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The sinking of MS Estonia: Case Reopened Part VII

Vixen said:
This thread is about the sinking of the Estonia. I am not sure what it is you are so upset about.
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What part of my post seems like I'm upset? You claim to be applying an even, dispassionate hand to the question of whether the captain of Estonia was murdered by gunshot. I pointed out here https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=14262646#post14262646 where you show that your trust in the only source for that accusation comes from unwarranted assumptions you've made. Any interest in explaining why you're acting so favorably to the conspiracy theory?

In this post, https://www.internationalskeptics.com/forums/showthread.php?postid=14262704#post14262704 you raised the larger question of being interested in the world around you as an explanation for why you are especially interested in what happened to Estonia. If you're unwilling to explain behavior we've seen from you that contradicts that explanation, then it seems proper not to believe you.
 
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Vixen said:
Whilst it is true the vessel was designed to cross between Finland and Sweden, which she did for many years, OTOH it is hardly true that she traversed across 'open ocean'. The journey from Tallinn to Helsinki for example is just 90km so not really different. I don't believe this is a factor in the accident.
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I can say without reservation that the body of water in which a vessel sinks absolutely is a factor in said sinking. Every single time.
 
Vixen said:
Whilst it is true the vessel was designed to cross between Finland and Sweden, which she did for many years, OTOH it is hardly true that she traversed across 'open ocean'. The journey from Tallinn to Helsinki for example is just 90km so not really different. I don't believe this is a factor in the accident.
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And this is why you fail.

Rivers and near-shore environments are not the same as ocean transit. That little stretch of water between England and Ireland is not too wide, but there are hundreds of wrecks dotting the sea floor in that area. I live on the Monterey Bay. The conditions within or bay due to the shape of the coastline, and our spectacular submarine canyon dividing north and south make for a calm southern shoreline. Calmer than San Francisco Bay to the point where Monterey was the U.S. point-of-entry for clipper ships coming from the far east...But...When the waters off Point Pinos, and the Big Sur Coast on down are open ocean. The water behaves differently, the waves are more powerful at any size, and their intensity can change without warning. The beach at Little Sur will never be open to the public for this reason.

Plus, the old report and the new report both state the bow was never designed to sail in the waters under the conditions in which she sank.

As for the Mayday, this is very interesting because the Mayday was made by Tammes, the second or third officer. It should have been made by the Captain, yet this is not even mentioned in the JAIC report. According to the watchman* he was on the bridge as he had been behind him as he was ascending the stairs. The impression of the nearby Mariella captain was that Tammes or whoever, had been trying to communicate earlier ( ship near Sweden claims to have picked up an attempted message earlier). The fact Tammes was unable to give the coordinates immediately (it was NOT GPS) and his colleague could be heard calling them out in the second recorded attempt indicates he was unable to see them, no doubt clinging on for dear life at a severe list. He was using a hand held device which again raises the question of why not use the much better quality radio devices on the bridge.
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Do you even read what you write?

The ship sank in about 15 minutes. The roll was progressively fast, and the bridge crew was caught off guard thanks to nobody checking the car deck, and the bow. Panic set in, and gravity did the rest.

As the captain of nearby Silja Europa told the press, the storm was no worse than usual for a September night.
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Uh huh, yet he and the other ferries sailed at lower speeds than Estonia. And the fact the Estonia is now on the bottom of the Baltic suggests otherwise.

And no, Estonia is not a crap country with a crap crew.

*This guy was jailed for drug smuggling later and was amongst the first off the ship, so who knows how reliable his testimony is.
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Wow, way to contradict yourself.

Also, I never said crap, I said Estonia is a country notorious for ineptitude, corruption, and half-assing things. Same as the other countries that have had catastrophic ferry sinkings in the past 30 years.
 
Foster Zygote said:
I grew up near the southern end of Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes are notorious dangerous for shipping.
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My first serious sailing experience was sailing tall ships on the Great Lakes. People who don't respect the power and anger of the "mere" lakes tend to become the dead that the lakes are infamous for not giving up.
 
Vixen said:
*This guy was jailed for drug smuggling later and was amongst the first off the ship, so who knows how reliable his testimony is.
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What does his being amongst the first off the ship have to do with the reliability of his testimony? How much more slowly should he have gotten off the ship for his testimony to be reliable?
 
Reformed Offlian said:
What does his being amongst the first off the ship have to do with the reliability of his testimony? How much more slowly should he have gotten off the ship for his testimony to be reliable?
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Ah, because it's notable, as if he was in a hurry.

Came off in the middle of the pack? Trying not to look conspicuous.

Near the end? Something to hide!
 
Vixen said:
Sorry, my bad. Rabe is an independent journalist.

Your comments seem to include a lot of vulgar phrases which I shall not comment on.
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You can quit the performative pearl-clutching, I didn't ask you to comment on my mode of address. With that said, I shall do my best to use prude-safe language in this post, lest my earthy manner offend your delicate sensibilities.

You seem to forget that most of the people you engage with on this thread have been here for years, so when you pop back up to repost your bat-poop conspiracies we aren't going to be convinced.

We know your sources are doo-doo.

We know that your theories are silly, unevidenced nonsense.

We have danced this dance before. We have memories.

In all honesty though, I must give you kudos for enticing me into engaging with your fantasy world again. You have an undeniable talent for weaponising frustration.

I know you will never honestly respond to critiques, fact checks and debunkings of your fantastical claims. This is fine, though. These things are not done to draw you into an honest response, but rather to illustrate the dishonesty of you arguments. Maybe that's unfair, maybe your arguments are misinformed, mistaken, erroneous, just plain wrong, or the result of brainwashing by evil space ghosts.

Ultimately, it doesn't matter because it's all bollocks sorry, orchids.


Anyway, the ship sank because it was sailed full tilt into stormy waters with a compromised bow, and none of your fantasies, fictions or fabrications have yet convinced me otherwise.
 
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GlennB said:
Ah, because it's notable, as if he was in a hurry.

Came off in the middle of the pack? Trying not to look conspicuous.

Near the end? Something to hide!
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And if he'd been even farther back, his testimony would be *completely* worthless.
 
Foster Zygote said:
I grew up near the southern end of Lake Michigan. The Great Lakes are notorious dangerous for shipping.
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When this topic first came up I pulled up the bathymetry for the Baltic, and the area of the sinking. I looked at the wind reports from that night, and I looked at the currents from the Baltic. The first thing that jumps out was how the shallow sea is, and who the wind - might - effect the currents as they pass around Gotland. While Baltic is not known for currents, the wind would certainly create them, and the combination of the wind and the fresh water mixing from rivers thick with snow-melted cold water sets up the perfect conditions for large rogue waves right in the area where MS Estonia got thwacked.

Had Estonia left an hour earlier, or an hour later she probably would have sailed on without incident. As it was, she was in the wrong place at the right time. And the captain was driving the ship far too fast for those conditions.
 
Jack by the hedge said:
We've all seen the TV footage of 'Piht'. It's on YouTube. It's not him. Conspiracy loons leap to conclude the bit with him in must have been edited out by Sinister Powers.

It shows survivors arriving at hospital in Finland, none of whom is Piht, but when the footage was shown on German TV news, someone mistakenly thought they saw him. So the police went to the TV station to get a full copy of the broadcast footage, which lovers of conspiracy theories rewrite in their heads as the Men In Black turning up to remove and destroy all copies of the footage, ignoring the illogic of thinking that doing so at one German TV station would erase what was recorded in Finland and sent to goodness knows how many places.

This is just as bonkers as people who watch footage of the moon landings while claiming NASA "lost all the tapes" of the very thing they're watching.

I'm feeling more than a little sorry for this dead horse. How many more floggings must it endure?
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The one circulating on youtube is clearly not him. In addition a journalist from YLE (=Finnish equivalent of BBC) had an archive of old broadcasting tapes and he or she retrieved the original tape from some archive box, and it was the same as the one circulating. From the ID on the ambulance, the one circulating is taken at Huddinge Hospital in Stockholm but the one it is claimed was seized from the German station was supposedly Piht at Turku University Hospital (TYKS). Several people rang each other to say they saw him on TV. How true this is, who knows? And of course, when people are grief stricken there is a phenomenon (it has happened to me) when you think you see the departed person on the street but then you look again and it is not them after all (of course).

But the thing is, tv recordings can be seized and wiped. There is nothing wrong with Rabe investigating how come so many people claimed to have seen him. Plus, of course, Piht was reported by a Swedish marine executive as meeting with Bildt and the next morning when Bildt was to visit Turku. Helsingin Sanomat (- Finnish equivalent to the TIMES [as it used to be]) and the EVENING STANDARD in London both also reported this. Piht was later reported as last being seen at Helsinki, by reputable news sources, not to mention the Interpol Arrest Warrant for him. So, yes, it is quite correct to find out how this could happen.
 
Axxman300 said:
And this is why you fail.

Rivers and near-shore environments are not the same as ocean transit. That little stretch of water between England and Ireland is not too wide, but there are hundreds of wrecks dotting the sea floor in that area. I live on the Monterey Bay. The conditions within or bay due to the shape of the coastline, and our spectacular submarine canyon dividing north and south make for a calm southern shoreline. Calmer than San Francisco Bay to the point where Monterey was the U.S. point-of-entry for clipper ships coming from the far east...But...When the waters off Point Pinos, and the Big Sur Coast on down are open ocean. The water behaves differently, the waves are more powerful at any size, and their intensity can change without warning. The beach at Little Sur will never be open to the public for this reason.

Plus, the old report and the new report both state the bow was never designed to sail in the waters under the conditions in which she sank.



Do you even read what you write?

The ship sank in about 15 minutes. The roll was progressively fast, and the bridge crew was caught off guard thanks to nobody checking the car deck, and the bow. Panic set in, and gravity did the rest.



Uh huh, yet he and the other ferries sailed at lower speeds than Estonia. And the fact the Estonia is now on the bottom of the Baltic suggests otherwise.



Wow, way to contradict yourself.

Also, I never said crap, I said Estonia is a country notorious for ineptitude, corruption, and half-assing things. Same as the other countries that have had catastrophic ferry sinkings in the past 30 years.
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It sank in about 35 minutes. It wasn't going particularly fast. The captains of Silja Europa and Mariella both said it was normal for the three ships to travel towards Stockholm together as of a certain point (two were coming from Helsinki, Estonia from Tallinn). Captain Thoresson said he could see Estonia alongside of him and Europa said it was slightly ahead. IIRC Europa and Mariella were doing about 11mn.

The known corruption (from Russia's POV) wasn't from Estonia in this case, it was the Swedes smuggling out USSR military materiel.
 
Axxman300 said:
When this topic first came up I pulled up the bathymetry for the Baltic, and the area of the sinking. I looked at the wind reports from that night, and I looked at the currents from the Baltic. The first thing that jumps out was how the shallow sea is, and who the wind - might - effect the currents as they pass around Gotland. While Baltic is not known for currents, the wind would certainly create them, and the combination of the wind and the fresh water mixing from rivers thick with snow-melted cold water sets up the perfect conditions for large rogue waves right in the area where MS Estonia got thwacked.

Had Estonia left an hour earlier, or an hour later she probably would have sailed on without incident. As it was, she was in the wrong place at the right time. And the captain was driving the ship far too fast for those conditions.
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You should come up and visit the Baltic. The archipelago is one of the wonders of the world. It used to be a lake and then the ice age melting caused it to expand to meet the North Sea further west. The Baltic isn't particularly known for tumultuous waves. There are literally hundreds, maybe even thousands of wrecks, but most of them were sunk due to hitting rocks or because of war. Anecdotal, I know, but the North Sea is infinitely rougher than the Baltic, with the most horrendous storms I have ever experienced.

As for 'snow melted cold water' the accident was at the end of September. Sure, Lapland has its first snow generally towards the end of August but the Baltic stops at the Bay of Bothnia which is not really regarded as Lapland. As far south as Helsinki/Tallinn to Stockholm, the first snow is generally around late October but usually only a light flurry, with the real snow happening late December to March, so that would not have been a factor here.
 
It wasn't about the Baltic being the most violent sea on the planet. It's about careless disregard for the obvious and ominous accumulation of multiple needless risk factors. People who underestimate cumulative risks drown in placid ponds as well as tsunamis, crash on suburban streets as well as racetracks, and die on Mount Washington as well as Mount Everest.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, if you were careful to avoid sailing in bad weather.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, in bad weather, if you were careful to keep her well maintained.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, in bad weather, when poorly maintained, if you were careful to keep it in perfect trim.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, in bad weather, when poorly maintained, and in an unbalanced trim condition, if you were steaming with a following wind and waves.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, in bad weather, when poorly maintained, and in an unbalanced trim condition, straight into oncoming wind and waves, if you reduced your speed.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, in bad weather, when poorly maintained, and in an unbalanced trim condition, straight into oncoming wind and waves, at full speed, if your crew were continuously vigilant about the operating condition of every critical part of the vessel and responsive to all warning signs.

You might get away with operating a vessel in waters it was never designed to operate in, in bad weather, when poorly maintained, and in an unbalanced trim condition, straight into oncoming wind and waves, at full speed, with you and your crew slacking off and disregarding warning signs, if you were very lucky.

But we know the vessel, crew, and passengers were not very lucky that night. The reason luck was left as their only (and ultimately inadequate) hope for collective survival was all those other factors that the people who should have known better idiotically allowed to stack up against them without even noticing until it was too late.
 
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