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    A Sea Story

    5 Comments by Doc Vernon Published on 28th May 2019 06:38 AM

    A Sea Story

    One of the worst maritime disasters in European history took placea decade ago. It remains very much in the public eye. On a stormynight on the Baltic Sea, more than 850 people lost their lives when aluxurious ferry sank below the waves. From a mass of material,including official and unofficial reports and survivor testimony, ourcorrespondent has distilled an account of the Estonia's lastmoments—part of his continuing coverage for the magazine of anarchyon the high seas.
    After midnight, in the first hours of September 28, 1994, theferry Estonia foundered in the waves of a Baltic storm. Theship was the pride of the newly independent Estonian nation, recentlyarisen from the Soviet ruins. It was a massive steel vessel, 510 feetlong and nine decks high, with accommodations for up to 2,000 people.It had labyrinths of cabins, a swimming pool and sauna, a duty-freeshop, a cinema, a casino, a video arcade, a conference center, threerestaurants, and three bars. It also had a car deck that stretchedfrom bow to stern through the hull's insides. In port the car deckwas accessed through a special openable bow that could be raised toallow vehicles to drive in and out. At sea that bow was supposed toremain closed and locked. In this case, however, it did not—andindeed it caused the ship to capsize and sink when it came open inthe storm and then fell entirely off.







    On the night of its demise the Estonia had 989 peopleaboard. It departed from its home port, Tallinn, at around 7:15 P.M.,and proceeded on its regular run, 258 miles and fifteen hours westacross open waters to the Swedish archipelago and Stockholm. For thefirst several hours, as dusk turned to night, it moved throughsheltered coastal waters. Passengers hardy enough to withstand thewind and cold on deck would have seen gray forested islands creepingby to the north, and to the south the long industrial shoreline ofEstonia giving way to a low coast darkening until it faded into thenight. Gentle swells rolled in from the west, indicating the sea'sunease—with significance probably only to the crew, which hadreceived storm warnings for the open water ahead but had not spreadthe news. There were various forecasts, and they tended to agree: anintense 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. Suchconditions were rare for the area, occurring only a few times everyfall and winter, but for ferries of this size they were notconsidered to be severe. Surviving crew members later claimed that aspecial effort had been made on the car deck to lash the trucks downsecurely—exemplary behavior that, if it occurred, probably had moreto do with concern about vehicle-damage claims than about the safetyof the ship. No other preparations were made. The main worry was toarrive in Stockholm on time.


    That night the ship knifed ahead at its full 19 knots, with allfour main engines fully throttled up to their combined output of23,500 horsepower, driving the hull across the gently accumulatingseas. The vessel's motion was at first barely noticeable to thepassengers. Inside the Estonia, the public spaces had the lookof a coastal casino designed around a nautical theme—completelyserviceable but over-decorated in red, a bit worn, a bit out of date.Though many couples and a few groups were aboard, collectively it wasa ship full of strangers, with little time to make new friends or, aspeople do on longer passages, to fall even temporarily in love. Theexperience of the sinking therefore turned out to be lonely andhighly atomized. Observers who later claimed that a social breakdownhad occurred failed to take that into account. Still, at first thatnight there was something of a cruise-ship atmosphere on the Estonia,as passengers dropped off their bags in their cramped, Pullman-stylecabins and emerged to explore the possibilities for whiling away thehours. Their choices ranged from visiting the sauna and pool on Deck0, deep below the waterline, to stopping by the various bars,entertainment spots, and restaurants on Decks 4, 5, and 6. Deck 7contained the crew cabins, but it had an outside promenade forpassengers who wanted to feel the wind and watch the ocean surge by.An external staircase led to additional outside space on Deck 8, fromwhich the lifeboats hung on davits. Because of the wind and the cold,only a handful of passengers ventured outside. Turned inward from thesea, the others lingered over their drinks and meals and, as theevening drew on, talked, read, gambled, or watched dancing girls andlistened to Estonian rock in the big Baltic Bar, on Deck 6.





    By 10:00 P.M. the Estonia had passed north of a lighthousecalled Osmussaar and was moving through the open ocean indeteriorating weather, with rain, strong winds, and an overcastscudding low and fast across steep seas. The ship was still runningat full power, but it was slowed now to 17 knots by the impacts ofthe waves, which rose regularly to ten feet and higher. Sheets ofsalt water were torn loose by the plunging and driving of the bow.They swept as heavy spray across the foredeck, and rained against thewindow-lined superstructure, as high as the upper decks and thenavigation bridge. Though the motions of the hull were complex, theride was rough mostly just in pitch and not in roll, because thewaves, unlike the winds, came from nearly straight ahead. The shipheaved upward and vibrated in the heaviest water, and slammed downinto the troughs, sometimes with a crash. The motions were difficultto predict even for the crew. Some passengers grew seasick, andretired to their cabins to suffer in private. This was not the besttactic, since most of the cabins were located forward in the ship,where the motion was most violent. For anyone feeling sick, justgetting to them would have been a trial. The interior hallways of theaccommodation sections were windowless, fluorescent-lit passageways,smelling of aluminum and plastic, and barely wide enough for twopeople to pass. They ran fore and aft, and had branches from side toside. With their twenty-four-hour lighting and long rows ofanonymous, closely spaced cabin doors, they gave those parts of theship an institutional allure not much different from that of modernprison galleries. Moreover, the cabins themselves were smaller thancells, and though this must have been unimaginable to even the mostmiserable of their occupants that night, many soon turned into trapsand then coffins.


    By around 11:00 P.M. the restaurants had closed. In the Baltic Bara Swedish passenger named Pierre Thiger lingered over a single Irishcoffee, enjoying the show. Thiger was a Stockholm-based ship broker,age thirty-two, who had gone to Estonia to look over a smallfreighter, and was traveling home alone. He had taken the Estoniaseveral times before, but never in weather so rough. As something ofa mariner himself, he believed that the ship was being driven toohard, but he was not particularly worried. Earlier in the evening hehad run across an acquaintance in the crowd, and the two men haddined together before proceeding to the bar; now they listened to theband.





    It was soon afterward that Thiger heard a heavy, metallic-soundingblow that reverberated sharply through the ship's structure. At firsthe thought it must have been caused by a heavy wave, but it didn'tquite feel like ordinary "slamming." He wondered if a truckmight have overturned on the car deck—but no, the impact was toostrong for that; it was almost as if a whiplash had run through thebulkheads. Thiger did not express these thoughts, and hisacquaintance said nothing either. A murmur may have rippled throughthe crowd, but the noise level was too high to tell for sure; themood remained determinedly festive. Thiger heard a clear comment fromonly one passenger, a man nearby, who joked, "Ha! Now we havesailed against an iceberg!" and took another gulp of beer. Thesinging continued unabated.
    About half a minute later there was another impact, identical tothe first. Thiger got the distinct impression that the ship wasswerving. He said to his acquaintance, "Do you feel it? We areswinging longitudinally now." His acquaintance said, "Yes,we are." Thiger felt a little unsettled, and reassured himselfwith the thought that the ship must have turned directly into thewaves, perhaps to lessen the rolls while the crew lashed vehicles orcargo more securely to the decks. Suddenly, however, the ship shookwith a strange back-and-forth movement and began to wallow. It rolledto port and starboard a few times, and then rolled steeply tostarboard and came back a little, but never returned to level. Theinitial list was enough to cause glasses to come crashing off ashelf, and a speaker to rumble across the floor and collide with arailing.


    The singing stopped.
    Thiger felt butterflies in his stomach. To his acquaintance hesaid, "Now there is something completely wrong. Now let's getout of here."
    "Yes, as you say," his acquaintance said.
    The two men jumped up, and had taken only a few steps toward theexit when the heel increased to an angle that Thiger estimated to beabout 30 degrees. There was immediate panic in the pub, with muchshouting. The bar counter stood along a wall on the pub's port side.The bartender had braced herself behind it, but she collapsedscreaming under a deluge of bottles and glasses. Refrigerators cameloose, and stools slipped out from under the patrons who clung to thecountertop to keep from falling. Others slid across the floor in aconfusion of tumbling tables, chairs, and sound equipment, and theypiled up in tangles along the ship's starboard side, across anddownslope from the exit. The bar counter itself broke loose. Manypeople were injured and subsequently died. Pierre Thiger and hisacquaintance managed somehow not to fall. But movement across thepub's open spaces toward the exit was now extremely difficult, evenfor men who were both agile and sober.


    At the receiving side of the Pub Admiral's deadly collapse, alongthe starboard wall, sat another Swede of about the same age, arecreational diver named Rolf Sörman, who turned out to haveprodigious reserves of calm, and great presence of mind. He was amember of a small "human resources" group that was making around trip from Stockholm in order to hold a shipboard seminar in theEstonia's aft conference room—an alternative to holding theseminar in a hotel, and a common practice on Baltic ferries. As ayoung man Sörman had toyed with the idea of going to sea, and indeedhad spent some weeks as an officer in training on a Swedish ferrybefore deciding that law school would provide a better life. LikeThiger, he had disapproved of the speed with which the Estoniawas being driven into the waves, and he had contrasted this handling,as he later said to me, with the policies he remembered from hisSwedish ferry service, during which ships had been slowed early forpassenger comfort in the expectation that people would maintain theirspending in the restaurants and bars. The Estonians were evidentlynot yet appreciative of such capitalistic subtleties. Earlier in theevening Sörman had watched as the officers pushed their ship pastanother ferry in a typically brutish Soviet manner. At dinner many ofthe people in his seminar group were sick. They consumed apre-ordered three-course meal nonetheless, and three bottles of winefor twelve. Afterward they broke up for the night, but Sörman andfour female colleagues headed up to the windward promenade on Deck 7,portside, to look at the sea. When they got there, the doors to theoutside were swinging open and shut, apparently because a latch hadbroken, and the carpet leading from the stairwell was soaked withsaltwater spray. Three of the four women grew nervous about goingoutside.


    Eventually they all found shelter in the Pub Admiral. They orderedbeers, and for a while sat too close to the speakers to be able totalk. Well before 1:00 A.M. they retreated from the noise to thefarthest reaches of the pub, which happened to be across from theexit, along the ship's starboard wall. During that short walk Sörmanfelt two or three distinct shocks on the deck under his feet. Theseappear not to have been the heavy blows felt by Thiger and others,because there was time afterward for leisurely conversation. Thewomen sat on a sofa that was bolted to the floor. Sörman sat facingthem on a chair. There were windows in the wall, black with the oceannight. Five minutes before 1:00 A.M. one of the women excused herselfover Sörman's affable objections. She left the pub, walked forwardpast the information desk and up the main staircase, and wentdirectly to her cabin, on Deck 6. When, shortly thereafter, the shipheeled over, her door popped open and she fell backward in her cabinand was pinned by gravity against the far wall. Because she wasdetermined and nimble, however, she managed to emerge from the trap,to negotiate the tilting hallway, to climb to Deck 7 and the outsidepromenade, 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 ontothe sofa to avoid the sliding debris. A wave lapped against thewindows beside them and then covered the glass with solid green waterlit by the light of the ship's interior. When the ship rocked backfrom the steepest angle, Sörman and his group seized the opportunityto gain the exit doorway nearby. They waited there briefly foranother cycle, and then lunged across an open space and dashedthrough a lateral corridor toward the aft stairway, which was justbeyond the center line of the ship on the port side. During that dasha falling refrigerator nearly hit Sörman, and smashed into a wall. Aman emerged from a forward corridor, shouting, "Don't panic! Thecrew has everything under control!"
    They did not panic. On the other hand, they believed that the shipwas out of control. They came to the aft stairway. Using the railingsand brass banisters, they hauled themselves rapidly up two levels,encountering only a few other passengers along the way. At aroundthis time there was a weak announcement in Estonian: "Häire!Häire! Laeval on häire!" meaning "Alarm! Alarm! Thereis an alarm on the ship!" Sörman and his companions did nothear the announcement. At the top of the stairway, on Deck 7, theyfound that some of the crew had formed a human chain to help peopleup the sloping floor to the promenade doors. Then the ship heeledmore steeply, however, and the crew disappeared onto the open deckoutside. Sörman and his group made it to the doorway nonetheless,and by grasping the frame they pulled themselves through. They wereamong the first passengers to reach the promenade. After failing toopen one of the life-vest boxes, they succeeded in opening another.Still functioning as a group at that time, they helped one another tofind life vests with no missing straps, and to put the vests on.


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


    Survival 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 atall. Action paid. Contemplation did not. The mere act of gettingdressed was enough to condemn people to death, and although many ofthose who escaped to the water succumbed to the cold, most of theultimate winners endured the ordeal completely naked or in theirunderwear. The survivors all seem to have grasped the nature of thisrace, the first stage of which involved getting outside to the Deck 7promenade without delay. There was no God to turn to for mercy. Therewas no government to provide order. Civilization was ancient history,Europe a faint and faraway place. Inside the ship, as the heelincreased, even the most primitive social organization, the humanchain, crumbled apart. Love only slowed people down. A pitiless clockwas running. The ocean was completely in control.
    Oddly enough, the relative distance that people had to travelseems to have made little difference. In the crew cabins on Deck 7,whose windows gave directly onto the portside promenade, divers laterTheir escape routes led by six short stairways to a common passagewayinside the car deck's center casing, from which separate stairwaysthen led upward, primarily to the Estonia's large entrancefoyer, which spanned the ship at the base of its main staircase, onDeck 4. The center casing was still mostly dry, but floodwaterssprayed at the fleeing passengers through gaps around the car-deckaccess dspotted the bodies of twelve victims who had gone down withthe ship. Conversely, the people with the longest escape route faredsurprisingly well. These were the occupants of the ship'sclaustrophobic basement—the cramped economy section that filled theforward half of Deck 1, below the car deck and the waterline. Becauseof their proximity to the bow, they turned out to have had a doubleadvantage: an uncomfortable ride that kept many of them awake, and anearly warning in the form of strange watery noises and metalliccrashes, which for as much as half an hour before the list arousedtheir curiosity and concern. This combination helps explain why thehands-down winner of the entire race came from Deck 1. She was aSwedish woman, age thirty, who expressed concern to her companions,and climbed the stairs fully clothed to Deck 7, where she arrivedpresumably quite calmly and took a seat at least fifteen minutes inadvance of the rush. Others on Deck 1 who were less alert to thedanger were nonetheless well primed, and those who ultimatelysurvived sprang into action immediately when the ship heeled overwith a screech and a howl and an impact so violent that people werethrown out of bed, or against the walls. Up and down the hallwaysdoors popped open and people emerged. As the leaders fled, they sawwater in various forms: running in rivulets on the floor, or rushingas a river, or spurting from fittings on a wall, or cascading downfrom overhead. oors.
    [IMG]file:///C:/Users/tmacd/AppData/Local/Temp/lu10728vsl4yb.tmp/lu10728vsl4yn.tmp[/IMG]
    Those left behind had a hard time. From what little is known aboutconditions on Deck 1, panic broke out as soon as the windowless worldbegan to turn onto its side. The shouting was very loud. People weretrapped in their cabins, either too weak or too badly injured toovercome the increasing list. In one doorway a tough old woman hungon determinedly, trying to pull herself out. People ran back andforth in the main hallway, colliding with one another in apparentconfusion about where to go. Movement soon became difficult. As theangle increased, many who had found their way to the stairs realizedthat they lacked the arm strength to keep climbing. One woman dressedin a nightgown stood at the base of the stairs screaminghysterically. Others who had stalled partway up seemed passive andresigned. They were overtaken by people who could not help them, andwho, although still capable of movement, were themselves losing therace to escape.
    "Häire! Häire! Laeval on häire!"
    On the upper passenger decks—4, 5, and 6—in the extensiveaccommodation sections, the hallway scenes were just as rough. Peoplewho had emerged from their cabins were trying to escape along thefore-aft corridors, which at the regulation width of 3.9 feet weretight even under upright conditions, and became extraordinarilydifficult to negotiate now as they began to rotate onto their sides,shrinking vertically and forcing people who were starting to walk onthe walls to crouch as they attempted to proceed. Some crew memberswere seen trying at enormous personal sacrifice to help them along.But all was confusion, congestion, and noise—raw terror containedin those fluorescent-lit prison galleries. The starboard cabindoorways now became chasms that had to be jumped across. Passengerswho failed fell into the cabins, and some did not emerge. Thetransverse corridors became dangerous shafts, dropping away to thestarboard side. Though no witnesses of this survived, after seawaterbegan to enter through breaking windows, those shafts became deadlywells. A particularly vicious trap was an apparent escape routeprovided by a small stairway at the forward end of thesuperstructure, which led upward through the stacked accommodationsections from Deck 4 all the way to Deck 7 on the ship's high portside. It could be reached on each deck only by crossing theforwardmost of the transverse corridors, but before the list grew toosteep some quick-thinking passengers succeeded. These were people whoshould have survived, and a few of them who were ultra-fast did; butthere was a catch to this route, and it was lethal. The principalstairways on the ship were built in a fore-aft direction—anorientation that allowed them to be scaled (by strong people, usingthe railings) at relatively steep angles of heel. This littlestairway, in contrast, was built in a transversedirection—side-to-side—a detail which meant that as the listincreased, the stairs went vertical and then inverted, cutting offthe possibility even of retreat. Months later divers found so manybodies there that they could not get through to take a completecount.
    Most of the passengers fled toward the main staircase at thecenter of the ship, emerging into the large open spaces thatsurrounded it on every deck, and then crawling or lunging as bestthey could to gain the banisters and railings. Handrails gave wayfrom the start. As more people arrived, and the list increased,passengers began to slide and fall, and some were crushed by topplingequipment. The scenes of loss and bedlam defied coherent descriptionby the survivors who witnessed them. On Deck 4 two women who hadreached the staircase lost their grip and fell fatally against awall. Others had already been badly injured, and some were lyingapparently dead. Emotions among those unable to climb varied widely,with some people screaming incoherently, others seemingly listlessand confused, and still others rational, self-contained, and brave.One of the survivors, a young man who had been trying to guide hisparents and his girlfriend to safety, got separated from them in thechaos while gaining the stairs. When he looked back to find them, itwas obvious that they would be incapable of negotiating the openspace, across which increasing numbers of people were fatallysliding. His parents shouted at him to save himself, as did hisgirlfriend. It was practical advice. There was no time to linger overthe decision. He turned and continued on alone.
    On higher decks hundreds of similar tragedies unfolded, as thegathering crowds struggled up the main stairways and people exhaustedtheir strength against the ever more difficult heel. Those no longercapable of movement clung to the railings or sat on the landings,just waiting for the end. People fell onto one another. One womanlost her husband to another woman that way. Among married couples thestrong were delayed by the weak. It is evident from the rarity ofsingle spouses among the survivors that many couples decidedconsciously to die together. These were not the sad, sweet momentsone sees in the movies. There was no music playing. There was astrange, coded alarm announcement, "Mr. Skylight, to number oneand number two," which was difficult to hear over the screaming.On every level the view from the main stairways was of carnage andconfusion. People lay in the mouths of the hallways, unable to figurea way across the open spaces.
    From the stairway some of the survivors saw a row of gamblingmachines fall onto passengers emerging from near the shop. Theinjured seem to have begged for help, but conditions simply did notallow the witnesses on the stairways to intervene. The calculationwas instinctive. To release one's grip on the railings for even amoment now was to fall, and to fall now was to perish. Up on Deck 7at the top of the main stairways, where an open foyer spanned theship, a few extraordinary people—both passengers and crew—weretrying to help those emerging from the climb to get through thedouble doors to the high, portside promenade. People who failed tocatch the doorframe slid on the carpeted deck and were killed orinjured, or ended up on the starboard promenade, on the low side,from which they were washed into the sea early as the ship continuedto topple. At least one of them survived. In any case, the race tofreedom was nearing an end. At some point someone secured a rope tothe portside promenade and dangled it down into the stairway. It wasfound in the wreck by divers, and probably came too late, since noneof the survivors mentioned its use. The last known attempt on thedoorway was made by a woman who lay hanging on to the thresholdbefore losing her grip and sliding away.
    At the rear of the ship on Deck 5, in a café called Neptunus thatadjoined the Pub Admiral, the ocean was flooding into the starboardside. A man there had been fighting hard to save his mother. He hadremoved his shoes and socks for a better grip, and was dragging hismother upslope by bracing against the tables, which were mounted onpillars and bolted solidly to the floor. The two had managed to stayout of the encroaching water, and, with periods of rest, hadstruggled to within two tables of a portside door that gave onto anopen deck at the stern. At that point, however, his mother lost thelast of her strength, and announced that she could go no farther. Shewas paralyzed not by fear or lack of will but by a simple physicalfact: no matter what her mind said, her muscles would not perform.This was a reality her son now needed to understand. She lay on thefloor, hanging on to a table with the ocean lapping up at her frombehind, and insisted that he leave her. At first he refused, andshouted at her to keep going. But she could not, and as his mothershe ultimately prevailed. He disappeared through the door, and foundrailings and fixtures that let him scale the ship's outside structureat angles of heel that by then were too steep to allow escape foreven the strongest of the 700 people left inside.
    The promenade decks, port and starboard, were lined with life-vestbins and cradles holding heavy life-raft canisters, and they wereoverhung by the large fiberglass lifeboats suspended from davits.Between difficulties caused by the angle of heel and the lack ofcoordinated action by the crew, none of the lifeboats were lowered.There were ten in all, five per side. Nine of them broke loose as theEstonia sank, and they floated to the surface asflotsam—damaged, overturned, swamped. For now, as the liststeepened to 45 degrees, the starboard promenade tipped ominouslytoward the reach of the waves, and the port promenade did theopposite, tilting upward until its floor and Deck 7's exterior wallbetween them formed a perfectly balanced right angle, open to the skylike a V. Though initially the V stood on the ship's protecteddownwind side, as the capsize continued, the incline of thesheltering wall diminished, and the promenade grew increasinglyexposed to the wind and spray. That wall rose only one level, to theopen, rooflike expanse of Deck 8. It became a floor when thestarboard list increased beyond 45 degrees and the Estonia layfully down to die. But even such imperfect shelter was preferable tothe horror inside, and nearly all the escapees took refuge there, onthe port promenade. In total there were perhaps 250 people. Some ofthe crew struggled individually to live up to the responsibility thathad been vested in them. The situation nonetheless was beyondsalvation, and chaos on the promenade was intense. The collectivescreams of the victims trapped below rose through the stairwells likea cacophony from hell, a protest that for some of those on theoutside near the doors drowned out even the roar of the storm.
    Some of the escapees panicked, crawling around on the promenadeand adding to the screams from below, or begging hysterically forlife vests, or sitting apathetically against the walls, or rushing toand fro without purpose like terrified creatures losing the lastground in a flood. Such reactions, however, turned out to be theexception. Despite the unusual danger that confronted them on theship's outsides, most of the escapees seemed to keep their wits aboutthem. A brutal selection was at play, by which those who hadsucceeded in reaching the promenade tended by definition to beprecisely the sort of people who could best handle the threat thatawaited them there. They were fast and strong, and capable of quickcalculation. Though their actions once outside were largelyself-centered, with personal survival predominating over otherconcerns, many of the escapees proved able to work together toachieve that end—preparing and deploying the heavy life rafts, forinstance, or attempting to free the lifeboats, however impossiblethat turned out to be. A few went further, and became genuinelyaltruistic. One man in particular comes to mind. He stood on thepromenade looking completely composed, reassuring passengers aroundhim that they would survive, patiently instructing people on how todon the life vests, and setting up an efficient system for the vests'distribution. Others played equally powerful roles. It was as ifhuman society, having been torn apart, was starting to remake itselfalready—as if with time there could have been kings and queens onthat drifting hull, and maybe even priests. But then the ocean washedthem all away.
    There was criminality, too, perhaps because among the variousadmirable characteristics being selected for, the less admirabletraits of opportunism and raw aggression lay inextricably entwined.Indeed, some of the first people to follow Rolf Sörman and his threefemale companions outside onto the nearly empty promenade were brazenthieves—a band of young Estonian men who took advantage of theconfusion to tear a gold chain off Sörman's neck and to strip cashand jewelry from the women. With startling speed they robbed otherson the deck and then disappeared inside, apparently to work throughthe crowds that were just beginning to surge up the staircases. Theywere confident, as criminals tend to be, and they must not even haveconsidered that the ship might then trap them, though the bestevidence is that it did.
    Sörman was angered by the assault. Still, preoccupied withfinding adequate life vests for himself and the three women, he wassoon confronted with aggression of a more dangerous kind. The problemstarted as fighting that broke out among passengers competing forlife in the aft stairwell—violent behavior related to panic, butmore focused and productive, which had the effect of intensifying theselection process under way and, especially toward the end, ofdelivering predators onto the port promenade, who had managed to comefrom behind and would stop at nothing to survive. A group of thesepeople emerged from the stairwell as the list approached the cutoffof 45 degrees, and having fought their way to the promenade, theylunged at passengers already there, wrestling life vests from theirgrasp or tearing them off their backs. People fought back, of course,but some lost. It was not known what happened to the victims, but ifthey went into the water without flotation gear, as some passengersdid, it is fair to say that they were murdered. The effect of thefighting on Sörman and his companions was less direct, but seriousenough. They were separated into two pairs—two women on one side,Sörman and the third woman on the other—and because of the risk ofbeing attacked, they were unable to join up again. The first pairdisappeared, and did not survive.
    Sörman's sole companion now was a middle-aged Swede named YvonneBernevall, who had participated in the seminar with him but was not aclose friend. Like Sörman, she was physically strong. To escape fromthe aggressors on the promenade, the two of them clambered up to theopen expanse of Deck 8. It was quieter there. The deck (which, again,essentially served as the ship's roof) was like a steel beach anglingdown dangerously toward the oncoming waves. Its slopes, however, werecovered by nonskid rubberized mats, and were interrupted by life-raftcradles, pipes and protuberances of various kinds, and the walls ofhigher structures, including most notably the captain's quarters andthe navigation bridge above it, and the large midship funnel—all ofwhich allowed for adequate purchase. As the ship continued to capsizeand flood, its movement softened, with the unfortunate effect thatthe waves reached higher against the decks, plucking off victims insmall groups or one by one. When the auxiliary engines failed and thelights flickered off, a new round of screaming erupted, but itquieted when the emergency generator kicked in. Increasing numbers ofpeople arrived on Deck 8 (actually now climbing down to it),because the formerly upward V formed by the promenade had rotated sofar to starboard that the alternative escape route, across its railsand onto the ship's port side, had risen beyond their reach.
    The storm was howling, generating waves as high as twenty-eightfeet. The ship was visibly sinking at the stern. Already the aftstarboard corner of Deck 8 had gone under. Crew members andpassengers were deploying the automatically inflating life rafts buthaving trouble with the wind, which blew unsecured rafts entirelyaway, and jammed others against railings and edges. The wastage wasenormous. The ship had safety equipment for more than 2,000 people,but it was clear that among the few hundred escapees outside, manywould go wanting. Desperation mounted. Getting the rafts into thewater 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 apparentlyperfect raft suddenly inflated—complete with a tentlike canopy anda little flashing light—and in response a large crowd rushed it,far too many people to get in. Yvonne Bernevall wanted to rush ittoo, but Sörman was afraid of the crowd, no less for its mood thanfor its size, and he persuaded her to stay away. He was strugglingwith a life-raft container of their own, and had hopes of getting itopen in time.
    When the list was 80 degrees, as loud crashes came from inside theship, a hatch popped open on the side of the funnel, and Sörman sawa terrified crewman emerge, having climbed up an internal escapeladder from the engine room. The crewman started shouting in English,"Water is coming in on the car deck!" until anothercrewman, having emerged beside him, smashed him in the face to calmhim down. They disappeared down-deck together. The bridge windowswere now breaking in the waves. The rubberized mats were coming offthe decks, piling up in jumbles, falling onto swimmers in the water.Then the funnel reached the ocean's surface, marking a list of 90degrees, and a cloud of acrid steam enveloped the ship as seawatertouched the hot exhaust pipes inside. The electricity generatorfailed, and people screamed, but the batteries kicked in,illuminating fluorescent emergency lights. A rocket flare arced intothe night. The ship's horn blew a loud and mournful good-bye. Thehull began to invert. Faced suddenly with the prospect of the ship'srolling over on top of them, scores of people still hanging on toDeck 8 began to drop into the water and attempt to swim clear. Theywere on the dangerous, upwind, up-storm side. Some got tangled inwires and cranes, or were dragged down or killed by the impacts ofthe waves. At midship the heaviest waves crashed nearly to the top ofthe deck, and aft they surged entirely over it. Sörman had toabandon his hopes for the life raft in the container. He had no faiththat his life vest would keep him alive. He sought the hand of YvonneBernevall for her company, and together they fell into the sea.
    Pierre Thiger took the alternate route to the water that night, asdid about half of the people on the promenade. When the deck's anglereached 45 degrees, and the promenade took the form of a perfectlybalanced V, he climbed over the rail, and perched outside of it on anedge above the ship's portside surface expanse—the window-linedsuperstructure immediately beneath him, and the heavy steel hullfarther below. Though the storm was growing worse, the moon emergedthrough a break in the clouds and lit the scene with its reflectedlight. A man lost his grip trying to cross the rail, and having wonthe race to freedom, having made it this far, he fell back and passeddirectly through the stairway doors, which gaped open like jaws toreceive him. There were many such horrors that night. Nonetheless,crouched safely on his perch outside the rails, Thiger remainedcomposed. Since he had left the Pub Admiral perhaps ten minutes hadpassed, or maybe twelve, but certainly not more. He had lost track ofthe 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 andnothing to do but survive. He rode the ship as others might ride ahorse. He was steady. He was patient. Even when the list grew to 80degrees, he kept waiting to see whether the hull would find itsequilibrium and stabilize. When it did not, and he saw the funnel liedown and go under, he had the evidence he needed that the Estoniawas inverting, so he left the railing and began to walk toward thekeel across the superstructure's outsides. The ship no longer rockedmuch in the waves. Surf crashed over its stern, to his left. Thesteel underfoot was wet. He was careful not to fall through thewindows into the darkened quarters below.
    It is not known whether victims trapped in the cabins and commonspaces saw Thiger or the others who navigated the superstructurewhile the hull was horizontal. From below the escapees would haveseemed like shadows in a dream, passing overhead against a pale nightsky. They would have seemed like fugitives on the run. One of themput his foot through a window and was injured but not caught. Therewas no communication between the two worlds, which had grownimpossibly far apart. Altogether perhaps a hundred people made thetrip across the outsides. By the time Thiger got to the lower hull,most of them had already arrived. A large group was bivouacked arounda stabilizer fin, where it was possible to delay for a few minuteswhile the ship hesitated, lingering on its side. Soon, however, themovement resumed, and the group broke up as people joined the chaoticmigration—chased forward and across the curvature of the bottom bythe settling at the stern and the ship's continuing roll. The heelgrew to 110 degrees, and later to 120 degrees and more. Some of theescapees had managed to drag life rafts with them, but they werehaving the standard problems of getting them launched—troubles thatwere compounded by fights that broke out, and by the desperation thatdrove people to pile into rafts that were still too high on the hull.Those people were difficult to dislodge, though some fell out whenthe rafts eventually tumbled or slid into the water. Many of thecanopies did not erect. Many of the rafts flipped upside down. Oneriot stands for others in those apocalyptic moments: after ten peoplethrew themselves onto an inverted raft near the aft end of the hull,and others attacked en masse, trying to get on too, the entireassembly 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 Septembernight.
    So was every other way, however. What difference did it make to bealtruistic and brave—indeed, what difference to be grasping? Thesewere the people who had led the race, and it was as if they had beendeceived, suddenly abandoned to chance. Their lives had been reducedto a rolling sliver of steel, a whaleback, the outside curvature of abilge dissolving into the sea. Between the force of the wind and thewaves and the nearness of the end, there was no possibility for eventhe sort of embryonic society that had flickered on the Deck 7promenade. Empty life vests and rafts both whole and ruined litteredthe water. People were scattered up and down the overturninghull—walking, crawling, lying down—and though some seemed tocluster, each of them in effect was alone. A couple was separatedwhen the husband jumped into the water and beckoned to his wife, andout of terror she refused to go. As one by one they were picked offby the waves, Pierre Thiger got the impression that the ocean wasreaching up to fetch them and drag them down. His own turn was comingsoon. The ship had rolled to 135 degrees, halfway from prone to fullyinverted, and the waves were surging all around. The water was soclose that when a lifeboat that had broken loose smashed against thehull, Thiger was showered by pieces of shattered fiberglass.
    The wave that took him caught him by surprise, hitting so quicklythat 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 againon what seemed to him to be a long, long trip. The ocean bubbled androared around his ears. Then he rose, and though he seemed to bedrifting upward forever, and though he swallowed water several times,he did not breathe the water in, and eventually he arrived on thesurface. Empty life vests floated in abundance there, and he caughthold of several, along with a wooden plank for good measure. Drivenby the wind, a line of life rafts disappeared behind the hull—likea string of pearls, Thiger thought, or a saint's-day procession. Thewaves would have seemed mountainous from his swimmer's height. Theybore down on him with speed, carried him upslope to the crests, andthen dropped him behind as they rushed on hissing into the night.Many of them were breaking, throwing powerful white cascades downtheir forward slopes, leaving scars of foam on their trails. The airwas full of spume and spray. Thiger heard a frightened swimmernearby, calling for help. Encumbered by his vests, he paddled over toassist him as best he could. Later he spotted a life raft, swam toit, and got in. It was characteristic of Thiger that he did not cowerin fear but sat up to look outside. The Estonia was showingits keel and slowly sliding below the surface on a steep angle, sternfirst. It had raised its bulbous nose so high that parts of thebridge remained clear of the ocean's surface. Ever the observer,Thiger noticed that there was something very wrong with the frontend—that the ship's openable bow had somehow fallen off. Thiger wasface to face with the cause of the Estonia's demise.
    Survival in the water was a desperate affair. The night was rentwith the cries of invisible victims pleading for help, growing weakwith the cold, moaning, going silent, and losing the fight to stayalive. Nothing could be done for them. Those without life vestssimply slipped away. Those with life vests died on the surface, aloneamong the waves. Many who found their way to life rafts could not getin. Many who got in were then washed out, and had to get in all overagain. Some did not succeed. Some did succeed, only to die onceinside. The horror aboard the life rafts was compounded by anonymityand confusion. Twenty-two life rafts were occupied. They were not theprotective cocoons one might imagine but flimsy assemblies ofinflated tubes, half collapsed, that were flipped repeatedly by thebreaking waves, flushed with frigid water, and oftenindistinguishable from the pandemonium of the sea.
    Rolf Sörman never found even such shelter in a raft. When he tookYvonne Bernevall's hand and dropped with her from Deck 8 into theocean, he knew the temperature of the water was lethal. He gavehimself a few minutes at the most before he would succumb to thecold. But he was so keyed up that the water felt neutral when heplunged in. In Baltic terms that means it felt warm. When he hit thewater, he kept holding Bernevall's hand. They went deep, and Sörmancleared his ears twice before the life vests prevailed over themomentum of their fall, and they started floating upward. Near thetop Sörman was hit in the head by the foot of a frantic swimmer, andhe yanked his hand from Bernevall's grasp in order to protecthimself. For some seconds after he surfaced he thought she might havedrowned, but then she appeared nearby. He swam over to her, and theyclung together for a moment to keep from being driven apart by theforce of the waves. They spoke. They had a sense of being tugged atfrom below, as if they were in the clutches of a vertical driftcaused by the hull's subsidence. Staying close together, they swamaway for about twenty-five yards, against the oncoming seas, untilthe sensation diminished. Again they held each other and spoke. Itwas essential that they find something to float on. Their positionupwind from the Estonia gave them no chance of reaching thelife rafts, which could not be secured or delayed on this, thestorm-bashed side of the ship, and which once released went scootingdownwind 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 trailwith waterlogged, wind-resistant debris. Sörman and Bernevallstruggled through the flotsam, hoping to discover an object largeenough to serve them as a raft—furniture, for instance, or asection of wooden planking. It later turned out that one survivor hadridden a wooden cupboard for a while. But Sörman and Bernevall werenot so lucky. They found nothing of use, and instead came suddenlyupon a scene of the dead and dying—a cluster of corpses lyingfacedown in the waves, and among them several people still alive butthrashing violently during the final throes of drowning. In theirhaste to avoid entanglement Sörman and Bernevall split apart—hestriking to the left, she to the right. Minutes later, when theytried to join up again, they could not. Sörman saw Bernevallfloating high on top of a wave when he was at its bottom. He swam forher, but when he saw her next she had drifted farther away. Afterthat she was lost.
    Sörman turned to swim back toward the Estonia, whensuddenly his life vest came off, the flotation collar peeling overhis head. He jammed it back on and tightened the straps, but it cameoff again. Five times this happened in rapid succession, reducingSörman to near panic, until he realized that the wind from behindwas to blame. He faced away from the Estonia and toward thewind, which solved the problem. He then tried to build a raft bystacking up ten squares of the rubberized deck matting that he foundnearby. The squares were not designed to float, and they barely did,offering little more support in combination than alone. Sörman hadto give up on his raft. At that point, however, an overturnedlifeboat came into view, riding bow-down and low, with its keel justa few inches above the surface. The front end was completely smashedin. Sörman had the impression that the lifeboat had just emergedfrom the depths. He swam to it and squirmed up onto the keel,emerging partially from the water. As many as seven others did thesame. Sörman helped several of them up onto the keel. The mostvulnerable was a young dancer who had a nasty head wound and wasfrightened and weak; Sörman grabbed her by her jacket and began hissecond 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 breakingwaves that kept sweeping across the hull. The man who had found thesafest position, at the stern, made no attempt to help the others,and clung with both hands to the propeller shaft in a full-blownpanic, wailing prayers and loudly calling to God. For the sake of hisown nerves and the courage of others, Sörman shouted at himrepeatedly to stop, but the man was beyond reach, and he did not. Theoverturned lifeboat drifted directly toward the mutilated front endof the Estonia's hull, now heavily inverted and in the laststages of sinking into the sea. Aboard the lifeboat nothing could bedone but to go for the ride. At the last moment, just when it seemedthey might be smashed against the hull, they were swept slightlyforward and began to pass directly under the ship's front end. Aninstant later, in the confusion of a nightmare, they passed into theflooded entrance of a huge dark tunnel that was swallowing thesurging waves. It was the open end of the car deck, the gaping woundleft when the bow fell off. Sörman realized that he had not escapedthe Estonia after all—that it would catch him now and takehim down. Unable to endure the sight, he turned his head away infear. When finally he found the courage to look again, the Estoniawas gone.







    Last edited by Mike Hall; 20th September 2019 at 02:37 PM.
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    Keith at Tregenna Guest

    Default Re: A Sea tory

    Interesting read,

    Keith.

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    Default Re: A Sea tory

    There was a similar incident in UK where the bow doors were not closed correctly.
    One of the major problem with such vessels.
    They can always be a problem, but much harder in rough seas.
    Happy daze John in Oz.

    Life is too short to blend in.

    John Strange R737787
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    Default Re: A Sea tory

    I sailed on Ro Ros the main problem was if you were put under pressure to leave port to keep your sked and some skippers sailed while the bow doors were not fully closed. ie Herald of Free Enterprise which caused the vessel to take in water on the car deck and destabilise the ship. Rgds Den

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    Default Re: A Sea Story

    Thanks for this post. It was so interesting that I had to read it till the end. I had heard about the Estonia but was not aware of all the facts. Very sad for all the victims.

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    Default Re: A Sea tory

    Quote Originally Posted by Denis O'Shea View Post
    I sailed on Ro Ros the main problem was if you were put under pressure to leave port to keep your sked and some skippers sailed while the bow doors were not fully closed. ie Herald of Free Enterprise which caused the vessel to take in water on the car deck and destabilise the ship. Rgds Den
    Den, I was on the old British Rail ro ro Ferries out of Holyhead for a while I cant recall one mishap, All British crews and built to last. They simply don't make them like they used to or crew them Regards Terry.
    {terry scouse}

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