SS Heraklion

In light of the most recent maritime accident off the Italian coast. Historically, how many ships (and lives) have been lost due to unexpected circumstances or just plain carelessness?

Greece, of course, has quite a few but the SS Heraklion is probably the most commemorated. Capsized and sank in 1966 in bad weather and with the loss of 200 lives. All due to an unsecured truck which repeatedly bashed against the loading door and, eventually, forcing the door to open. The truck plummeted into the sea and in return the sea washed in.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SS_Heraklion

Islanddawn wrote:

In light of the most recent maritime accident off the Italian coast. Historically, how many ships (and lives) have been lost due to unexpected circumstances or just plain carelessness?

Almost all of them, I'd imagine. If the hazard was expected and care had been taken to avoid it then the ship wouldn't have sunk.

Smartypants!

Though on a serious note - and given that this category highlights unxplained events - the most deadly maritime accident since world war two has yet to be explained. When the passenger ferry Estonia sank in the Baltic in 1994 over 800 people perished and yet the most crucial piece of evidence, the containing bolt which secured the vehicle deck doors and which allegedly failed, was thrown back into the sea by the Swedish naval commander in charge of the investigation and salvage operation. His action was never justified, either by him or by his employers. The bolt has never been recovered.

Even more suspiciously, parts and components of the structure which were below the waterline and were subsequently recovered showed distinct effects of superheating from an external source. It was almost a decade before NATO finally confirmed that the day of the sinking coincided with the beginning of a ten day exercise involving submarine targeting practice with live ordnance.

Hmmm ......

Another potent source of shipwrecks is poor design and mainteneance. Take a look at the Prestige oil spill for an example - and note the conculsions about her sisters. The loss of the Derbyshire also pointed to structural failure, albeit exacerbated by extreme weather conditions - which, particularly for smaller vessels, are probable causes or partial causes of sudden ship losses.



And don't forget insurance frauds.

nordmann wrote:

Though on a serious note - and given that this category highlights unxplained events - the most deadly maritime accident since world war two has yet to be explained. When the passenger ferry Estonia sank in the Baltic in 1994 over 800 people perished and yet the most crucial piece of evidence, the containing bolt which secured the vehicle deck doors and which allegedly failed, was thrown back into the sea by the Swedish naval commander in charge of the investigation and salvage operation. His action was never justified, either by him or by his employers. The bolt has never been recovered.

Even more suspiciously, parts and components of the structure which were below the waterline and were subsequently recovered showed distinct effects of superheating from an external source. It was almost a decade before NATO finally confirmed that the day of the sinking coincided with the beginning of a ten day exercise involving submarine targeting practice with live ordnance.

Hmmm ......

Where NATO live firing in the Baltic? Only in the good old days they didn't or tended not to because it made it to easy for the Russians to spy out the weapon systems.

Have heard a rumour that the Russians did it because the western intelligence services were using it as a pipeline for people and information.

Doubt we will ever know for sure.

The training of ships crews could be a large factor. Sometimes the crew abandons the ship before the passengers.

Hi Parallax - you made it on board! Good to see you.

Speaking of training - it is actually a part of some ferry and cruise companies' training for crew members to leave the ship before the passengers using the same principle as applies to children when oxygen masks are deployed on a plane, and they must take charge of lifeboats, harness equipment or whatever else might be required to save lives. Of course other crew members have the opposite task and are detailed to stay on board while all that is going on up on deck. It is the captain's ultimate responsibility to ensure therefore that the correct evacuation procedure is applied to suit the emergency. Where it all gets very grey is in the fact that this is not maritime law, simply procedure which varies from company to company or even ship to ship, and often from incident to incident. And nowhere is the captain necessarily obliged to be the last person on board, let alone that he should "go down with his ship". It might be deemed more prudent in certain admittedly rare circumstances that he assume personal responsibility for the welfare of the passengers by leaving with them.

In the recent Costa Concordia disaster another interesting aspect came to light of which most people were not aware - namely that the captain is not necessarily the highest authority and cannot disobey explicit instructions issued by the appropriate command authority, in this case the Italian coastguard. Their assessment of the gravity of the situation and its likely outcome required the captain to stay on board as an essential part of a coordinated rescue, an order which he apparently ignored. This reneging of his duty under an established chain of command that is set down in maritime law is a mainstay of the prosecution case against him in the forthcoming trial in which has been accused of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck, and "abandonment of his passengers and crew", something he was actually at leave to do right up until he received a command to the contrary from the coastguard official. The clarity or otherwise of this command will play a huge role in the case, I feel.

Thanks for the welcome.
I guess I was spoiled by reading "The Birkenhead Drill"...about a British ship which went down with her contingent of soldiers at attention and her band playing.
 I did assume it was the duty of present day crews to stay behind until the passengers were safely off the ship. Of course I was aware of other crew duties, having been on liners and watched them practice lowering lifeboats, but I was not aware of the facts you related, for which I also
thank you.

This isn't on-topic, Parallax, but I would like to welcome you to Res Historica.  I've lurked a few times lately but today is the first time I've posted anything for a week or so.

http://www.stripes.com/news/navy-admits-error-honors-world-war-ii-captain-s-bravery-in-sinking-of-u-boat-1.320266

Interesting comments from Ballard in the radio report of this, that the deep sea is the largest open museum on the planet since in really deep water a tremendous amount of non-organic material is perfectly preserved. (my understanding of his comments not a verbatim account)

LadyinRetirement wrote:

This isn't on-topic, Parallax, but I would like to welcome you to Res Historica.  I've lurked a few times lately but today is the first time I've posted anything for a week or so.

Well, the more the merrier LadyinRetirement.  

Thanks for the welcome.

Indeed, and the merrier the better. With that thought, please join us in the bar sometime, Parallax, although I can't guarantee you'll get served this side of Ne'erday nor that the ashtrays have been emptied since the last.

Thank you for the invitation ferval, I will get my GPS out and find my way to the bar.

Having consulted our own little constellation of Res Historica GPS satellites (artist's impression above) they all seem to point to this den of iniquity ...

The Tumbleweed Suite

Just reading this interesting research on shipwrecks from Sweden. The conclusion being that the women and children first rule, crew last and the captain going down with the ship is largely a myth created during the Titanic disaster. 



http://m.pnas.org/content/109/33/13220.full.pdf

Surely the Birkenhead is a good part of the creation of this version of history? (I hesitate to call it a myth)

23 January 1909, and the White Star liner Republic is accidentally rammed by the liner Florida in fog.Republic's Marconi wireless operator, Jack Binns, sends a CQD distress signal notifying all ships in the vicinity to come at once.

Apart from 6 people killed aboard the two ships during the initial collision, all other passengers and crew of the Republic are saved, mostly by the damaged, but still afloat Florida
.

Unfortunately, the very success of this rescue leads to a false sense of security, that on the busy shipping lanes of the North Atlantic there would be a quick response to any distress signal, and that lifeboats would only be required to transfer passengers and crew from one ship to another.
The thought that no rescue ship would turn up in time, and that the lifeboats would have to be in sufficient number to hold everyone on board, does not seem to have occurred to the Board of Trade. This mistake would be found out three years later with Titanic

Republic sinking after the collision;

I was one of those who was devastated to learn in later life (a bit like the Santa revelations suffered around the same time) that "CQD" did not mean "Come Quick. Drowning!". Interestingly I, along with a few million other kids, had learnt the term from Batman who, for reasons best known to creator Bob Kane, insisted on this archaic morse code signal being issued by Commissioner Gordon whenever the caped crusader's services were required, even if it was patently obvious that Batman as far as I can recall had never had to save anyone from drowning, ever.

Kane knew his stuff however. "CQ", from the French sécu bit of sécurité, had come to mean an "all stations" alert in the early days of telegraphy. Marconi had put the "D" for "distress" at the end when settling on the maritime signal used as a standard before "SOS".

SOS is a nice simple transmission, ..._ _ _ ...


Going by Wiki, the SOS was first introduced by the Germans.  British operators stuck with CQD for a while, and Titanic transmitted both signals during her sinking.

The loss of the Hamburg-Amerika ship SS Austria, a prime example of carelessness:

wiki:
On 1 September 1858, SS Austria captained by F. A. Heydtmann sailed from Hamburg on her third voyage to New York City. At approximately 12:00, on 13 September, at coordinates
45°01′N 41°30′W, a decision was made to fumigate steerage by dipping a red-hot chain into a bucket of tar; the chain became too hot for the boatswain to hold, and it was dropped onto the deck, which immediately burst into flames; although the ship was traveling at only half speed it was impossible to stop the engines as the engine crew had become asphyxiated. When the helmsman abandoned the wheel, the ship swung into the wind, spreading the flames down the length of the ship, racing through the mahogany veneer and varnished bulkheads, as passengers jumped into the sea. The passing barque, Maurice of France rescued most of the survivors (67), and the Catarina of Norway picked up more (22) the next morning. As the blackened hulk was left to sink, all but 89 of 542 passengers were lost.

Triceratops,

I had a lot of difficulty to understand, as I didn't understand how one can fumigate a steering..but after a search on google I came indeed also to "the lower deck"...and migration...
Thanks for the story.

Kind regards from Paul.

nordmann wrote:

If the hazard was expected and care had been taken to avoid it then the ship wouldn't have sunk.

Traditionally attributed to the person in charge allowing those under his command to have a drunken party in the wrong place and at the wrong time, the sinking of the White Ship in 1120 has in recent decades become the feature of speculation regarding whether it was indeed merely a case of misadventure or rather one of actual mischief.

About 250 people including King Henry I’s sons William and Richard and his daughter Matilda perished in the tragedy off the coast of Normandy. The contemporary chronicler Oderic Vitalis placed the blame squarely on the ship’s master Thomas FitzStephen for allowing his crew to get drunk just prior to putting to sea that night and then recklessly trying to race the other ships in the flotilla back to England. In 1998, however, the historian Victoria Chandler of the University of Georgia suggested in an article entitled The Wreck of the White Ship: A Mass Murder Revealed? that Ranulph Meschin the nephew of the Earl of Chester, had plotted with a royal steward William of Pirou to sabotage the ship for political and monetary gain. Chandler’s own untimely death (aged 49) only a year after writing the piece saw the story sink until raised again by Charles Spencer in his 2020 book The White Ship: Conquest, Anarchy and the Wrecking of Henry I’s Dream. Spencer says of the story that “It’s Game of Thrones meets Titanic”.

Whatever the actual cause of the sinking, the deaths of the young royals triggered a dynastic crisis which would have long-term implications for both English and Norman history.

The largest British ship lost at sea, the MV Derbyshire, seen here under the original name of Liverpool Bridge.


Derbyshire was lost with all hands on the 9th September 1980 during Typhoon Orchid.



wiki:

In 1994, a deep water search began. In June 1994, the wreck of Derbyshire was found at a depth of 4 kilometres (2.5 mi), spread over 1.3 kilometres (0.81 mi). An additional expedition spent over forty days photographing and examining the debris field looking for evidence of what sank the ship. Ultimately it was determined that waves crashing over the front of the ship had sheared off the covers of small ventilation pipes near the bow. Over the next two days, seawater had entered through the exposed pipes into the forward section of the ship, causing the bow to slowly ride lower and lower in the water. Eventually, the bow was completely exposed to the full force of the rough waves, which caused the massive hatch on the first cargo hold to buckle inward, allowing hundreds of tons of water to enter in moments. As the ship started to sink, the second, then third hatches also failed, dragging the ship underwater. As the ship sank, the water pressure caused the ship to be twisted and torn apart by implosion/explosion, a property of double-hulled ships where the compression of air between the hulls causes a secondary explosive decompression.

Derbyshire's sister ship, Kowloon Bridge, came to grief on the West coast of Ireland six years later, though in this case the crew were rescued.

Irish wrecks online/ Kowloon Bridge

What is always called the Wahine Disaster occurred at Easter, 1968 when 51 people died on the day, one a few days later and one in 1990 of injuries sustained in the disaster, though I don't know what that meant - maybe they were paralysed or something. I remember that day as do most people my age. A person on another message board I belong to was wandering along the beach and came across a dead body. He was about 11, I think.
Another famous shipwreck though that was caused by sabotage in WWI was the Marquette. From a NZ HIstory site is the following: The sinking of the transport ship Marquette in the Aegean Sea in late 1915 added to the grief of a nation still reeling from the heavy losses at Gallipoli. Among the 167 fatalities were 32 New Zealanders, including 10 members of the New Zealand Army Nursing Service.
They need not have died. As a grey-painted troop transport, the Marquette was fair game for the German submarine that torpedoed it. A marked hospital ship, theoretically safe from attack, had left the same port on the same day as the Marquette, completely empty.
By putting the medical staff in an unmarked transport in a convoy carrying troops and ammunition, the authorities unnecessarily risked their lives. The New Zealand government acknowledged as much in November 1915 when the governor, Lord Liverpool, told the British War Office that New Zealand wanted future transfers of medical units to be made by hospital ship where possible.
The sinking sparked public outrage. The death of the nurses was felt particularly badly in the South Island, where most of them had lived or nursed.