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

[Vixen]

Vixen please explain what about Jay's comment is so ridiculous?

The utterly ridiculous assertion that the Lusitania was sunk because it ran on time.

 

[Vixen]

Isn't that exactly what you were claiming with your talk of submarines firing torpedoes at the ship?

the point was about weather and tide effecting the arrival time of a ship,

Some harbours can't be approached in bad weather with wave and wind from certain directions.
It's the same for tide conditions, I know a number of harbours that are only approachable at certain conditions of the tide, the Bar limits entry even when the anchorage has enough depth. Some of them are even a challenge to cross at high tide.

The ferries do not run under severe weather conditions. Obviously, if a ship is delayed by an unforeseen tornado or a hurricane, that won't draw any criticism from either the passengers or the management. Safety first.

 

[Vixen]

Locks were still in the close position but they were ripped apart.

Of course they were.

 

[Vixen]

Seems that the words 'strong wave' do not appear in the section you quoted. Are they elsewhere in the report?

OK, so they were weak waves. Is that any better?

What do you understand by 'wave impact'?

 

[Vixen]

No, there wouldn't have been any visible damage to the bulbous bow. There was, however, damage to the skirting abutting where the bottom lock would have been (that damage was wholly consistent with the bow visor swinging free from its top hinges and banging down against the skirting repeatedly.

See, here's what very likely happened:

First, almost certainly, cumulative fatigue in the lugs of the bottom lock (aided and abetted by the crew's practice of hammering the bolt through the lugs) caused the lugs to fail when - in a "straw that broke the camel's back" scenario - the strong waves battering against the visor put stresses on the bottom lock that were just sufficient to tip the lugs over into total failure.

The visor then started pulling up as the ship rode each oncoming wave. This in turn put the side locks under stresses for which they'd never been designed. They then both failed in turn.

The visor was now just hanging from its top hinges. It was totally free to swing up and down as the ship continued ploughing up and down through the oncoming swell. Each time the visor hit on the area where the bottom lock had been, it caused a very loud bang to reverberate through the steel structure of the ship. Which was heard by many, many people, over a period of at least several minutes.

Finally, the top pivots in turn succumbed to the stress loads which in turn were way beyond their design parameters. They failed, and the bow visor pulled itself off the ship. As it did so, it fatally compromised the bow ramp with which it had an interconnection.

Once the bow visor had completely detached and the bow ramp had been pulled so far out of position, the ship was scooping up vast volumes of seawater through its bow opening every single time it dug into an oncoming swell. That seawater gushed into the open vehicle deck, and started finding its way (via gravity) to all the decks below. And that's how the ship soon capsized and sank.


Any questions?

Oh dear. A totally illiterate interpretation of the laws of physics. Whilst the metal was indeed corroded, cracked and fatigued (cf Hoffmeister), under such conditions, the Atlantic lock would not have failed first as it was not the weakest or most stressed. Secondly, it was normal for that vessel to journey with up to 100 tonnes of sea water swishing about inside the bow visor due to a gap in the starboard side. There is a red mattress and various blankets and towels visible in the videos of the car ramp, which the JAIC dismisses as having come loose from a clothes storage. You and it fail to even ask why would such a storage space be by the car ramp, if not to be used for anything other than to plug the incoming seawater and rain? What other use would such a storage facility have on a car deck?

In addition, the only way water to enter the superstructure pre-capsize would be through the upper pipes situated along the middle of the ship and middle stairwell. If the ship was listing to starboards, then the water is accumulating to the right not the centre and as it leant towards stern you can then visualise the water level would be towards aft and starboards. It doesn't go anywhere near the centre of the ship for such slow flooding to occur, as happened with Oceanos. So, to get the necessary amount of water to ingress the vessel, the JAIC has to feed us the totally implausible scenario of it floating at 90° without fully capsizing - when we know that within seconds of a ship passing its angle of stability (nearer 40°, when the engines cut out as a result) it should overturn completely (as did the Oceanos after 18 hours of starboard list at about 30°, before it passed the point of no return and capsized within nine minutes completely).


But you believe it floated on its superstructure of twenty minutes whilst the windows and inner dividers broke - again the waves - even though the reinforced glass is designed to withstand wind speeds of 41m/s.

How can "seawater gushed into the open vehicle deck, and started finding its way (via gravity) to all the decks below" when it was at a 90° angle??? The water via gravity would descend to the starboard walls, not the lower decks!!!

 

[Vixen]

Vixen also signally fails to recognise/understand that what happened to the bottom lock was a cumulative fatigue-based failure of the lugs which had probably been progressing for months (or even years) previously. The waves and swells encountered that night by the bow visor just happened to take the lugs over the tipping point into failure. And from that point, the die was cast.

Vixen seems to be labouring under the delusion that the bow visor's bottom lock lugs went from being in perfect working & metallurgical order at (say) 9pm, then failed totally (from a standing start) by 1am - simply because of those "few strong waves". That seems to be a staple part of the CT diet when it comes to the Estonia disaster: "Yeah right! A few fairly strong waves were all it took to knock off the bow visor! The JAIC is telling you lies, sheeple!!"

Any evidence for this?

The Atlantic lock hadn't been used effectively for a long time.

 

[Andy_Ross]

What he says is that the locks were cracked but not torn off (see 4:05 into the video ).

From Chapter 8 of the report

All three attachment lugs for the bottom lock installation had failed. The locking bolt remained attached to the actuating cylinder piston rod, which was bent. The remains of the attachment lugs and the locking bolt were removed from the wreck during the diving operation for close investigation.

It was noted that the weld beads between the lugs and the bolt housing and the support bushing respectively had failed partly in the bead itself and partly in the fusion zones. The steel plate of the lugs had failed in their thinnest sections, generally in a forward-upward direction. The two lugs for the bolt housing were twisted towards the port side.

The lugs had separated from the visor by shearing of the visor plating around the attachment welds, leaving rectangular holes in the visor bulkhead plating. The tear pattern and deformation of the bulkhead generally indicated that the lugs had been torn off in a downwards and aft direction.

All four hinge bushing housings had separated from the side plates of the hinge arms. The failure had generally taken place at the fillet welds and the rim of the lug, surrounding the aftward facing part of the housing.

The welds had failed generally in the fusion zones between either the weld beads and the housing or the bead and the side plates.

The failure of the visor actuating mechanism was caused by failure of the bottom mounting platform of the port side actuator and full extension of the starboard side actuator, whereupon the mounting platform was pulled out of the hull.

The platform was pulled out of the hull by shearing of the plating and failure of welds around the entire platform, sized about 600 x 450 mm. The bulb bars separated from the adjacent bulkheads because of weld failure.

The two port side hinges at the bottom of the ramp had failed because of tension fracture of the ramp-mounted lugs.
The mounting of the pins for the upper locking hooks was heavily twisted. The locking hooks could not be inspected in detail but were confirmed to be in locked position. The hydraulic actuators were in extended (locked) position.
Three of the four side locking bolts were in their extended position and the mating boxes on the ramp side beams had been ripped open

 

[Vixen]

LMAO!!

Do you really believe that the position of the JAIC - and, for that matter, the position of most of the participants in this thread - is that all three locks on the bow visor had to have "fallen off simultaneously"??

You really know nothing at all of value about this case. Your ignorance of such basic facts - especially when you consistently boast of being some sort of expert on the case and the underlying science - is embarrassing and is getting extremely tiresome. You don't know what you're talking about, and every single day you prove that more and more.

That is what they effectively claim. So even London John is beginning to understand the absurdity of this.

We are making progress. Slowly but surely.

 

[Andy_Ross]

Hindsight is a fine thing.

and yet all the other ships in the area had slowed down and taken weather routing.

Any captain worth his rings should have been aware that the conditions warranted slowing down and even changing course.

Manuals of seamanship and navigation have entire chapters dedicated to how ships of different size and configuration should be handled in different conditions and how to recognise when action needs to be taken.

That the captain of the Estonia disregarded this is very telling.

 

[Vixen]

Once again....

Please re-familiarise yourself with the "straw that broke the camel's back" analogy.

Then picture yourself trying to say something like "You're trying to tell me that all it took was the load of one single straw to cause the camel's back to break?! Can't you see what a hoax that must be!!"

And once you've done that, you can apply your learning to the bottom-lock lugs of the bow visor on the Estonia.

You're welcome.

But it wasn't 'one camel' (the lock): it was THREE of them.

 

[Andy_Ross]

According to the JAIC the Atlantic lock failed first (when one wonders whether it was ever even locked at all, or even particularly needed) and this caused the other two locks, virtually at the same time, to also fail. Think about it. The two upper locks were not dependent on the bottom lock other than marginally (re bearing tension). When one wheel comes off a wagon, not all the other wheels come off the same time or even nanoseconds after. Yet the JAIC are asking us all to suspend credulity and just believe.

It was locked, the lugs were damaged when it failed.

How are wheels on a cart anything like the locks on the bow visor?

 

[Andy_Ross]

Let's imagine for argument's sake 'wave impact' caused the bow visor to fall off. The JAIC affirm it was the bottom lock that failed first, then the port and then the starboard.

An independent expert mechanical engineer specialist who has written literally hundreds of papers on machine tools, nuts and bolts, probably one of the foremost experts in Europe (not up to your standards, of course), Dr-Ing Hans-Werner Hoffmeister then of Hamburg Technical University caried out his own tests, as appointed by Meyer Werft, the shipbuilders of the vessel, and his wholly scientific results (= which means they are replicable under the same conditions) showed that in fact, the weakest link was the starboard locks, nuts and bolts, then the port and last of all, the bottom lock, and this is the sequence they would have failed had such a hypothetical force was exerted on the bow visor.

What makes an expert in machine tools and nuts and bolts an expert in ship construction?
How did he test this?
Why does a difference in the failure sequence mean the bow didn't fail?
Doesn't his report confirm the failure of the visor locks?

 

[Andy_Ross]

A moment's pause for thought should tell you it is nonsense.

Why?

 

[Andy_Ross]

The utterly ridiculous assertion that the Lusitania was sunk because it ran on time.

That wasn't a claim made.
If you read it again it says that the ship could only pass a certain point at certain conditions of the tide.

 

[Andy_Ross]

The ferries do not run under severe weather conditions. Obviously, if a ship is delayed by an unforeseen tornado or a hurricane, that won't draw any criticism from either the passengers or the management. Safety first.

And yet they were all running in a storm and other ferries slowed and took weather routing.

Why was the Estonia not also taking these precautions if it was 'safety first'?

 

[Andy_Ross]

Oh dear. A totally illiterate interpretation of the laws of physics. Whilst the metal was indeed corroded, cracked and fatigued (cf Hoffmeister), under such conditions, the Atlantic lock would not have failed first as it was not the weakest or most stressed. Secondly, it was normal for that vessel to journey with up to 100 tonnes of sea water swishing about inside the bow visor due to a gap in the starboard side. There is a red mattress and various blankets and towels visible in the videos of the car ramp, which the JAIC dismisses as having come loose from a clothes storage. You and it fail to even ask why would such a storage space be by the car ramp, if not to be used for anything other than to plug the incoming seawater and rain? What other use would such a storage facility have on a car deck?

In addition, the only way water to enter the superstructure pre-capsize would be through the upper pipes situated along the middle of the ship and middle stairwell. If the ship was listing to starboards, then the water is accumulating to the right not the centre and as it leant towards stern you can then visualise the water level would be towards aft and starboards. It doesn't go anywhere near the centre of the ship for such slow flooding to occur, as happened with Oceanos. So, to get the necessary amount of water to ingress the vessel, the JAIC has to feed us the totally implausible scenario of it floating at 90° without fully capsizing - when we know that within seconds of a ship passing its angle of stability (nearer 40°, when the engines cut out as a result) it should overturn completely (as did the Oceanos after 18 hours of starboard list at about 30°, before it passed the point of no return and capsized within nine minutes completely).


But you believe it floated on its superstructure of twenty minutes whilst the windows and inner dividers broke - again the waves - even though the reinforced glass is designed to withstand wind speeds of 41m/s.

How can "seawater gushed into the open vehicle deck, and started finding its way (via gravity) to all the decks below" when it was at a 90° angle??? The water via gravity would descend to the starboard walls, not the lower decks!!!

I don't understand any of that.

 

[zooterkin]

It was locked, the lugs were damaged when it failed.

How are wheels on a cart anything like the locks on the bow visor?

I suspect Vixen is referring to this documentary film

 

[Andy_Ross]

Any evidence for this?

The Atlantic lock hadn't been used effectively for a long time.

What is your evidence for this claim?
The bottom lock was in the locked position.

From the report

All three attachment lugs for the bottom lock installation had failed. The locking bolt remained attached to the actuating cylinder piston rod, which was bent.

When the locking bolt was removed from the actuator piston rod, the actuator was in fully extended, i.e. locked, position. The piston rod was bent upwards, away from the forepeak deck

 

[Steve]

OK, so they were weak waves. Is that any better?

What do you understand by 'wave impact'?

Nah, the report does not say that either. Your reading and quoting abilities are abysmal. Reflects poorly on your honesty and reliability.

My understanding of 'wave impact' in the context of the report, and has been repeatedly explained to you, is sustained impact of various sized waves over a period of time resulting in progressive metal fatigue and subsequent failure. The "few wave impacts" (actual words in the report, fyi) were the final straw that instigated the failure.

 

[MarkCorrigan]

The utterly ridiculous assertion that the Lusitania was sunk because it ran on time.

Please quote the post where Jay said this.