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The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part II

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JayUtah said:
According to your secondary source. A primary source disagrees.

You're the one who referred us to Silver Linde. How convenient that he now becomes "unreliable" when his primary testimony contradicts your preferred secondary source.
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junkshop said:
Your source is wrong, as shown by Jack by the hedge back in post #1089, 'Mr Skylight' could mean different things depending on what followed it:
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Actually, as discussed in detail above 1049, the EFD website Vixen uses as a source doesn't even make the claim that Mr. Skylight was the fire alarm code. In fact, EFD explicitly says it agrees with the JAIC about the alarm codes. The text in section 29.3 of EFD is not consistent with the earlier discussion of alarm codes on the EFD website.
 
Vixen said:
Don't call me dear.
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Don't try and deflect from the point with faux outrage.

It's been pointed out multiple times that your claim that Mr Skylight was the fire code is wrong. At this point it's either that you're ignoring us and deliberately being intellectually dishonest or you're simply lying and trying to gaslight us.
 
Meanwhile ... I'm wondering what technique could have been used to transfer a vehicle from The Estonia to another vessel that was necessarily close alongside, in the dark and in bad conditions.

Was this vehicle (or these vehicles) on the top deck? If not, how was it transferred up there from the lower car deck to effect the transfer? Did one of the ships have a substantial crane? Is a crane transfer even half-plausible under such circumstances?

No. The very idea is a total load of bollocks.

Or is it? No nautical expert me.
 
GlennB said:
Meanwhile ... I'm wondering what technique could have been used to transfer a vehicle from The Estonia to another vessel that was necessarily close alongside, in the dark and in bad conditions.

Was this vehicle (or these vehicles) on the top deck? If not, how was it transferred up there from the lower car deck to effect the transfer? Did one of the ships have a substantial crane? Is a crane transfer even half-plausible under such circumstances?

No. The very idea is a total load of bollocks.

Or is it? No nautical expert me.
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I think the ideas is they opened the bow doors and pushed it out.
That's what caused the ship to founder.
 
Steve said:
But, but, but, people said stuff! And some even wrote stuff down or drew cartoons!

You notice that in all the myriad scenarios presented by Vixen for the sinking there is one, and only one, that is not listed as plausible. The one you describe here. The one that actually happened.
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Until someone animates the disaster using stop-motion Lego that lays out the CT I'm not sold:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mcDaXR8rKs4
 
What I want to know is the difference between an alarm for a fire and an alarm for "Hey, we're sinking"? I could be wrong but unless your tasked with fighting the fire your job is to get the passengers to the lifeboats. And if you're a member of the crew who fights fires why have you not been trained to deal with hull breaches?
 
whoanellie said:
Actually, as discussed in detail above 1049, the EFD website Vixen uses as a source doesn't even make the claim that Mr. Skylight was the fire alarm code. In fact, EFD explicitly says it agrees with the JAIC about the alarm codes. The text in section 29.3 of EFD is not consistent with the earlier discussion of alarm codes on the EFD website.
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Yes. The "Mr Skylight" code is used throughout the world of passenger-carrying merchant ships, and its meaning throughout that world is a general alert, not a fire-specific alert.

Frankly, it would have been utterly absurd if this one ship - the Estonia - out of all of the passenger-carrying merchant ships in the whole world, had somehow decided to subvert the meaning of that code (for unfathomable reasons). Especially given that a) there's plenty of movement between ships of ratings-level crew, and b) for many ratings-level crew, English is a second or third language.
 
phiwum said:
Well, that's true, but the testimony regarding that night mentions "Mr. Skylight No. 1" and "No. 2", not any of the other suffixes.

That said, if I understood what WhoaNellie reported, the Skylight messages were overloaded so that Nos. 1 and 2 gave instructions to boat crews as well as fire crews.

(I still suspect that "fire crew" is a bit broader than it sounds, but I have no evidence for that.)
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The "number 1" and "number 2" suffixes merely refer(red) to the particular groups of crew for specific locations on the ship.

So, for instance, there was a selection of crew on the Estonia who were assigned to "number 1" group, and their muster location was at the bow. And when the "Mr Skylight number 1" message was broadcast, a) it alerted all crewmembers to there being a serious (general) problem, and b) it specifically instructed those crewmembers assigned to the number 1 group to get to their muster station immediately.
 
Vixen said:
It's the huge lock at the bottom. Amazing that it, the two side locks AND the two hydraulic arms all fell off 'due to a few strong waves'! In a wavy sea. My, my.
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More ignorance. You're implying here that the failure of each of the locks and the pistons was an independent event. And that therefore it was (in your view) near-inconceivable that all of these components just happened to fail at precisely the same time.

The reality is that these were not independent events. Once the lower lock failed, the visor was now able to pivot upwards. A combination of the mass of the visor and the mass of seawater that was now able to move the visor around.... gave huge angular momentum to the visor. And this, in turn, was more than sufficient to overcome firstly the hydraulic pistons and then the side locks. One failure begat the other failures.
 
phiwum said:
One more time, look at what you quoted.



He went to the control room because of an apparent emergency (at least, the ferry had "got into trouble"). Other engineers told him that the ship was taking in water via the bow. The next two paragraphs are about an influx of water.

Okay, so if this water were normal, why did he go to the control room and in what sense was the ferry "in trouble"? If there was a fire and the sprinklers were going off, why did these two engineers tell him about the water coming in from the bow (which you claim was normal)?

Surely, after the pleasantries about the water coming in (which was totally normal), they should have at some point mentioned the fire and/or sprinklers. The alleged fire wasn't normal, was it? Wouldn't mention of that spice up a conversation?

But no, it went something like this. The mechanic went to the control room after the ferry got into trouble.

Two engineers said to him, "Say, Henrik, you know that water that's always coming in around the bow? Well, it still is and in amounts that are not at all surprising or indeed noteworthy."

Henrik then watches for a while, observing the water cover the car tires and water from somewhere, splashing on the camera. He thought nothing of this, of course, though he did mention it to the interviewer much later. He of course recognized that it was a sprinkler and hence there was a fire at that time as well, but he knew the interviewer wouldn't be interested in such trivialities. Best to focus on the normal leaks at the bow which on that fateful day were ominously normal. No increased flow at all. The same as every other trip. Boy, that didn't bode well... He decided to draw a picture of the water's ingress to show just how startlingly usual it really was.

Does that sound about right?
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Note Sillaste says he was in the control room. This is the engine room! The engine room is in the hull, very lowest deck. Truth is, he and Treu were 'up to their knees in water' in the engine room. The hull is where the 'flooding' was happening.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
The ramp was not a watertight fitting, the bow was supposed to be.

Add in that the crew had to use hammers to close the locks and the ramp according to you was held up with a hawser and it is obvious there were serious problems with the ship.

If the water was over the car tyres and given that a cubic meter of water weighs a ton, what weight of water you think there was given the size of the car deck?
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AIUI the capacity was limited and even if the car deck was full of water, the air in the hull keeps the ship afloat. Remember it carried a whole load of heavyweight lorries without any problem.
 
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