Cont: The Sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part V

[zooterkin]

'Height-ism'. Oh deary deary me.

Then what, exactly, did you mean by this comment?

How can this guy all of 160cm be the expert opinion on why a 15,500-tonne ship sank? It is all complete and utter nonsense.

 

[Vixen]

Estonia sunk and the commission was formed on 28 September. That is the Day One. Things that he said then were reported by newspapers on 29.9.1994. Things that he said on day two were reported on 30.9.1994. Note that you yourself admit there that it is not day one when you write "the day after his first press release". If something happens a day after the first day, it's no longer the first day.

But of course, when Lehtola says that eyewitnesses have reported that the water came in from bow, he shouldn't have said that. He should have said that what really happened was that Russian smugglers opened the bow visor to throw some trucks out while the KGB blew the visor off with explosives and a Russian submarine torpedoed it whilst and at the same time it hit a Swedish submarine. Because that makes so much more sense than a badly-maintained ship losing its visor in a storm.

By the way, you are aware that you are accusing Lehtola of committing a serious crime arent you? Helping to cover a crime is a crime under Rikoslaki (chapter 15.11, probably a few other places would also hit).




I don't say that you are racist because you say someone is small. I say that you think that a man being short is a flaw that makes him worth less. If you didn't think that, you wouldn't have written what you did. Sillaste's height has absolutely no relevance on his credibility, no matter how much you think short men are not real men.

I think that you are racist against Estonians based on the comments that you made on that another thread. I also think that you are far right politically because you keep quoting far right sources and on that other thread you expressed views that are very common among the far right in Finland (I pointed out specific examples on that thread, you ignored them, I'm not doing it again on this one).

If you don't want people to think that you are far right, don't quote far right sources. If you don't want people to think you are racist against some group, don't say that they are beasts in the fields. Quite simple.



He wasn't presented as an expert on the cause of the disaster. He was presented as an eyewitness who said what he saw happening. Which was water seeping in from sides of the ramp. The same ramp that robotic camera later confirmed was partially open.

But of course, we know that Sillaste can't be a reliable eyewitness because he was short. No 160 cm tall man is trustworthy.



I didn't say that. I said that the name fell out of active use long before 1918 and that in written sources the name "Härkätie" is used only in contexts that speak about the nursery rhyme or describe events happening in the past while contemporary references use some variant of "Hämeentie" or "Turuntie" depending on whether they are written in Varsinais-Suomi or Häme. I also provided you a bunch of references from the 19th century showing that they did, indeed, use "Hämeentie" around Turku. One of the references even mentioned the Huilu kievari being next to Hämeentie.

I'm not going to watch a 14 minute video of two guys driving a car in 2014. Is there a specific point there where they demonstrate that the name "Härkätie" was in active use in 1918? Could you please give the timestamp for that so that I can check it.

[Edited to add: I actually managed to find a 1904 reference to "Hämeenlinnan Härkätie" that wasn't present among my earlier search results. It may be that they have uploaded corrections to OCR meanwhile (they do that all the time). The newspaper is Kansan Lehti 9.1.1904 (page 3, column 3). It is in a local interest story sent by a correspondent at Vesilahti that rails against alcohol sales. However, the road that the corresponds calls "Hämeenlinnan Härkätie" is the road leading from Hämeenlinna to Vesilahti church and not the Turku-Hämeenlinna road]

Lehtola was a lawyer, a very clever man. He saw himself as a diplomat. He saw it as honourable deceit, 'for the good of the people and protection of our nordic nations'. Bildt was a CIA agent, according to wikileaks. No doubt he sees himself as similarly honourable and benign, the father of helping the Estonians become free of the Soviet yoke.


When Finland beat Sweden in Beijing Ice Hockey t'other day. I-L reported that the Swedes were angrily commenting that they were the 'Big Brother' of the Finns, and no doubt this was Bildt's attitude as well. Anything that spells security against the Russians, the Finns will go along with. It has one of the biggest armies in Europe, 900,000 people ready to die should Russia invade. So Lehtola's attitude whilst incredibly patronising in believing people should be protected from the truth of what happened to Estonia was predicated on benevolent avunculism. Any questions about sabotage, he'd advise the journalist to 'refer it to the prosecutors' with a wave of his hand.

The only reason Sillaste's height struck me as amusing was when he was juxtaposed next to Treu, and in recall of the witness who had seen 'a tall man and a short man emerge from the funnel engaged in a punch-up'. There is nothing racist about this, as both are Estonian. The comedic theme of a big guy with a little one is a common one (Little and Large, Laurel and Hardy, Tom and Jerry. the guy in Taxi, Mini Me) and whilst a bit suspect in terms of wokeism, is hardly racist or 'far right'.

You are really reaching here, to try to link not accepting the JAIC claim the Estonia sank because of a few strong waves, causing all three locks and the two hydraulic arms to spontaneously and simultaneously detach, to crazy far right, anarchistic, anti-vaxxer, anti-masker, anti-moon voyage, flat-earth loony conspiracy theorists, simply doesn't wash as you can't slot me into that category, no matter how much you try.

What does it say about you that you believe such a sinking of a passenger ferry as set out by the JAIC on DAY ONE and thereon after...? It means you will believe anything you are told, not matter how unlikely and impossible.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

What does it say about you that you believe such a sinking of a passenger ferry as set out by the JAIC on DAY ONE and thereon after...?

What does it say about you that you persist in falsely claiming the JAIC started with a conclusion and worked backwards? It says you are a conspiracy theorist.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Riiight. A regularly scheduled passenger car ferry sinks suddenly in the middle of the night with 989 (official figure) on board. Quite normal. Nothing to see here. Move along.

It wasn't 'normal'
That's why there was an enquiry resulting in major changes to SOLAS regulations in safety and construction requirements for passenger ships.

 

[Vixen]

It's tiresome to have to take issue with this yet again, yet here we are.

The word "vague" insinuates its way in there this time, clearly implying there's doubt over whether Sillaste could have seen what he saw on the monitor. You have absolutely no justification whatsoever for doing that. Rejected.

Then there's the dishonest word "seeping". That word implies a leak which is, above all, slow. Nobody would expect droplets of liquid seeping from a leak to break surface tension and fly away under their own momentum. That's just not what seeping means. There are other, better words, like spraying, fountaining, gushing etc which might describe what Sillaste sketched: lines of water arcing away from both sides of the ramp, right from the top to the bottom.

Describing that as "seeping" is utterly misleading and this is hardly the first time that twisting of the facts has been pointed out.

Sillaste's story is that he was in the ECR off duty hours because he needed to go along to fix passenger toilets at the Deck 0 swimming pool and sauna and ended up in the Engine Control Room, with Treu and Kadak. He felt or heard a couple of loud bangs and he says this caused him to look at his monitor screen. But he doesn't say how soon after the bangs. It could have been a few seconds or ten minutes.

If the vessel leaked at the car ramp any time there was rainy weather, and there are many witnesses as to this fact, together with a mattress and other bedding seen on the Rockwater videos seen by the car ramp, then seeing water coming in at the sides is not particularly noteworthy. Sillaste never said the car ramp was open. Dr.-Ing Hans-Werner Hoffmeister an independent mechanics expert for the shipbuilders, confirmed the evidence of corrosion and water line indications on the metal and signs of fatigue and stress, indicated that not only were the lugs not aligned with the bow visor, and that there was a significant gap in the starboard side, but that on any journey there would be the equivalent of 100 tonnes of sea water swivelling around. This would not have been foreseen by the tool designers, and thus unfair to blame the shipbuilders for a 'design fault'. In other words, this was due to poor care and maintenance. It is indictive that the seeping in of water was so commonplace nobody saw it as any cause for alarm until it was too late.

I would be sceptical that there was much water on the car deck at all.


It is all pure conjecture.

 

[Jack by the hedge]

Sillaste's story is that he was in the ECR off duty hours because he needed to go along to fix passenger toilets at the Deck 0 swimming pool and sauna and ended up in the Engine Control Room, with Treu and Kadak. He felt or heard a couple of loud bangs and he says this caused him to look at his monitor screen. But he doesn't say how soon after the bangs. It could have been a few seconds or ten minutes.

If the vessel leaked at the car ramp any time there was rainy weather, and there are many witnesses as to this fact, together with a mattress and other bedding seen on the Rockwater videos seen by the car ramp, then seeing water coming in at the sides is not particularly noteworthy. Sillaste never said the car ramp was open. Dr.-Ing Hans-Werner Hoffmeister an independent mechanics expert for the shipbuilders, confirmed the evidence of corrosion and water line indications on the metal and signs of fatigue and stress, indicated that not only were the lugs not aligned with the bow visor, and that there was a significant gap in the starboard side, but that on any journey there would be the equivalent of 100 tonnes of sea water swivelling around. This would not have been foreseen by the tool designers, and thus unfair to blame the shipbuilders for a 'design fault'. In other words, this was due to poor care and maintenance. It is indictive that the seeping in of water was so commonplace nobody saw it as any cause for alarm until it was too late.

I would be sceptical that there was much water on the car deck at all.


It is all pure conjecture.

So you have no justification whatsoever for your claim of a "vague" view on the monitor. Nor any justification for using "seeping" to describe water fountaining in on both sides of the ramp from the bottom to the top. Nor any justification for implying that amount of water coming in was normal.

Got it.

 

[Vixen]

Then what, exactly, did you mean by this comment?

That it was striking that a relatively lowly crew member was wheeled out to earnestly explain to the watching millions the cause of the accident, given that we know he cannot possibly have been on the deck 'handing out life jackets and calming people down' as he claims in these interviews as his story to the police and the JAIC was that he was down on Deck 0 the entire time (to fix toilets) and only left the ship at 0130, via the funnel, which bypassed going anywhere near the decks. Strangely, he also managed to grab his wallet, passport and survival suit on the way.

 

[Andy_Ross]

No, there is nothing complex about it. There are set formulae. Just feed them into a computer modelling program.

What is your evidence for this?

What 'computer modelling program' would this be?

You yourself point out that the JAIC simply had to work out how much water was needed to sink the ship. Having got the figure, it then had to work out how the heck did 8,000 toees of water get in, given the car deck could only hold a maximum of 2,000 tonnes. So it had to invent a wholly unbelievable scenario of the vessel floating exactly on its 90° beams - with the brim of the starboard hull at an upright vertical angle below the water - for a whole twenty minutes before suddenly sinking.

Instead of just making stuff up, why not read what modelling was actually done? It is covered in the report and the accompanying supplementary documents.
All of Chapter 12 is used to summarise it.
https://onse.fi/estonia/chapt12_1.html

Pull the other one.

The fictitious scenario was that it had to float in this manner whilst the waves rose up to smash each window and inner divider in turn in order for water to ingress to the correct amount to sink it.

And people suck this up.

Why do you invent stuff like this rather than reading the actual report and supplements?

Extensive model tests ordered by the Commission were performed at the maritime research centre SSPA Maritime Dynamics Laboratory.
An actual physical model in an actual wave tank. Not just numbers plugged in to a computer program.

Vertical wave loads on the ESTONIA bow were also been simulated using a non-linear numerical method to supplement the SSPA model experiments.
All the computation methods and results are detailed in chapter 12.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Sillaste's story is that he was in the ECR off duty hours because he needed to go along to fix passenger toilets at the Deck 0 swimming pool and sauna and ended up in the Engine Control Room,.

Once more, he was called on duty to fix a fault in the vacuum system in the engine room which is on deck 0. He was not in the swimming pool and sauna.
He went in to the control room because that is where you would expect to find engineers when they are on duty and not doing an actual task.

 

[Vixen]

What does it say about you that you persist in falsely claiming the JAIC started with a conclusion and worked backwards? It says you are a conspiracy theorist.

That is what the JAIC did. It stuck resolutely to the Herald of Free Enterprise blueprint and never once deviated from it. The several hundred pages of wave impact calculations and bow visor specifications were just window-dressing to pad out the report and give it some kind of plausibility. Taking three years to publish it helped keep up the subterfuge that they were working really really hard on finding out the cause of the accident.

How on earth is Sillaste and Linde the star witnesses, when it had Piht and Lieger?

It knew, of course, on Day One, the cause of the accident. And it was not a few strong waves...

 

[Vixen]

It wasn't 'normal'
That's why there was an enquiry resulting in major changes to SOLAS regulations in safety and construction requirements for passenger ships.

No. The reason there was an inquiry is because it is set in law that where there is an accident at sea resulting in death (I think of at least five people IIRC) there must be one.

Nothing to do with whether it is deemed normal or not. Nothing charitable about it. It is the law.

 

[Vixen]

So you have no justification whatsoever for your claim of a "vague" view on the monitor. Nor any justification for using "seeping" to describe water fountaining in on both sides of the ramp from the bottom to the top. Nor any justification for implying that amount of water coming in was normal.

Got it.

There was a 'My Skylight' alarm, so the German shipbuilder's belief that what Sillaste saw was merely the spray from the drench fire alarm systems hitting the CCTV lenses, both of which were high up at ceiling level, is a credible one.

So a reasonable alternative explanation of what the motor man saw.

 

[Vixen]

Yes, sorry, I didn't check the full title on the album; 'Indians' is also frowned upon these days too. I'm not aware that 'Cherokees' is deprecated. The correct spelling is Minstrels, btw.

It was, once again, a comment on how reliable your unsourced statements are. We have yet another example, the song is "Three Wheels on my Wagon".

That was not my claim, as you would find if you read what I posted. Memory is fallible, so merely asserting something is not going to convince people here. If you make a claim, particularly about something which goes against the established facts, you need provide a source which can be checked.

Herein lies your downfall, in believing trifling trivia as being important.

 

[junkshop]

There was a 'My Skylight' alarm, so the German shipbuilder's belief that what Sillaste saw was merely the spray from the drench fire alarm systems hitting the CCTV lenses, both of which were high up at ceiling level, is a credible one.

So a reasonable alternative explanation of what the motor man saw.

Already dealt with when you argued it here.

Please move on.

 

[junkshop]

Herein lies your downfall, in believing trifling trivia as being important.

Herein lies your downfall, in believing details and accuracy are unimportant.

 

[LondonJohn]

'Height-ism'. Oh deary deary me.

Well why else did you make a bizarre point of mentioning his (entirely irrelevant) height, and mentioning it in pejorative & disparaging terms?

Well....?

 

[LondonJohn]

No, there is nothing complex about it. There are set formulae. Just feed them into a computer modelling program. You yourself point out that the JAIC simply had to work out how much water was needed to sink the ship. Having got the figure, it then had to work out how the heck did 8,000 toees of water get in, given the car deck could only hold a maximum of 2,000 tonnes. So it had to invent a wholly unbelievable scenario of the vessel floating exactly on its 90° beams - with the brim of the starboard hull at an upright vertical angle below the water - for a whole twenty minutes before suddenly sinking.


Pull the other one.

The fictitious scenario was that it had to float in this manner whilst the waves rose up to smash each window and inner divider in turn in order for water to ingress to the correct amount to sink it.

And people suck this up.

You don't know what you're talking about, I'm afraid. You're hopelessly out of your depth. As I said, you couldn't even begin to understand the calculations involved, and the physics & maths that underpin them (that became blindingly and embarrassingly obvious a long time ago....)

 

[LondonJohn]

Riiight. A regularly scheduled passenger car ferry sinks suddenly in the middle of the night with 989 (official figure) on board. Quite normal. Nothing to see here. Move along.

Do you have reading comprehension difficulties, Vixen?

Can you really not differentiate between a) stating that there was nothing mysterious about this disaster*, and b) stating that what happened was "normal" and that there was no need to figure out how/why it happened?


* And of course there is nothing mysterious about this disaster: we know what happened and why. This is not a two-pipe problem for Sherlock Holmes. We know what happened, and it's very important that we know what happened (& why), in order to a) provide some closure to families of the victims & to the survivors, and b) try to ensure that things change (ship design, regulations, operational training, etc) to greatly reduce the risk of a similar accident ever happening again.

 

[Andy_Ross]

If the vessel leaked at the car ramp any time there was rainy weather, and there are many witnesses as to this fact, together with a mattress and other bedding seen on the Rockwater videos seen by the car ramp, then seeing water coming in at the sides is not particularly noteworthy. Sillaste never said the car ramp was open. Dr.-Ing Hans-Werner Hoffmeister an independent mechanics expert for the shipbuilders, confirmed the evidence of corrosion and water line indications on the metal and signs of fatigue and stress, indicated that not only were the lugs not aligned with the bow visor, and that there was a significant gap in the starboard side, but that on any journey there would be the equivalent of 100 tonnes of sea water swivelling around. This would not have been foreseen by the tool designers, and thus unfair to blame the shipbuilders for a 'design fault'. In other words, this was due to poor care and maintenance. It is indictive that the seeping in of water was so commonplace nobody saw it as any cause for alarm until it was too late.

I would be sceptical that there was much water on the car deck at all.


It is all pure conjecture.

Why did the design allow up to a 100 tons of water to 'swivel around?

Why did the design allow water in at all?

Why did the crew consider that water leaking in and around the visor was normal?

There is plenty of blame to go round.

 

[Andy_Ross]

That it was striking that a relatively lowly crew member was wheeled out to earnestly explain to the watching millions the cause of the accident, given that we know he cannot possibly have been on the deck 'handing out life jackets and calming people down' as he claims in these interviews as his story to the police and the JAIC was that he was down on Deck 0 the entire time (to fix toilets) and only left the ship at 0130, via the funnel, which bypassed going anywhere near the decks. Strangely, he also managed to grab his wallet, passport and survival suit on the way.

He exited on to the upper deck, where do you think the passengers and crew were gathering?