Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Re-opened Part III

[Jack by the hedge]

Soz, the car decks are decks no. 2 and 3. In effect, the JAIC is claiming that when the vessel capsized onto its starboard side, decks 4 and 5 immediately filled with water, the windows having smashed, battened down the cabin doors (cabins themselves divided into literally hundreds). This defies belief as a ship cannot float on its superstructure. Once it capsized to the side, it would have turtled within minutes ceteris paribus.

Gobbledegook. The JAIC said that car deck flooding caused instability, which caused the list, which continued until the large windows on the starboard side of decks 4 and 5 were exposed to a pounding they were not intended to have to cope with. Those large windows are not cabin windows, by the way, "battened down" or otherwise. When they failed that allowed flooding to proceed more rapidly.

Your mantra that a ship cannot float on its superstructure appears to be as irrelevant as it is confusing and your obsessive insistance that capsizing ships usually turn right over continues to be wrong, expecto patronum.

 

[JayUtah]

...your obsessive insistance that capsizing ships usually turn right over continues to be wrong, expecto patronum.

Quod erat errandum.

 

[Spektator]

Ladies and gentlemen, may I present your champion of champions!


Let's give him a big hand, folks. Didn't he do well?

I shan't let it go to my isotope Peru.

 

[Andy_Ross]

The negative buoyancy and negative shift in the centre of gravity. Imagine you are walking along. Your body's centre of gravity keeps you perfectly balanced. Then imagine an unseen hole in the ground introduces an element of instability in that it causes your right foot to miss its stride. Your centre of gravity is no longer balanced, pitching you to one side, causing you to either stumble, to use your arms, shoulders and other side of the body to regain balance, or you fall over completely. You do not remain in a state of inertia. Something has to give.

London John's fond belief The Herald of Free Enterprise was forever fated to lie on its side, unhindered by the bank it lay on, shows continues to cause amusement.

What does any of that have to do with a ship sinking?

 

[Vixen]

Oh good lord. It just gets better and better*.

Your musings on the interaction between a centre of gravity, balance and buoyancy, and the way you translate your musings on to what you believe must have happened to the Estonian, are scientifically-illiterate. Please don't insult us with these horrible attempts at justification/rationalisation of your moribund PoV.






Ehm..... what now? Are you claiming that the HOFE would have done something other than lie on its side in perpetuity, had it not been dismantled for scrap? Or are you claiming that had the sandbank not "intervened", the HOFE would necessarily have turned upside-down in the water, rather than sinking in a 90-degree-capsized attitude?

Because either way, you're wrong. I'm glad, however, that you find your own scientific ignorance amusing.




* More and more embarrassing.

The ignorance is staggering. The Herald of Free Enterprise landed where she did and in the position she lay because the crew steered it deliberately onto a sandbank. It is in that position because that is the lie of the land where she was grounded. Doh_!


Given the water in which The Herald of Free Enterprise lay is extremely shallow, it is preposterous for you to confidently assert that that is exactly how it would have lay on the seabed had it been deeper water and it had sunk fully submerged.

The ship ended up on her side half-submerged in shallow water 1 kilometre (0.5 nmi; 0.6 mi) from the shore. Only a fortuitous turn to starboard in her last moments, and then capsizing on a sandbar, prevented the ship from sinking entirely in much deeper water.

wiki

The Estonia for example, went from being on its starboard side to sinking face down, with a seabed gradient of 30° halting its descent and thus, causing it to finish up at 214°. Had the seabed been level it would have been nearer 180°, except the bridge and funnel would have caused an angle,

 

[Andy_Ross]

There was water on the car deck but by all accounts that was quite normal in rainy weather. One of the crew on the Estonia, said he saw water up to the car tyres.

Half a mater of water on the car deck would be around 2000 tons.

Even the JAIC said that even if the car decks were filled with a maximum volume of water, that would not of itself be enough to capsize the boat .

Where do they say this?

 

[Andy_Ross]

A multi-pronged attack was the Soviet leitmotiv.

Even the British Royal Navy used to employ more than one form of attack: double-headed hammers and cannonballs to sink a ship in days of yore.

What are you burbling about?

 

[Andy_Ross]

No, because a professor in Materials Science (Westermann) and three other metallurgy labs (Braidwood) have found evidence of damage in the metal structure consistent with explosives deformation.

Didn't we go though that in great detail over many pages just last week?

 

[Andy_Ross]

Using the Wilhelm Gustloff as an example: certainly. Perhaps more by accident than design.

Where was the Wilhelm Gustloff struck above the waterline? It was hit by torpedoes, they are by their nature below the water.

 

[Vixen]

Okay, so undeniably, water came in gushing from the sides of the ramp at some point of time. Now, "gushing in" isn't the sort of problem that the mattresses would be there to prevent. They may have slowed a leaking visor, but not one in which water gushed around the ramp.

Hence, whether the ramp was up the entire time or not, an unusually large amount of water was coming in from the bow. Agreed?

This is based on what one person saw on a monitor after the ship heeled. As the car ramp leaked anyway, as per the accounts of numerous witnesses, we can't assume this was the cause, without further substantiation IMV.

 

[Vixen]

None of this is actual physics. Nothing's center of gravity "keeps it perfectly balanced." An object may be angularly stationary if, for example, the reactive force to gravity acts through the center of gravity (a zero-length moment arm), and there are no other moments to accommodate. The location of the center of gravity is one parameter to an angular stability problem, but it is not something that, by itself, guarantees or generates angular stability or instability.

Bipedal locomotion is a metastable state of constantly moving the center of gravity forward from the locus of the reactive force and generating a forward pitch moment. Then it changes the locus of the reactive force (i.e., which foot is bearing the weight) to convert the pitch moment into forward motion. If you lose your footing, then the state stops being metastable and becomes unstable; there is an uncorrected pitch moment and you might fall.

Please stop trying to teach people physics. You don't have the faintest idea what you're talking about. You're just throwing words around that you may have vaguely remembered from your "five years of physics" as a child. But you aren't fooling anyone into thinking you actually have something to teach others.

I was trying to keep it very very simple.

 

[Vixen]

But as has been explained (to Vixen) several times already in these threads - and as the official investigation understood properly* - ships such as these simply aren't designed to have hulls that are internally watertight. In fact, it would be a pretty severe hindrance to a passenger- and vehicle-carrying ship if it had to partition and seal off every internal area of the hull.

And that's precisely why, once the water had started flooding onto the vehicle deck via the now-compromised bow opening, it immediately began to find its way down through the internal structure of the ship - via stairwells, ventilation shafts and other openings.

In the end, the combined mass of seawater on the vehicle deck plus seawater that had pooled lower down in the hull was sufficient to pull the ship so far down in the water that sinking became the inevitable outcome. At the same time, the un-baffled water on the vehicle deck severely destabilised the ship (which had set off with imperfect trim in any event), precipitating the capsize which greatly sped up the loss of the vessel.


* It goes without saying that the official investigation understood this properly, since they knew 1) that the ship sank, and 2) that the cause of its sinking was the broken bow opening mechanism.

Once again you are incorrect. The Estonia had fourteen watertight compartments in her hull. The Herald of Free Enterprise had none and I believe it became regulatory to increase buoyancy in the hull after that.

The JAIC made it clear that the heeling of water in the car deck alone was not sufficient to cause capsizing so stop claiming it was.

 

[phiwum]

Half a mater of water on the car deck would be around 2000 tons.



Where do they say this?

She quoted it above. Section 12.6 from the report.

It is not clear to me whether JAIC is saying that other decks must have had water flow in from outside or water flow down from the car deck. Perhaps it will be obvious to those of us used to reading this sort of report.

 

[Andy_Ross]

The Estonia had a total buoyancy equivalent to 18,000 tonnes in its hull.

Even the JAIC admit a car deck full off water would not be enough to cause it to capsize.

Cargo capacity is not what is being discussed.

2000 tons of water (half a meter depth) on the car deck rushing to the leeward side when the ship rolled is what capsized it.

As a number of posters have pointed out, stability and buoyancy are different things.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Once again you are incorrect. The Estonia had fourteen watertight compartments in her hull. The Herald of Free Enterprise had none and I believe it became regulatory to increase buoyancy in the hull after that.

The JAIC made it clear that the heeling of water in the car deck alone was not sufficient to cause capsizing so stop claiming it was.

What is your evidence that the HOFE had no watertight compartments in the hull?

How do you think it's construction differed from that of the Estonia?

What was the status of the openings in the hull at the time it sank?

Why would a hole in to one of these compartments cause the Estonia to sink if all the other compartments was watertight?

 

[Vixen]

Gobbledegook. The JAIC said that car deck flooding caused instability, which caused the list, which continued until the large windows on the starboard side of decks 4 and 5 were exposed to a pounding they were not intended to have to cope with. Those large windows are not cabin windows, by the way, "battened down" or otherwise. When they failed that allowed flooding to proceed more rapidly.

Your mantra that a ship cannot float on its superstructure appears to be as irrelevant as it is confusing and your obsessive insistance that capsizing ships usually turn right over continues to be wrong, expecto patronum.

From Rockwater Supplement 503, it clearly states divers had to use special 'spike' cutting equipment on decks 4 and 5 to get in, and oxy-acetyline cutters.

If the windows were smashed by 'pounding' waves, they would not have needed to cut the glass out of the window frames.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Once again you are incorrect. The Estonia had fourteen watertight compartments in her hull. The Herald of Free Enterprise had none and I believe it became regulatory to increase buoyancy in the hull after that.

The JAIC made it clear that the heeling of water in the car deck alone was not sufficient to cause capsizing so stop claiming it was.

Water found it's way in to the hull. the machinery spaces were flooding, that is why the engineering crew abandoned them and power was lost.

How would a hole towards the bow on the starboard side flood the machinery space?

 

[Andy_Ross]

She quoted it above. Section 12.6 from the report.

It is not clear to me whether JAIC is saying that other decks must have had water flow in from outside or water flow down from the car deck. Perhaps it will be obvious to those of us used to reading this sort of report.

It says that the water on the car deck alone would not be enough, we know that water was finding it's way in to the hull.
This flooding was over a wide area as the machinery spaces were flooding. A small hole above the waterline towards the bow would not have flooded the machinery spaces.
Water was finding it's way below through ventilators, air intakes, access hatches etc.

Machinery spaces are not watertight from above, if they were then the engines would not work.

 

[Vixen]

Half a mater of water on the car deck would be around 2000 tons.



Where do they say this?

In section 12.6.1 of the Final Report:
“Even though the list developed rapidly, the water on the car deck would not alone be sufficient to make the ship capsize and lose its survivability. As long as the hull was intact and watertight below and above the car deck, the residual stability with water on the car deck would not have been significantly changed at large heel angles (figure 12.12). Capsize could
only have been completed through water entering other areas of the vessel.”

 

[Andy_Ross]

From Rockwater Supplement 503, it clearly states divers had to use special 'spike' cutting equipment on decks 4 and 5 to get in, and oxy-acetyline cutters.

If the windows were smashed by 'pounding' waves, they would not have needed to cut the glass out of the window frames.

Do you know how many windows there are? look at the pictures of the ship.

Windows will not hold against any kind of water pressure, that is why any portholes near the waterline have steel 'deadlights' on the inside that can be secured over them.
Windows in the superstructure sides are proof against occasional wave and spray. those in the front of a superstructure or the bridge are thicker and tougher as they can take heavy hits from waves in rough weather.

It wasn't the 'pounding' waves that were the problem, it is the pressure difference between the air inside the superstructure and the water that would break them.
However. when power was lost and the ship turned beam on to the sea wave action could have smashed some of the windows in the superstructure.

A diver would not enter through a smashed window that still had glass in it. they would need to remove glass from any unbroken windows they wanted to access and the Bridge would not have had broken windows, it is not a watertight space.