinions, but on the other hand a comparison with aviation and some common sense seems to go a long way.

Mendel, I skimmed through the Wikipedia entry that you suggested. It is about a fishing vessel, the “Hoheweg” that sank in the North Sea. The wreck posed a danger to shipping and also to the environment because it had full fuel tanks, so it was lifted and brought to Bremerhaven where the wreck was subjected to an investigation. The conclusion was that a firehose, used for cleaning the deck, had somehow gotten overboard and wrapped itself around the propeller shaft. Without engine power, control of the cutter was lost and it capsized. Additional factors were that doors to cabin and wheelhouse were found open and modifications to the vessel that had not been approved led to a reduction in stability. A sad story, but what is the relationship to the sinking of the Estonia? And since we have broached the subject: Yes I can agree that free access to a wreck can lead to theft of objects on board, even disturbing evidence. But that can be regulated in maritime law. I am not familiar with laws dealing with ships that sank outside of territorial waters, but if access to divers can be restricted or even prohibited, surely another rule can be implemented, if it does not already exist, to limit access to official investigations. If an aircraft comes down, the investigation will be conducted under the laws of the country where it crashed, but investigators of the country of registration, as well as experts from the manufacturers will be involved as well. There are international laws and agreements; what is there to prevent something similar to be implemented for ships? A prohibition on the grounds that the wreck is a grave and must not be disturbed is in my opinion not a really valid argument. An investigation has the potential of providing clues to what happened and how to prevent a similar accident from reoccurring. Relatives of the victims may well prefer to have a burial rather than a ceremony where they throw flowers on the water from the deck of a ship. The German authorities had no problem lifting the wreck, regardless of whether or not it might still have bodies on board. I have the feeling that Mendel has this in mind when he put us on to the Wikipedia article.

The Hoheweg sunk in shallow waters close to the coast in German jurisdiction. The mystery is that the captain’s body was never found, and we don’t know much about what the ship was doing because someone (who?) stole the computers. Why was it out in this weather? It’s possible that the hose was placed there intentionally as an act of sabotage or self-sabotage.

In aviation, when there is an accident on land nowadays, usually the investigators can gather a lot of information very quickly. In the marine realm, that’s a lit more difficult (as it is when planes crash over the sea), so that makes many of these these accidents more mysterious.

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Sweden won’t reopen an investigation into 1994 Baltic Sea ferry disaster

FILE - In this Nov. 19, 1994 file photo, the bow door of the sunken passenger ferry M/S Estonia is lifted up from the bottom of the sea, off Uto Island, in the Baltic Sea. Swedish authorities say they will not reopen the case of a 1994 ferry sinking in the Baltic Sea that killed 852 people, in one of Europe’s deadliest peacetime disasters at sea. (Jaakko Aiikainen/Lehtikuva via AP, File)

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STOCKHOLM (AP) — Sweden won’t reopen an investigation into a 1994 ferry sinking in the Baltic Sea that killed 852 people in one of Europe’s deadliest peacetime sea disasters, after investigators in Estonia, Finland and Sweden found no indication of a collision or an explosion, the prosecutor said Thursday.

A TV documentary aired in 2020 showed a hole in the hull of the wreckage of the M/S Estonia, leading to calls for a new investigation.

“There is nothing to indicate that there would have been a collision with a ship or a floating object, nor any explosion in the bow,” prosecutor Karolina Wieslander said in a statement.

She said that most recent investigations by Estonian authorities with the assistance of Finland and Sweden did not mean that “anything else has come to light that gives reason to assume that a crime has been committed.”

The M/S Estonia sank in heavy seas on Sept. 28, 1994, killing 852 people, most of them Swedes and Estonians. The ferry was on its way from Estonia’s capital, Tallinn, to Stockholm when it sank about 30 minutes after an initial distress call. Only 137 people on board survived.

In 1997, Sweden, Estonia and Finland concluded in a report that the ferry sank after the bow door locks failed in a storm. The report flatly rejected the theory of a hole, which has long been the focus of speculation about a possible explosion on board, or collision with another vessel.

In 1995, the three countries agreed that the wreck is considered as a final place of rest for victims of the disaster, and must be respected. Some 758 bodies remain entombed on the car ferry, which rests 80 meters (265 feet) underwater.

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Achille Lauro Sinks Off Coast of Somalia

By The Associated Press

• Dec. 3, 1994

The Achille Lauro cruise ship sank today off the coast of Somalia, while the 979 passengers and crew who survived a fire on the luxury liner and abandoned ship two days ago headed to one of three Indian Ocean ports.

The fire began on Wednesday in the engine room of the Achille Lauro, an Italian liner that made headlines in 1985 when it was hijacked by Palestinian guerrillas who killed an American Jewish passenger.

Two passengers died in the ship's final disaster, one apparently of a heart attack. Eight people were injured as lifeboats and rafts were dropped into the Indian Ocean.

Geoffrey Wall, one of the passengers, told British Sky TV today that one of the two passengers who died had been injured when the ship's crew released inflatable rafts on top of a lifeboat, which held about 35 people. "It was tilting at an angle," Mr. Wall said. "They dropped two of these inflatable life boats on top of us, resulting in injury to one man."

He said that people in the lifeboat tried to revive the man before a rescue ship arrived about four hours later, but that he died shortly before the ship reached them.

The ship sank Friday evening shortly after Italian tugboats reached it in an effort to bring it back to home port.

Eight cargo vessels and two American warships -- the cruiser Gettysburg and the frigate Halyburton -- were carrying passengers and crew members to Djibouti; Mombasa, Kenya, and Muscat, Oman. Most were heading for Mombasa.

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WATCH: On This Day in 1994, the MS Achille Lauro Cruise Ship Caught Fire and Later Sank Off Somalia

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Shipping History reminds us that on this day in 1994, the MS Achille Lauro cruise ship caught fire and later sank near Somalia following an engine explosion. Below is a first-hand account of the incident filmed by one of the crew members onboard:

The MS Achille Lauro caught on fire and sank 125 miles off the coast of Somalia while I was working on board as a crew member. We were rescued by several ships and sailed a few days to Mombasa harbor.

More about the Achille Lauro on wikipedia .

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How Often Do Cruise Ships Sink?

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“How often do cruise ships sink?” is a question that frequently crosses the minds of potential cruisers as they contemplate embarking on a voyage across the sea.

Cruise ships, renowned symbols of vacationing and exploration, annually transport millions of individuals across the globe. However, fears regarding their safety, often fueled by infamous maritime disasters and dramatic depictions in films, lurk within the consciousness of many travelers.

• 1 How often do cruise ships actually sink?
• 2 What are the main causes of cruise ships sinking?
• 3 How safe are modern cruise ships compared to those from the past?
• 4 What precautions are taken to prevent cruise ships from sinking?
• 5 How are cruise ships designed to withstand rough seas?
• 6 What happens when a cruise ship sinks?
• 7 How many people have died from cruise ships sinking?
• 8 What is the survival rate when a cruise ship sinks?
• 9 Are there any notable historical incidents of cruise ships sinking?
• 10 What is the largest cruise ship that has ever sunk?
• 11 What are the most common misconceptions about cruise ships sinking?
• 12 How does the law deal with cruise ship sinking incidents?
• 13 How are passengers compensated after a cruise ship sinking?
• 14 Are certain routes or destinations more prone to cruise ship sinking incidents?
• 15 How does climate change impact the risk of cruise ships sinking?
• 16 Should You Be Worried?

This comprehensive article aims to address these concerns, offering in-depth insights into the safety regulations, construction aspects, legal considerations, and historical events related to cruise ship sinkings.

How often do cruise ships actually sink?

Cruise ship accidents can make headlines around the world due to their dramatic and often tragic nature. However, the reality is that cruise ship sinkings are relatively rare events.

According to data from 2011 to 2020, an average of about 2-3 passenger ships (including ferries, which constitute a significant proportion) have sunk each year globally. It is important to note that this number does not solely represent cruise ships, which have an even lower frequency of sinking.

What are the main causes of cruise ships sinking?

While the sinking of a cruise ship is rare, when it does occur, it can usually be attributed to one or more of the following reasons:

• Bad Weather: High winds, heavy seas, and storms can lead to structural stress or flooding.
• Grounding: Hitting a submerged object or running aground can cause a rupture in the hull.
• Fire: Fires on board can lead to evacuations, and in extreme cases, loss of the vessel.
• Equipment Failure: Faulty equipment or design can lead to catastrophic failure.

How safe are modern cruise ships compared to those from the past?

In terms of safety, modern cruise ships are far superior to their predecessors. Several advancements have made today’s ships safer:

• Design and Construction: Modern cruise ships are designed with compartmentalization, which can prevent water from flooding the entire ship in case of a breach in the hull.
• Technology: Today’s ships are equipped with advanced navigation and weather prediction technology to avoid dangerous situations.
• Safety Regulations: Enhanced safety protocols, regular safety drills, and strict regulatory inspections have significantly improved safety.
• Life-saving Equipment: There is a legal requirement for modern cruise ships to have enough lifeboats for everyone on board.

These factors have contributed to the decrease in the frequency of cruise ship sinkings over the past century.

What precautions are taken to prevent cruise ships from sinking?

The cruise ship industry takes a multitude of precautions to prevent ships from sinking. Here are some key measures:

• Design: Cruise ships are designed with a focus on stability and buoyancy. They are built with compartments that prevent water from flooding the entire vessel if the hull is breached.
• Training: Crew members undergo rigorous training to handle emergency situations including potential sinking.
• Inspections: Regular inspections are performed to ensure all systems are functional and any necessary repairs are made promptly.
• Technology: Modern navigation and weather tracking technologies help ships avoid dangerous conditions that could lead to sinking.
• Safety Drills: Regular safety drills are conducted to ensure passengers know what to do in case of an emergency.

These measures are fundamental to the cruise ship industry’s safety operations. Each of these components contributes to creating a secure environment for passengers and crew members aboard cruise ships.

How are cruise ships designed to withstand rough seas?

Cruise ships are engineering marvels specifically designed to withstand the challenging conditions of the sea. Some crucial elements of their design include:

• Hull Design: Cruise ship hulls are built with steel and designed to be both strong and flexible to cope with rough seas. The shape of the hull is also crucial – the V-shaped hulls are excellent at cutting through waves, reducing resistance and maintaining stability.
• Stabilizers: Modern cruise ships are equipped with stabilizers – wing-like protrusions that extend from the sides of the ship to reduce roll in heavy seas.
• Ballast Tanks: These are specially designed tanks that take in or release seawater to adjust the ship’s weight and maintain its balance.
• Bilge System: This system pumps out any water that might accumulate in the ship, preventing excessive weight and potential capsizing.
• Weather Monitoring Systems: Modern cruise ships are equipped with sophisticated weather monitoring systems that provide real-time weather updates, helping the crew navigate away from potential storms.

What happens when a cruise ship sinks?

When a cruise ship begins to sink, a series of critical actions are taken:

• Emergency Alarm: An alarm is sounded throughout the ship to alert passengers and crew.
• Instructions: The crew provides instructions over the public address system. These instructions typically guide passengers to muster stations where they’re given life jackets and prepared for possible evacuation.
• Evacuation: If necessary, the captain will give the order to abandon ship, and passengers and crew will board lifeboats in a controlled and orderly manner.
• Rescue: In many cases, coast guard services and other ships in the area will be alerted to the sinking ship and begin rescue operations.

It’s important to note that every incident is different, and the response may vary depending on the specifics of the situation.

How many people have died from cruise ships sinking?

The exact number of people who have died due to cruise ships sinking is difficult to determine due to the varying definitions of what constitutes a ‘cruise ship’, as well as discrepancies in historical data.

However, some notable tragedies have resulted in significant loss of life. The most infamous is likely the sinking of the Titanic in 1912, which led to the deaths of over 1,500 people. In more recent history, the sinking of the Costa Concordia in 2012 resulted in 32 deaths.

What is the survival rate when a cruise ship sinks?

Survival rates when a cruise ship sinks can vary widely based on numerous factors such as the speed at which the ship sank, the weather conditions, the proximity to rescue services, and the execution of evacuation procedures.

In general, the survival rate is quite high thanks to improved safety measures and better ship designs. For instance, despite the tragic loss of life when the Costa Concordia sank in 2012, over 4,000 people were successfully evacuated and survived, representing a survival rate of over 99%.

Are there any notable historical incidents of cruise ships sinking?

There have been several notable incidents of cruise ships sinking throughout history. Some of the most famous include:

• The Titanic (1912): Perhaps the most infamous maritime disaster, the Titanic hit an iceberg and sank on its maiden voyage, resulting in the deaths of more than 1,500 passengers and crew.
• The Lusitania (1915): This ship was sunk by a German U-boat during World War I, causing 1,198 fatalities.
• The Costa Concordia (2012): This modern cruise ship ran aground and capsized off the coast of Italy, resulting in 32 deaths.

Below is a table showcasing major incidents from the past, along with the reported causes:

Each of these incidents has led to significant changes in maritime safety regulations.

What is the largest cruise ship that has ever sunk?

The largest cruise ship to have ever sunk in terms of passenger capacity is the Costa Concordia. The ship had a capacity of 3,780 passengers and 1,100 crew members. It ran aground and capsized off the coast of Italy in 2012.

What are the most common misconceptions about cruise ships sinking?

Common misconceptions about cruise ships sinking include:

• Cruise ships sink frequently: In reality, sinking is a rare event thanks to modern design, technology, and safety procedures.
• Large waves can easily capsize a cruise ship: Modern cruise ships are designed to withstand incredibly rough seas and large waves.
• If a ship sinks, everyone on board will die: Safety measures, including lifeboats, safety drills, and international rescue services, mean that even when ships sink, the survival rate is often high.

How does the law deal with cruise ship sinking incidents?

In the event of a cruise ship sinking, several areas of law come into play:

• International Maritime Law: This body of law includes various conventions and treaties that regulate safety and establish liability in the event of maritime accidents.
• National Law: The laws of the ship’s flag state, as well as those of the state where an accident occurs, can be relevant.
• Personal Injury Law: Passengers who are injured may be able to sue for damages under personal injury law.

The International Maritime Organization (IMO) is a United Nations agency responsible for the safety and security of shipping and the prevention of marine and atmospheric pollution by ships.

How are passengers compensated after a cruise ship sinking?

Passenger compensation following a cruise ship sinking can depend on a variety of factors, including the circumstances of the incident, the terms of the ticket contract, and applicable laws and conventions.

Generally, cruise lines may be held liable for injuries, losses, or damages incurred as a result of their negligence. Compensation might cover medical expenses, lost belongings, and emotional distress.

In some cases, cruise lines may offer refunds, credit for future cruises, and additional compensation voluntarily or as part of a settlement.

Are certain routes or destinations more prone to cruise ship sinking incidents?

While cruise ship sinkings are rare and can theoretically occur anywhere, some routes and destinations may pose more risks due to factors like weather conditions, sea currents, and the presence of ice or other navigational hazards.

For example, cruising in the North Atlantic during iceberg season, or in Southeast Asia during monsoon season, could potentially increase the risk. However, cruise lines are aware of these dangers and generally take measures to mitigate them, such as altering routes or schedules.

How does climate change impact the risk of cruise ships sinking?

Climate change can potentially increase the risk of cruise ships sinking in several ways:

• Sea Level Rise: Rising sea levels could lead to increased coastal flooding and the submergence of hazards that ships can collide with.
• Increased Storm Intensity: Climate change can result in more intense and frequent storms, which could create more dangerous sea conditions.
• Iceberg Calving: Warming temperatures can lead to increased iceberg calving in polar regions, posing navigation hazards.

However, the cruise industry is continually adapting to these changes, investing in better ship designs, advanced weather tracking technologies, and more effective safety procedures to keep passengers safe.

Should You Be Worried?

While the sinking of cruise ships makes for dramatic news headlines and blockbuster film plots, it is a relatively rare occurrence in reality.

Significant advancements in ship design, safety measures, and technology have greatly reduced the risk and increased the survival rate in such unlikely events.

Understanding the facts, being aware of the procedures, and debunking misconceptions are crucial in ensuring a safe and enjoyable cruising experience.

Climate change, however, introduces new challenges that the cruise industry must continue to adapt to in order to ensure passenger safety. Remember, awareness and preparedness can make a significant difference when venturing out on the vast expanse of the sea.

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Dan Claydon