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

[Andy_Ross]

Boris Yeltsin had no idea what his intelligence agents did as they did their own thing,

What is your evidence for this?

What does that have to do with Clinton?

 

[Andy_Ross]

BTW did you hear back from your friend Ben, yet?

No, I haven't seen him yet.
I don't think he would have any opinion on the micro structure of steel components though.

I did speak to another friend who I have mentioned previously, he is in NDT, he says to identify the stress fractures he would use either a die penetration method or use pulse echo ultrasonic.
Which one he used would depends on the circumstances. He might even use both methods.

I asked if, while performing these tests he would have noticed if the part had been damaged by explosives.
He says it would be far easier to spot than fatigue cracking.

His experience with explosive damage is a contract he did for an engineering company on Tyneside refurbishing British Army Mine Ploughs being returned from Iraq and Afghanistan.

I asked if given a steel structure to test he would know if damage was caused by stress and fatigue or explosives.
He said if he couldn't he wouldn't be fit to do his job.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

<edit: replying to Mojo's post> Vixen was more specific a few days later, here: http://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=13630830#post13630830

"This is what the JAIC rely on: that when the ship was floating at 90° on its superstructure (this is an intellectual error as a ship cannot float on its superstructure) the water pressure burst the windows, thus flooding the superstructure spaces."

Thus it appears that when the ship was listing at 90° it was "floating on its superstructure", yet ships cannot do that so it wasn't. Can anybody explain this paradox?

 

[Andy_Ross]

I think the mistake is in thinking that a ship's superstructure is watertight in any way other than a superficial sealing against rain or spray as a house or building is.
A ship's superstructure is not expected to ever be in the sea and in fact contains lots of large openings to let air in to the ship for engines, generators, air conditioning etc.

 

[LondonJohn]

Can anyone (by which I mean Vixen...) tell me the difference between a) "floating on its superstructure" and b) "floating" (or "not sinking")?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

I begin to think the "mistake" is nothing more than Vixen's declaration that the JAIC claimed the Estonia was "floating on its superstructure" as if to mean they thought the superstructure was air and watertight. Whereas they specifically argued that the higher deck windows would have broken in and increased the rate of flooding.

 

[JayUtah]

Which one he used would depends on the circumstances. He might even use both methods.

"The circumstances" include how invasive or destructive the investigation is allowed to be, which is important for a number of reasons. Ultrasound examination is noninvasive, which preserves the integrity of the evidence for future tests. In non-forensic contexts, it also preserves fit tolerances and finish constraints, which are important for the longevity and proper function of the part if it's going to be reused. But if the surface is too irregular, this can cause false readings in the ultrasound. For forensic purposes the fit tolerance is generally irrelevant; the part won't be reassembled and used again. But to prepare a part for dye penetration testing involves removing material that may be evidence of a different character and useful in other ways. If invasive methods are tolerated, the dye penetration method is generally more reliable.

I asked if, while performing these tests he would have noticed if the part had been damaged by explosives. He says it would be far easier to spot than fatigue cracking.

In my experience the evidence of explosive damage would tend to obscure fatigue cracking. That is, if you had a part that had only been subject to fatigue, and a similar part that had been equally fatigued and had been subject to explosive damage, you'd have to clear away the superficial aspects of the explosive damage in order to even look for fatigue cracks.

I asked if given a steel structure to test he would know if damage was caused by stress and fatigue or explosives. He said if he couldn't he wouldn't be fit to do his job.

I concur. The better question is that regardless of what you were asked to do, if your final report included a description of the superficial characteristics of the part in question -- chiefly factors that suggest different failure modes -- and you mentioned some, but not all, of the superficial evidence, would that be a complete and accurate report? To say a researcher would note fatigue cracking and corrosion as part of a general inspection of the specimen, but then not go on to describe pitting and contact welding from explosives, is particularly comical hair-split.

 

[ferd burfle]

The better question is that regardless of what you were asked to do, if your final report included a description of the superficial characteristics of the part in question -- chiefly factors that suggest different failure modes -- and you mentioned some, but not all, of the superficial evidence, would that be a complete and accurate report? To say a researcher would note fatigue cracking and corrosion as part of a general inspection of the specimen, but then not go on to describe pitting and contact welding from explosives, is particularly comical hair-split.

I did a fair amount of failure analysis as part of product development at a small start-up firm. The first step in any analysis always was to just look it over, first by eye and then under a zoom stereo microscope at relatively low power. The person or group submitting the sample would tell me what they thought caused the failure (or in some cases told me what they needed me to find ) but I didn't assume what they told me was correct. Seeing burn marks or spatter on a part said to have failed mechanically would have halted any further sample preparation and required discussion with the submitter.

My analyses were done in a hurry-up-before-we-burn-through-all-the-capital situation but I would expect any competent analyst to approach a sample similarly. What they wouldn't do is start polishing or etching or sectioning the part without looking it over first, and if they found something unexpected, talk with the submitter before proceeding.

 

[Reformed Offlian]

Can anyone (by which I mean Vixen...) tell me the difference between a) "floating on its superstructure" and b) "floating" (or "not sinking")?

Well "floating on its superstructure" obviously means the ship turns turtle. And as Vixen has consistently maintained, ships that turn turtle go on to sink very very quickly.

Oh, wait...
Nevermind.

 

[whoanellie]

Boris Yeltsin had no idea what his intelligence agents did as they did their own thing,

What is your evidence for this?

What does that have to do with Clinton?

Vixen was being sarcastic.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Vixen was being sarcastic.

Sarcasm might be one explanation for claiming the US president "was presumed head of the CIA" while later arguing the Russian president "had no idea what his intelligence agents did". Another explanation is a habit of leaping on whatever thing suits your argument right at that moment and ignoring its inconsistencies with anything else you've previously argued.

 

[whoanellie]

Sarcasm might be one explanation for claiming the US president "was presumed head of the CIA" while later arguing the Russian president "had no idea what his intelligence agents did". Another explanation is a habit of leaping on whatever thing suits your argument right at that moment and ignoring its inconsistencies with anything else you've previously argued.

She does that also.

 

[Steve]

Vixen was being sarcastic.

Do you mean it was a 'quip'?

 

[Axxman300]

Boris Yeltsin had no idea what his intelligence agents did as they did their own thing,

And yet somehow Clinton was on top of CIA's activities?

Okay.

 

[Vixen]

How could he produce the report without metallurgy being involved?

But if there he been explosion damage are you saying he wouldn't have recognised it or would have failed to report it in his findings?

Either he was incompetent or a liar under your interpretation.

How can you trust him?

To find evidence of explosives damage, you have to look for it. It is not always self evident.


For example, Ida Westermann had to cut off a sample of the material from the bow visor and attach it to a plate in order to analyse it. It has t be ground and polished.

Hoffmeister was looking at corrosion, fractures and stress in the sidelock bolts and lugs.

 

[Vixen]

But you didn't.
What is at the link does not support your claims.
No mention of weapons or US marines guarding trucks.

Hirschfeldt presented his investigation findings to the Rikstag in 2005. He merely confirmed Sweden had indulged in smuggling Russian military equipment 14th and 21st September 1994. He did not specify what this materiel was nor provide any other detail. It is classified for 70 years. Hirschfeldt burnt all of his research and investigations documents. More recently he said he now regrets he did this, in light of the recent reopening of the case.

 

[Vixen]

Irrelevant. They could hardly have failed to see it, if any had been there. You seem to think this sentence, ignorantly and often repeated, renders the investigators selectively blind.



In the course of doing that they also noted the general character of the affected parts including corrosion and fatigue cracking. Corrosion is generally visible to the naked eye. Fatigue cracks generally are not; the surface must be prepared and often dyed, and must be examined with a microscope. It is not a casual inspection. In preparing the surface to look for those elusive cracks, the researchers would have had to scrape away the unmistakably telltale evidence of pitting and contact welding left by nearby explosives, yet decided not to note it.

But then you knew that. Oh, wait -- you don't. That's because this is a specialized field that we already know you don't know anything about. You're arrogantly trying to tell people who do this for living how some group must have acted.



Why do you think metallurgy is not taught to mechanical engineers? Why do you think evidence of explosives can only be uncovered by specialized metallurgical techniques? What do you think identifying fatigue cracking entails?

What part of "I've done this for a living for nearly 30 years" was in any way unclear to you?



Identifying corrosion and fatigue cracking isn't part of a strictly-mandated process of modeling failure using finite-element methods, but the team did it anyway because it was pertinent to their findings. Yet somehow the glaring evidence of explosively compromised metal wasn't something they felt they had to mention.

Look. The JAIC report concluded the root cause of the disaster was a design fault in the bow visors locks and structure. It presented a sequence of events that held that the Atlantic lock was first to fail, leading to a sequential failure of the side locks.

What Hoffmeister was tasked to do was to look at these exact same nuts and bolts to see what conclusions he came to about the order of play. Rightly IMV - as the Atlantic lock is merely an accessory and the bulk of the tension is borne by the side locks - he found that it was likely the starboard side lock would have failed first, then the port lock and then the Atlantic lock.

This is important.

I am sure the thought of testing for explosives is terribly more exciting that testing for common or seawater rust but it is extremely compelling that it does not agree with the JAIC.

 

[Vixen]

This is meaningless gibberish.

Thank you, because this is exactly what JAIC claims the Estonia did.

 

[Vixen]

Oh good grief.

You've trawled the internet for something which "proves your point".

But what you've actually found here is entirely irrelevant wrt the sinking of the Estonia - or the sinking of any reasonably-large ship.

What you've found there is a video showing a capsize test for a pilot boat. The boat itself has full buoyancy as designed. There's no compromise in the hull. There's no sea water in the hull. There's no free surface effect in play.

The buoyancy test you've somehow decided is relevant.... is a standard test carried out on these sorts of smaller specialised vessels. These sorts of boats are designed to be self-righting if they ever get totally capsized for any reason (any reason, that is, which doesn't involve the boat being damaged or non-watertight).

The point of this buoyancy test - the only point of the test - is to confirm that if the vessel capsizes totally for any reason (and with a pilot boat, this might happen for example if it gets rolled over by a large container ship), it will right itself automatically.

The boat in that test was entirely sealed - it had a totally intact hull and sealed superstructure. The test therefore had absolutely nothing to do with what might happen to the boat if (eg) it got holed beneath the waterline by a rock or a large ship. For the purposes of this capsize test, the assumption was that the boat itself was watertight and in a proper state of repair/operation.

However..... it's rather clear that you didn't/don't understand what that video was actually showing - and what it was not showing. And ironically, the boat in that video didn't float upside down for more than a few seconds - the mass of its keel effectively made sure the boat self-righted as designed.

You don't know what you're talking about, Vixen.

Answer the very simple question: how long did it float on its superstructure?

 

[Vixen]

We collectively repeat: what the holy heck does "....floats on its superstructure" actually mean??

Or to be more accurate: what does that phrase mean to you?

Because for the rest of us, it means nothing of any value or relevance.


(BTW, there is one thing I do know about vessels: empty vessels make the most noise.)

The superstructure of the Estonia comprises Decks 2 - 8 and the bridge.

We know ships float on their hull, or even upside down but how does it float on its side?