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

[Steve]

Vixen, a question - how to you tell the difference between "classified so there's no evidence" and "there's nothing hidden so there's no evidence?" In both cases there's no evidence, so how do you tell the difference? And how do you tell the difference between evidence that disappeared and evidence that never existed? In both cases there's nothing. (And NO, PM Bidet did not claim the sinking was HOFE part 2 16 hours later (or until the preliminary report report was out several days later for that matter. Heck, he had 7 days left in office, did he ever say that while he was still PM?)

Also, if there was a coverup, since the new government took over just 7 days later, everybody involved in any coverup answered to the new government. Since they would have complete access to everything, why wouldn't they expose the coverup and wipe Bidet's party out of existence simply for direct political gain? It would ensure they'd be heading any coalition for a decade. That's certainly a motive.

And Vixin, you've settled on every possible version of every conceivable theory as being what actually happened in this thread except for one theory - can you figure out what that one is, and why you haven't considered it?

Vixen, you responded to this post but failed to answer these questions. Care to give it a go?

 

[Jack by the hedge]

... Please note the correct spelling of my name.

It was autocorrect changing Bildt to Bidet that caught my attention.

 

[JayUtah]

Okay. Hopefully that Hewia has the "nuclear weapons don't exist" page link displayed often would be enough to drive any non-diehard CT's-ist away from his page.

Björkman didn't venture into those other conspiracy areas until later. He was initially known only for his Estonia conspiracy theory. At the time, his employment difficulties were not yet known, and his theory was technically complicated enough that many people believed it had merit. Only later when his disgrace as a purported engineer came to light, and after his foray into obviously wrong conspiracy theories, did people start to question his original Estonia conspiracy theory. Today's Björkman really doesn't have a leg to stand on. But he wasn't always recognized as a crackpot, and didn't always supply enough nonsense to make that evident.

 

[Everett]

Indeed. And the apparent fact that he chose - knowingly - to a) distort the footage of the hull opening in order to misrepresent it and...

Wait, are you saying he did more than simply crop it to omit the rock outcrop? To make the hole look different than it actually is? If so, that's a whole other level of dishonest.

 

[Axxman300]

Wait, are you saying he did more than simply crop it to omit the rock outcrop? To make the hole look different than it actually is? If so, that's a whole other level of dishonest.

I believe that the documentary omits the fact that the wreck has rolled since the original investigation, which allowed the cracks to be better documented. The charge was that divers never investigated the cracks, but in the weeks after sinking, swimming underneath the hull would have been suicide (were it even possible). What the viewer of the documentary is left to believe - by omission - is the investigation ignored the hole.

And editing out the rocks added to the misdirection as they are clearly the cause of the damage (combined with the stresses of benthic decay).

 

[JayUtah]

Wait, are you saying he did more than simply crop it to omit the rock outcrop? To make the hole look different than it actually is? If so, that's a whole other level of dishonest.

I don't know what LondonJohn means by "distort." But Evertsson did selectively present the damage he observed along the hull. He cherry-picked the one that looked most to him like collision damage and omitted the context. He admitted there was more damage along the hull than what he reported. His description of the other damage made it clear that it was caused by impact with the seafloor and subsequent hull stress. Evertsson's insinuation that the damage he reported is most consistent with a surface collision is based in large measure on a misrepresentation of the total damage to the ship's hull.

This is important because advocates of the surface-collision theory assume JAIC was compromised and that Evertsson is interested only in the truth. Therefore Evertsson's conclusions should be given more weight. But Evertsson did not give a complete and accurate account of his observations, and he cited editorial discretion as his reason for doing so. You could call that a distorted perspective.

 

[Everett]

Current SOLAS requirements for coastal liferents do not specify anything other than Bailer, pump, knife, instructions, Paddles, Repair kit, Rescue ring, torch, Sponge and a whistle.
At the time of the Estonia sinking not even all of these were required. rescue from a raft in coastal or enclosed waters like the Baltic is expected within 6 to 12 hours so no food or water is required.

Wait WHAT? That's actually less stuff then was carried on the liferaft of a WWII US Navy fighter aircraft! I would add:

-Small battery powered light on the raft that comes on automatically when deployed, so both survivors in the water and rescuers can find it at night. (Put it on the top of the canopy extending through it and the same bulb/etc. can provide light for survivors inside as well.)

-FLARES. Again, they whole "help you be found especially at night thing."

(Those two things would have been a big help on the Estonia.)

Also, a sea die marker is probably a good idea, cheap and I doubt would take up much space.


PS: Have a link to that WWII document on progressive flooding you mentioned a few parts ago? (The damage control handbook I actually already have a hardcopy of.)

PSPS: Wouldn't a non-watertight interior cabin like those on the Estonia, with the door closed, still take maybe 2-3 minutes to flood? Even one minute with a quarter of the cabin doors closed would (I would guess anyway) throw off numerical flooding simulations.

 

[JayUtah]

...the empirical testing rather needed for its development due to scant empirical data past 20-25 degrees of list was as best as I was able to figure out never actually performed.

It's nigh unto impossible to obtain approval for human-subjects studies that would involve significant risk of injury to the subjects, especially in Europe. So we're not very likely to get good empirical data for extreme deck angles. Cost is also a factor.

But the more insidious factor is the ironic infidelity of contrived evacuation simulations to real life. People simply don't behave the same way in a drill as they do when the ship is actually sinking or the airliner is really on fire. And unfortunately it's unethical to scare your test subjects into panicking properly. This touches on a perennial debate. We want all our models in science to be based on repeatably testable observations. But ironically for this particular problem that's not always the most reliable yardstick.

Which puts they program AENEAS itself into the "boldly extrapolating past empirical data" category, relying on theoretical data alone past ~24 degrees.

It's usually not as bold as all that. The underlying math isn't frequently so nonlinear that it will fluctuate wildly in response to small shifts. If you can tune it from 0 degrees to 24 and get good fit, the rest of your fit will probably be more reliable than the error you get from subjects not panicking properly. That said, I haven't actually seen their math. I need to find Valenta's 2006 paper where he supposedly gives more detail into how he massaged the model.

So the bottom line is there's no really reliable way to test this model. The best we can offer is mathematical induction to put some reasonably credible confidence interval around the extrapolated data. But you're astute to note this is a weak part of the analysis. You raised a red flag at the right place.

My company developed a solution for the Army to do something similar for vehicular traffic in congested cities. They use it for real-time routing of convoys through hazardous urban environments. It uses the same basic principles as these evacuation models. The validation data set is constrained to historical examples, and from that we have to extrapolate a predictive model for situations we haven't yet observed. The PhDs actually did a pretty good job of keeping the model well-behaved in the absence of a full set of empirical validation methods. So while it's not ideal, it's not exactly anti-science to do what they've done here.

 

[Everett]

I believe that the documentary omits the fact that the wreck has rolled since the original investigation, which allowed the cracks to be better documented. The charge was that divers never investigated the cracks, but in the weeks after sinking, swimming underneath the hull would have been suicide (were it even possible). What the viewer of the documentary is left to believe - by omission - is the investigation ignored the hole.

And editing out the rocks added to the misdirection as they are clearly the cause of the damage (combined with the stresses of benthic decay).

I don't know what LondonJohn means by "distort." But Evertsson did selectively present the damage he observed along the hull. He cherry-picked the one that looked most to him like collision damage and omitted the context. He admitted there was more damage along the hull than what he reported. His description of the other damage made it clear that it was caused by impact with the seafloor and subsequent hull stress. Evertsson's insinuation that the damage he reported is most consistent with a surface collision is based in large measure on a misrepresentation of the total damage to the ship's hull.

This is important because advocates of the surface-collision theory assume JAIC was compromised and that Evertsson is interested only in the truth. Therefore Evertsson's conclusions should be given more weight. But Evertsson did not give a complete and accurate account of his observations, and he cited editorial discretion as his reason for doing so. You could call that a distorted perspective.

Well that's pretty damming. Pious fraud at best. Pretty likely he doesn't even believe his own documentary. I wonder if he even actually thinks there was a conspiracy.

Björkman didn't venture into those other conspiracy areas until later. He was initially known only for his Estonia conspiracy theory. At the time, his employment difficulties were not yet known, and his theory was technically complicated enough that many people believed it had merit. Only later when his disgrace as a purported engineer came to light, and after his foray into obviously wrong conspiracy theories, did people start to question his original Estonia conspiracy theory. Today's Björkman really doesn't have a leg to stand on. But he wasn't always recognized as a crackpot, and didn't always supply enough nonsense to make that evident.

Too bad he wasn't an obvious nut from the beginning then. What'd Jutta Raab do to get her drummed out of the profession, besides the Estonia "making things up" stuff?

 

[JayUtah]

...throw off numerical flooding simulations.

Just a quick note on this.

Ship flooding models have become incredibly more complex than the initial models that JAIC and similar bodies would have used. Unfortunately the complexity means there are more knobs to turn, and having more knobs means having to guess in many cases where to set those knobs.

 

[JayUtah]

Well that's pretty damming. Pious fraud at best. Pretty likely he doesn't even believe his own documentary. I wonder if he even actually thinks there was a conspiracy.

I'm reluctant to speculate on whether Evertsson believes his own claims or why he decided to tell the story the way he did. All I can say is that the difference between the evidence he presented and what is obtained and described by others would lead a knowledgeable expert to draw a significantly different conclusion. With all the data in place, there is really nothing anomalous to see there.

Too bad he wasn't an obvious nut from the beginning then.

I initially encountered him at another forum and debated only his claims about Apollo missions and nuclear weapons. As much as he tried to get us to pay attention to his theory about Estonia, we were focused on what was then the appropriate subject for that forum. It was only when I joined this forum that I saw that his Estonia stuff was equally rubbish.

 

[Everett]

Just a quick note on this.

Ship flooding models have become incredibly more complex than the initial models that JAIC and similar bodies would have used. Unfortunately the complexity means there are more knobs to turn, and having more knobs means having to guess in many cases where to set those knobs.

I was comparing to the numerical models from the late 2000's studies, actually. But that's the catch, isn't it? I don't know if models have become more complex since then, but with better hardware hopefully the new investigation can do more simulation runs or do it hardware cheaper enough to have more than one set of hardware and have more than one going at once. But it's a very good point. Might as well do a "sensitivity test" for part of one deck of running the highest plausible and lowest plausible open-door percentage to see how much that influences results.

Also the original dive footage can probably be used to get an "actual case" for the (small) parts of the interior explored, which probably is about the same everywhere assuming you only include a even number of port and starboard corridor cabin doors. The SSPA assuming all doors were open probably resulted is less accuracy, but not nearly as much as not having even enough survivor interviews to have any reliable idea what the results should look like. Right now just about anything plausible matches. Hopefully with the complete survivor interviews we'll at least have a good idea of the shape of the graph.



(Which I 'think' are not properly referred to as hatches in this case???...)

 

[JayUtah]

I was comparing to the numerical models from the late 2000's studies, actually. But that's the catch, isn't it? I don't know if models have become more complex since then...

They have.

...running the highest plausible and lowest plausible open-door percentage to see how much that influences results.

That's usually the practice. And yes, the computational capacity has increased such that it's often credible to vary more parameters and ascertain the effects. But as I said above, having more knobs to fiddle with doesn't always result in better understanding. It makes the model more flexible and more predictable when you have the right values for those parameters, but it doesn't provide much more insight when you lack them.

Hopefully with the complete survivor interviews we'll at least have a good idea of the shape of the graph.

Let's hope so.

 

[Everett]

It's nigh unto impossible to obtain approval for human-subjects studies that would involve significant risk of injury to the subjects, especially in Europe. So we're not very likely to get good empirical data for extreme deck angles. Cost is also a factor.

But the more insidious factor is the ironic infidelity of contrived evacuation simulations to real life. People simply don't behave the same way in a drill as they do when the ship is actually sinking or the airliner is really on fire. And unfortunately it's unethical to scare your test subjects into panicking properly. This touches on a perennial debate. We want all our models in science to be based on repeatably testable observations. But ironically for this particular problem that's not always the most reliable yardstick.



It's usually not as bold as all that. The underlying math isn't frequently so nonlinear that it will fluctuate wildly in response to small shifts. If you can tune it from 0 degrees to 24 and get good fit, the rest of your fit will probably be more reliable than the error you get from subjects not panicking properly. That said, I haven't actually seen their math. I need to find Valenta's 2006 paper where he supposedly gives more detail into how he massaged the model.

So the bottom line is there's no really reliable way to test this model. The best we can offer is mathematical induction to put some reasonably credible confidence interval around the extrapolated data. But you're astute to note this is a weak part of the analysis. You raised a red flag at the right place.
...

That's the other problem. Assuming you could do a test, what would it prove? Monash stated that some of their subjects ran, and then excluded them from the database. But then any real evacuation is likely going to be heavily complicated by something, be it bad weather, darkness, lack of time, smoke, blocked escape routes or the reason for the evacuation itself.

Which does seem to indicate that using this type of data to pin the starting assumptions of a study, as the Hamburg Report did, is a pretty bad idea.

IMHO in the MS Estonia case there at the point where the correct coarse of action went from "keep passengers aboard and take rapid efforts to save the ship" to "abandon ship" it was already too late.

 

[Everett]

I initially encountered him at another forum and debated only his claims about Apollo missions and nuclear weapons. As much as he tried to get us to pay attention to his theory about Estonia, we were focused on what was then the appropriate subject for that forum. It was only when I joined this forum that I saw that his Estonia stuff was equally rubbish.

The famous energy budget equations on the ApolloHoax forum, saturated with far too many references to his "marine safety inspector" background. Then he went to the BAUT forum with the same thing and got himself banned. Didn't know he had a thread about nukes though. Last I heard of Hewia he was trying to teach rocket basics to the CluesForum several years back, since unlike most of them he did believe satellites were real.

 

[Everett]

Personally, and I'll preface it by saying that I'm not an actual expert on this, I would expect the bow doors of a properly designed and built ship with average maintenance to not suffer catastrophic structural failure under the circumstances of the accident (wave action, speed) as a matter of course. Putting a lot of load on them certainly, operating toward the upper end of the operating envelope yes, but still firmly within it, although with a lower margin of safety. Honestly I would assume most captains of similar ships in the Baltic at the time would agree, considering prior incidents on various ships weren't widely known. I also don't think the captain had any way of reasonably knowing the ship was supposed to be limited to coastal work, since that piece of paperwork had been lost during the ship's change of flag and ownership. So I don't blame the crew too much for that.

Of course, I do blame the crew for their utterly incompetent response to the first signs of trouble when the Atlantic lock failed, where proper action probably would have resulted in saving the ship and preventing a disaster.

 

[Everett]

@Axxman300: You know that point you raised a while back about how the geometry of the seafloor in the area leads to very strong waves, form your training - you might want to consider bring that up professionally, since I've never seen an report consider that and it stands a decent chance of being important.

 

[Axxman300]

@Axxman300: You know that point you raised a while back about how the geometry of the seafloor in the area leads to very strong waves, form your training - you might want to consider bring that up professionally, since I've never seen an report consider that and it stands a decent chance of being important.

Estonia's sinking was an engineering problem, maintenance failure, and crew failure. The engineering problem was simple, the Estonia was not built for open-ocean transit, she was a near-shore vessel by design. The ship had only sailed in one other open-ocean storm. The captain pushed the ship too hard, driving it into the waves. A Polish ship crewman reported seeing waves breaking well over the bow, and thought Estonia was moving too fast for the sea conditions. The other ferries had taken a northern tac at a slower speed for obvious reasons.

The sea floor is being addressed in the new report, at least from what the team spokesperson has said. When I read the official report, and watched ALL of the documentaries they scream "Rogue Wave", or a damned big one striking the bow just right. Looking at the ROV footage there is rippling of the hull plating at the bow, which means the cover was indeed knocked loose, and was hammering the ship until it fell off. All caused by sailing to fast into the waves and wind.

My reading of the report shows they understood the physical conditions of the sea on the night Estonia sank.

 

[bknight]

An old saw said once that ships do two things; they float or they sink.

 

[Everett]

Estonia's sinking was an engineering problem, maintenance failure, and crew failure. The engineering problem was simple, the Estonia was not built for open-ocean transit, she was a near-shore vessel by design. The ship had only sailed in one other open-ocean storm. The captain pushed the ship too hard, driving it into the waves. A Polish ship crewman reported seeing waves breaking well over the bow, and thought Estonia was moving too fast for the sea conditions. The other ferries had taken a northern tac at a slower speed for obvious reasons...

The engineering problem, as I understand it, was that nearly every Baltic RO-RO ferry had under engineered bow door locks, due to systematic engineering design failures underestimating expected wave loads. The Estonia was one of the worst in that regard, coupled with the Estonia having a unique design flaw where the end of the ramp extended into the visor, so that the visor going over the side would result in the ramp being torn open. The Estonia wasn't the only ship with bow door damage that night, or even the first ship to lose her bow visor! (In the other bow visor loss incidents the bow visor was viable from the bridge, unlike on the Estonia, and prompt crew action saved the ship.)