The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-Opened

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Captain_Swoop said:
I think Brian Braidwood saw what he wanted to see.
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I agree.

Again, I'm a layman, not an engineer. I live near a former US Army base, Fort Ord, which I have extensively hiked and found hundreds relics damaged by explosives, or in the case of the old pineapple hand grenades - have exploded. I have been out on hikes while EOD has been actively discharging un-exploded goodies, and since I grew up here when the base was an active training location I am very familiar with the sounds of explosions.

This year I got back into building models, starting with the DMK Bismarck, now currently working on the USS Indianapolis, and am dreading the giant RMS Titanic kit mocking me from the corner of my workshop. I have spent the entire year looking at shipwreck photos and footage of not only these ships, but dozens more.

That said, based on my non-expert opinion, explosives leave scorch marks on metal that often last decades. Ballard and James Cameron have photographed Bismarck extensively and scorch marking is still visible. Where there are no scorch marks there is still evidence of heat from the blast. This is consistent with almost all of the battle damaged WWII wrecks.

I see no evidence of explosive charges on the locking clamps of the bow. I see stress failure, and while I'm not an engineer I used to be a guy who could lift heavy things which led to jobs doing demolition. I found that you can break just about anything once you find the right angle of attack and take your time. And yes, sometimes when you're done the piece will look like it exploded.
 
Vixen said:
The JAIC clearly says the lorries were lashed as stormy weather had been forecast and the crew acknowledged it did this. Cars were not, just that the hand brake had to be on and the gear in reverse.
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The report also says:

The car deck was not surveyed due to the hazards related to divers working in the area. It is therefore not known whether the lashings had been able to restrain trucks.
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Captain_Swoop said:
I think Brian Braidwood saw what he wanted to see.
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That thought most definitely crossed my mind. We don't know how his report was compiled or if he was asked leading questions when presented with the video footage to examine. "Is it possible this is an explosive?" "is it possible an explosive was used here?" for example.
 
JayUtah said:
Then I guess I need to throw out all the sophisticated physical flooding models that we've been using for decades. Give us a citation to his statement, please, so we can see the context in which he said it.
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Here you go:

Werner Hummel, head of Marine Claims Partner GmbH of Germany, who was hired by the shipyard to investigate the disaster, agrees. Only over time would seawater penetrate the ship and push out air.

“This is simple physics,” Mr. Hummel says, adding that an intact ship would have floated for at least several hours, if not a day.
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Washington Post
 
If you wanted to sink a ship with small explosive charges just blow the sea pipes.

A ship like Estonia has lots of through hull pipes for sea water in and out. Things like engine cooling, generator cooling, fire mains, deck wash down etc.
Blow heat exchanger return pipes for the engines and generators and you will be pumping thousands of gallons of water in to the ship as long they are running.
Even if they are stopped the water will still be flowing in through the blown through hull fittings.

As for the sound.
I can assure everyone that the sound and feel of an explosive charge is very different to mechanical 'hammering'
You would not mistake one for the other.

James Bond style sabotage with 'shaped charges' is more ridiculous than the submarine story.
 
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Vixen said:
Here you go:

Washington Post
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And yet we see that ships can sink very quickly, almost as if every sinking involved different circumstances.
We know the Estonia was flooding from the car deck in to the hull and then when it turned on it's side through hatchways, stairways, windows and machinery ventilators.
We know the passenger decks were not divided in to watertight sections and not divided from each other by watertight hatchways. Like all passenger vessels they had open stairwells and domestic partitions that allowed water to flood all the decks.

He's talking out of his arse to satisfy the people that paid him to produce the verdict they needed.
 
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Delphic Oracle said:
We already covered the problems with sending divers into that wreck.

Either you're being transparently disingenuous or you have the memory of a goldfish.
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Nonsense. There was no problem retrieving the remains of the 9/11 victims, even from remnants of bone and hair which has never ceased. The victims of the 2004 Tsunami were meticulously identified and passed to their relatives. TWA 800 that crashed in the Atlantic near New York because of a bomb had the bodies recovered despite cables, hazards, sharp steel fragments and scattered over a wide area (divers went down 4,000 times). 196 out of 230 were recovered. The Ehime Maru ship that was wrecked by a carelessly emerging USS Greeneville sub was immediately salvaged and all but one body recovered. The Russians spared no expense bringing home the bodies of the personnel in the fated MV Kursk nuclear submarine, despite being highly contaminated and some remains badly burnt.

There is no excuse not to recover the remains of the Estonia which is only in waters 60 - 80 m deep, the icy waters at a perpetual near freezing point and the lack of aerobic bacteria (that need oxygen, of which there is little of here), the mild salinity, all mean that the bodies won't be as badly deformed as one would expect as in a plane crash. Police, firemen and recovery divers recover bodies all the time and see it as their job and even a service to the community.
 
Vixen said:
Nonsense. There was no problem retrieving the remains of the 9/11 victims, even from remnants of bone and hair which has never ceased. The victims of the 2004 Tsunami were meticulously identified and passed to their relatives. TWA 800 that crashed in the Atlantic near New York because of a bomb had the bodies recovered despite cables, hazards, sharp steel fragments and scattered over a wide area (divers went down 4,000 times). 196 out of 230 were recovered. The Ehime Maru ship that was wrecked by a carelessly emerging USS Greeneville sub was immediately salvaged and all but one body recovered. The Russians spared no expense bringing home the bodies of the personnel in the fated MV Kursk nuclear submarine, despite being highly contaminated and some remains badly burnt.

There is no excuse not to recover the remains of the Estonia which is only in waters 60 - 80 m deep, the icy waters at a perpetual near freezing point and the lack of aerobic bacteria (that need oxygen, of which there is little of here), the mild salinity, all mean that the bodies won't be as badly deformed as one would expect as in a plane crash. Police, firemen and recovery divers recover bodies all the time and see it as their job and even a service to the community.
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We went through all this at length in this thread last week.
Have you forgotten already?

Can you guess the main difference between Estonia and the WTC buildings?

Or the difference between Estonia and an aircraft?

Or the differnce between the Estonia and the 58 m 741ton Ehime Maru and that there were only 9 missing crew?
 
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Captain_Swoop said:
He says there were 'explosive bags' scattered around too.
How many charges does he say we're present and why would there be anything left after all these years?
If it was hit by a sub what was the purpose of the explosives?
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Braidwood was with the German Group of Experts (led by Hummel who employed Bemis, the US diver who as the rights to the Lusitania) wreck). Braidwood cut a piece of the metal from the bulkhead and had it tested. He also examined the video footage of the JAIC and spotted what looked like explosives attached to the side bolts of the bow visor. As he was a Royal Navy explosives expert and diver, I expect he knows a device when he sees one. He also pointed out the typical debris scattered nearby which is indicative of this type of explosion.


It is the Germans who believe the accident was by sabotage via explosives.


The Estonian former prosecutor Margus Kurm believes it was sunk by a collision with a Swedish submarine.

These are both considered expert opinions based on objective evidence.


It strikes me that the explosive devices might have been left by some careless Swedish navy divers, who will have been sent to do some intelligence work on behalf of Sweden, independently of the JAIC, and perhaps needed to blow off the lugs and bolts to examine them, although why they left the offending atlantic lock on the seabed is anybody's guess.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
You previously claimed that they had all found traces of explosives. That's incredibly misleading. You are an astonishingly unreliable reporter of facts.

So in fact what they appear to have concluded is that the deformation of the metal *could* have been caused by an explosion, but they didn't say that it couldn't have been caused by something else, such as a large section of the front of the ship being violently wrenched off its mountings.
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A Finnish company examined the bow visor for traces of explosives but found none. However, the same thing happened with the TWA 800 bomb on an airplane that crashed into the Atlantic. As the wreck had been in the water for seven days, it was no longer possible. The Estonia had been underwater for seven weeks so it should have realised tests won't be able to identify the chemicals.

Trace amounts of explosive residue were detected on three samples of material from three separate locations of the recovered airplane wreckage (described by the FBI as a piece of canvas-like material and two pieces of a floor panel).[1]:118 These samples were submitted to the FBI's laboratory in Washington, D.C., which determined that one sample contained traces of cyclotrimethylenetrinitramine (RDX), another nitroglycerin, and the third a combination of RDX and pentaerythritol tetranitrate (PETN);[1]:118 these findings received much media attention at the time.[45][46] In addition, the backs of several damaged passenger seats were observed to have an unknown red/brown-shaded substance on them.[1]:118 According to the seat manufacturer, the locations and appearance of this substance were consistent with adhesive used in the construction of the seats, and additional laboratory testing by NASA identified the substance as being consistent with adhesives.[1]:118

Further examination of the airplane structure, seats, and other interior components found no damage typically associated with a high-energy explosion of a bomb or missile warhead ("severe pitting, cratering, petalling, or hot gas washing").[1]:258 This included the pieces on which trace amounts of explosives were found.[1]:258 Of the 5 percent of the fuselage that was not recovered, none of the missing areas were large enough to have covered all the damage that would have been caused by the detonation of a bomb or missile.[1]:258 None of the victims' remains showed any evidence of injuries that could have been caused by high-energy explosives.[1]:258

The NTSB considered the possibility that the explosive residue was due to contamination from the aircraft's use in 1991 transporting troops during the Gulf War or its use in a dog-training explosive detection exercise about one month before the accident.[1]:258–259 Testing conducted by the FAA's Technical Center indicated that residues of the type of explosives found on the wreckage would dissipate completely after two days of immersion in sea water (almost all recovered wreckage was immersed longer than two days).
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Wiki

This is why the German Group arranged for metallurgical examination instead.

Three independent laboratories confirmed that the twinning deformation found in the Estonia bow bulkhead port side panel showed the force of an explosion in its structure. The BAM sponsored by the German government didn't even test the panel from the Estonia. It used an ordinary panel and tried to recreate the twinning by other means (shot peening) which the Estonia had never had done, according to records, and was of a superficial nature.

ETA: Metal showing structural damage from a force above 1,000 m per second, is categorised as an explosion. The independent laboratories in the USA, UK and Germany determined that the Estonia samples showed a force of between 3,000 - 5,000 mps range as having acted on it.
 
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RolandRat said:
Yeah it's a bit weird. The report claims the "explosive" subsequently vanished. A claim was made that the image below is a shaped charge.

[qimg]https://www.estoniaferrydisaster.net/estonia%20final%20report/images/report%20pics/folder%204/pg1099.jpg[/qimg]

"Evaluation of the footage made by ROV on 02. and 09.10.94 revealed, however, that the package had not been at the identified location on the 5th deck on these dates, thus must have been placed there between the 09.10. and 03.12.94 and therefore could not be casualty related. In any event, the term "explosives", which had always been in the background during the preceding years of the investigation, was suddenly brought back to the attention of the investigators and the video footage available in Hamburg, all obtained from the JAIC, was analysed again also in an attempt to find possible explanations for numerous so far unexplained damage areas. It revealed among other things that an orange coloured cube had been attached to the recess of the port front bulkhead of the wreck in way of the hydraulic and manual side locks and the fastening of the bow ramp actuator.

The cube was clearly visible and had been closely looked at by the ROV during the inspection on 09.10.94, it could not, however, be found on the 02.10.94 videos which was possibly due to restricted visibility and was definitely not in this location on the SPRINT ROV made on 03.12.94 respectively on the diver video of the same date.
Images were made from the orange coloured cube and identified by all three experts from Sweden, England and Germany with a high degree of probability as an "explosive charge".

https://www.seainfo.se/files/Estonia-Investigation-Initiative.pdf

It seems there are conflicting conspiracies going around which have all been merged into one super-conspiracy in this thread. Some people think it was explosives, a smaller group seem to think it was hit by a sub.

Brian Braidwood seems to be an expert in his field but the nature of his relationship with the people for whom he did the reports for is not apparent. It seems Braidwood died in 2014 so he can't be questioned.
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Lehtola tried to brush it off as a piece of broken wood and the remains of a tarpaulin.

The JAIC never even considered any other scenario other than a few strong waves causing the bow visor to drop off.

The Germans at least looked at the levels of maintenance and seaworthiness and found both severely lacking.

So why did the JAIC say the vessel was seaworthy? Because the report is little more than window dressing.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
You claim Bildt could not have learned from Sillaste what the report claims Sillaste said. And your proof is your personal incredulity. Imagine how unconvincing that is.

So instead you invent a fantasy where Bildt (for no reason we can see) just makes up a story about the bow door which, by amazing coincidence, divers later discover to be true.
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Bildt was told of the accident within an hour of it. He had his ready explanation within sixteen hours. Witness Mart Laar, PM of Estonia who actually questioned Sillaste on 28 Sept 1994 says Sillaste did not say the bow was missing.

He was interviewed several times more. However, he never made that claim on 28 September 1994. Laar said he felt frustrated by Bildt's insistence it was technical when he, Laar, had suspicions it was terrorist related.
 
It wasn't a 'few strong waves' It was more than a decade of operating in 'strong waves'
 
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