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

[Axxman300]

Thanks for your input. It is actually a simple current affairs news report. What happened was that a Swedish filmmaker, Henrik Evertsson, was making a documentary about the 1997 disaster and was surprised to note a massive breach in the hull.

Well, what actually happened was he found the crack, and saw the rock outcrop that caused it, and left that part out. Even after he'd noted the wreck had shifted since it first sank.

There is no mention of this in the original JAIC report that came out circa 2000.

Because in 1994/1995, the ship was laying at an angle that didn't allow divers or ROVs to get under the hull.

Statement in support

• the accident happened during the fall of the USSR and the Berlin Wall comming down

• 
  
  The wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union followed in 1991. The Estonia sank in 1994.
  
  

  the USSR was being demilitarised in Estonia

  
  The Russians were being kicked out of Estonia.
  
  

  there was a large amount of smuggling on the black market of ex-USSR materiel

  And? (spoiler alert, most Soviet gear is borderline line junk. See Ukraine)
  
  

  [*]a nuclear plant was decommissioned. There was a lot of a radioactive material on the black market.

  
  And?
  
  

  [*]The Swedish Prime Minister at the time, Carl Bildt, was 'procuring' USSR military materiel, such as space technology via the passenger ferry from Estonia to Sweden.

  
  Mostly for comic relief.
  
  

  [*]This smuggling by Sweden was top secret but was verified in the Riksdag circa 2005 and is minuted.

  
  And?
  
  

  [*]According to wikileaks, Bildt was a CIA operative.

  
  Which sounds cool unless you read the actual report, and discover the Swedish government was cooperating with the US and NATO countries because they were (and are) cooperating with Sweden.
  
  
  

  [*]It follows that IF the accident was connected with this smuggling, then:
  [*]the accident could have been caused by Russian sabotage in revenge
  [*]the accident could be a Swedish own-goal as it were, and as such classified information.

  
  Could have been extraterrestrial technology too.
  
  

  [*]The accident could be due to Estonian criminal gangs. Estonian engineer, Silva Linde was jailed for 14 years for drug smuggling a couple of years later.

  
  No.
  
  

  [*]With new evidence that the JAIC didn't mention, it is natural the survivors and familes of the victims want an explanation.
  [*]A breach in the hull would explain why it sank so rapidly.

  
  No, but the open bow ramp, combined with the ship sailing at flank speed into the huge waves was the better and true explanation.
  
  

  [*]The victims included children, newboarn babies, pregnant women, ordinary men and women plus a group of 70 Stockholm civil police staff.

Has nothing to do with a bad bow and ramp design, for a ship never designed for open ocean transit, sailing too fast into high seas.

The hardest lesson I had to learn and accept, as a former conspiracy theorist, is the fact that it is possible for a number of things to be true, without any of them being directly linked. All the things you listed may be true, but none of them have anything to do with poor seamanship, and structural failure.

The MS Estonia is getting the same 3D treatment RMS Titanic received. They've already posted high resolution side-scan sonar images of the wreck. No signs of sabotage.

 

[lobosrul5]

AIUI the Concordia wasn't out at open sea and the captain abandoned ship. From what I recall, had it been out at open sea, it would have been a massive disaster.

Hmm, I think she probably wouldn't have run aground on the open seas.

 

[lobosrul5]

The MS Estonia is getting the same 3D treatment RMS Titanic received. They've already posted high resolution side-scan sonar images of the wreck. No signs of sabotage.

Oh, then whoever made the scans is in on the conspiracy... There is no other possible explanation.

 

[JayUtah]

The hardest lesson I had to learn and accept, as a former conspiracy theorist, is the fact that it is possible for a number of things to be true, without any of them being directly linked. All the things you listed may be true, but none of them have anything to do with poor seamanship, and structural failure.

This is what separates real investigators from armchair detectives. Once you have enough experience as an investigator who can be held accountable for their findings, you learn that the most helpful line is not the one that goes through all the points.

Conspiracy theorists and armchair investigators inevitably fall victim to a bias created by focus. When something bad happens, investigations focus attention on things that wouldn't otherwise come to light. That attention will include not only the evidence pertinent to what happened, but also all the other seedy nonsense that was going on that has nothing to do with it.

That stuff happens all the time. A flight attendant will do a line of coke in the bathroom before a flight. A maintenance supervisor will sign off on something "just this once" without inspecting it, so that he can make his date with the woman he just met. A sailor will be told that the corrosion he sees on a critical mechanism is "normal." A passenger will sneak his souvenir cigarette lighter into his carry-on. Another passenger will have just heard that his boss committed securities fraud. A kid puts a penny on a rail. A baggage handler puts a bottle of local whiskey into the hold for his cousin at the plane's destination. The copilot will power through a migraine he hasn't told anyone about. A ship owner will casually "mention" the possibility of staff cuts and also that he's concerned about on-time arrival rates. A traffic controller will drop his pen and lean over to pick it up. A mechanic will run out of bolts for the baggage door actuator and reuse one of the only-slightly-stripped ones he took out. A girl will call in bomb threat to her school. A company will cancel its contract with the airline. A politician will divorce his wife. A train driver will leave the locomotive cab unattended while he takes a leak.

If nothing happens, no one finds about about this stuff. Or no one assigns it any special significance. It's one of a hundred flights, train trips, sea voyages, or cab rides that happen in a day. Even traditionally brittle systems are often resilient enough to abide a single failure. And lots of these discoverable details really do remain irrelevant. We ignore successful trials.

But if something does happen, all this detail comes to light. And because we don't know similar detail about non-failed trials, we often believe that all the sordid goings-on we uncover in the investigation or in its periphery make this trial suspicious above all others. Since they "don't happen" in other cases, we wrongly believe that a complete, satisfactory explanation must account for everything that's possible to observe. The multiple threads of causality that run though any given time and place don't suddenly combine just because one of them leads to a catastrophe.

To a real investigator, parsimony is far more important than imagination or cleverness. The goal is not to draw as intricate a line as possible through all the dots. The goal is to draw the straightest line possible that hits the most dots. Very wiggly lines represent scenarios that simply don't happen in the real world. They're great fun for conspiracy theorists and armchair detectives. They make for gripping amateur blogs and true-crime podcasts. They make us feel clever and shrewd. But they ultimately provide no useful answers.

 

[MBDK]

In my previous post I contrasted the testimonies of the Titanic and Estonia survivors. Had you bothered to read it, you understand my point that the Titanic survivors were mixed on weather the ship broke in two, something not confirmed until 1985. I pointed out that the Titanic passengers knew the ship was sinking, and watched the boat go down from lifeboats in a flat calm sea. The contrast between their experience and that of the Estonia is stark. Estonia's passengers did not know the ship was in trouble until it began to list. They quickly found themselves in the water, in stormy seas, in freezing temperatures. The fact that the Titanic survivors saw different things under mostly an ideal situation should clue a reasonable person into how unreliable eye witness testimony in dire situations can be.

In lieu of your enlightenment on this matter, I see my post #3330 was incorrect regarding the context of your contrast in testimony post. Since I accepted Vixen's comment at face value that, "Axxman said in the case of the Titanic there were witnesses to the fact it hit an iceberg", I erroneously assumed, and wrote - "Axxman300's point being the witnesses viewed the definitive initiating cause of the disaster." Though it made logical sense to me that this could have been your argument, it is my mistake for not following through on confirming your original post on the matter. My apologies.

Regardless, you are correct, of course, that eye witness testimony is abysmal for reconstruction of actual events.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Regardless, you are correct, of course, that eye witness testimony is abysmal for reconstruction of actual events.

I wouldn't say that eye witness testimony is necessarily 'abysmal'. You just have to be aware of its limitations.

 

[MBDK]

I wouldn't say that eye witness testimony is necessarily 'abysmal'. You just have to be aware of its limitations.

It is for the minutia required for a detailed analysis. Which is what this thread goes into, thus making those limitations even more relevant and their argumentative impact abysmally poor.

 

[Roger Ramjets]

It is for the minutia required for a detailed analysis. Which is what this thread goes into, thus making those limitations even more relevant and their argumentative impact abysmally poor.

We hardly need a detailed analysis to eliminate submarine rammings and secret weapons of the KGB.

CHAPTER 6 SUMMARY OF TESTIMONIES BY SURVIVORS

Plenty of useful testimony there. After reading it I don't ever want to go on an open sea trip again.

The last time I took a ferry the sea was very rough and something came loose in the cargo deck below, banging and crashing around constantly. I went out on deck to get some air and waves started crashing over the deck. I hung tight onto the handrail hoping to not be washed overboard for about half an hour, until we got into calmer water. Then a crew member came out with a towel so I could dry myself off. I went into the cabin area and the captain announced that this would be the last trip of the season. "No kidding!" I thought. At least our car didn't get washed overboard like had happened to some people in other crossings...

 

[Roger Ramjets]

Estonia's passengers did not know the ship was in trouble until it began to list. They quickly found themselves in the water, in stormy seas, in freezing temperatures. The fact that the Titanic survivors saw different things under mostly an ideal situation should clue a reasonable person into how unreliable eye witness testimony in dire situations can be.

I have to disagree with you there. Many witnesses thought the ship was in trouble before it began to list, and several thought that something was wrong at the bow. It didn't sink quickly, but went though a series of abrupt lists that had passengers fighting to get out. Eventually it rolled over with some people still on the hull, then it sank. Several witnesses in the water saw this happen in the moonlight.

The Titanic's situation was not ideal. After the lights went out everything was dark and it was impossible to know whether the ship had broken up. You could surmise that breaking up was the cause of the lights going out, but you couldn't know that.

Not that it matters. Nobody reported a submarine ramming it or explosives going off. It was perfectly obvious why it sank and any small variations in witness testimony have no bearing on that fact.

The Titanic hit an iceberg. No rational person would deny that fact. "Oh, but that's not why it sank." is just stupid. In the case of the Estonia, many witnesses reported extremely violent seas before the proximate signs of trouble. Arguing about exactly what broke and how that made it sink is silly. The cause was the ocean acting on a vessel not designed to handle it. Stupid conspiracy theories are even sillier. Why deny the obvious?

 

[MBDK]

We hardly need a detailed analysis to eliminate submarine rammings and secret weapons of the KGB.

Straw Man. I have still made no claim as to the actual cause. Now, I do understand your position is that the CT element should be dismissed entirely, and the evidence for one has been thoroughly trounced. However, I fail to see why you eschew detailed analysis, since it provides valuable documentation of actual weaknesses and failures, and only buries those CTs further. I guess Sweden thinks so, too, with their 25 million (euros?) allocated for further investigations this year.

https://www.government.se/press-releases/2023/04/continued-investigations-of-ms-estonia/

 

[Vixen]

Bad news, they've had a good idea of what happened to Titanic since the summer on 1912. What these fantastic scans give us is a clear image of the wreck, and hopefully the debris field for the first time in it's entirety. There are commercial dive operations every summer on Titanic, the wreck has been under yearly observation since the Cameron movie.

What these cans will never show is the precise damage from the iceberg. That part of the hull is under 30 to 60 feet of mud, and well out of view.



I recommend reading a hardback book once in a while. Or you can wander into any of the dozens of Titanic messageboards on the internet.

There is no speculation. The conversation between Ismay and Smith was overheard. White Star wanted to set a record. And when you look at the pictures taken the next day by and of Carpathia, you can see all the ice floating in the area. The hows and whys of the sinking are technical exercises, and are relevant to engineers, and marine safety experts, and ners like me. But they don't alter the fact that Titanic struck an iceberg and sank.



And?

In my previous post I contrasted the testimonies of the Titanic and Estonia survivors. Had you bothered to read it, you understand my point that the Titanic survivors were mixed on weather the ship broke in two, something not confirmed until 1985. I pointed out that the Titanic passengers knew the ship was sinking, and watched the boat go down from lifeboats in a flat calm sea. The contrast between their experience and that of the Estonia is stark. Estonia's passengers did not know the ship was in trouble until it began to list. They quickly found themselves in the water, in stormy seas, in freezing temperatures. The fact that the Titanic survivors saw different things under mostly an ideal situation should clue a reasonable person into how unreliable eye witness testimony in dire situations can be.



Which I never said.

There is actually a Titanic exhibition at my local maritime museum just now as there were 65 Finns on board the Titanic when it went down.

The thing about the 137 survivors' police statements is that in most case (a) the witness statement taken was within a day or so of the incident, (b) police are trained to be only interested in what the witness themself saw, experienced or heard. Thus when so many said they heard what was experienced as 'explosions' then they corroborate each other and is not just faulty perception or false memory due to hearsay and speculation on the news. The survivors were treated like suspects, according to some, claiming they were frog-marched on to buses to be kept in hospital wards in isolation. Fair enough because at that stage the police cannot rule out crime.

 

[Vixen]

Like Christopher Bollyn?

What about Bollyn? My quoting someone is not an endorsement of what they are saying.

 

[Myriad]

That's right. The families of the Hillsborough victims should just accept the original report into the disaster and what the national Murdoch newspaper said about Liverpudlians being a bunch of thugs and hooligans who caused the disaster themselves, and what's more, picked the pockets of the crushed dead.

How dare people ask questions or expect a proper investigation into how an accident happened in a public place, such as a football ground or on a public passenger ferry? Bloody bastards should just shut up.

The information I summarized in the post I quoted came to light as a result of investigation. As I said in that original post, when this thread began I was content to regard the sinking as a tragic accident caused primarily by a storm at sea. An "act of God" as insurance industry terminology would put it. But it turns out that it actually resulted from the cumulative effects of the operators' bad decisions, so bad and with consequences so easily foreseeable that in my mind they cross the line into depraved indifference.

 

[Vixen]

Well, what actually happened was he found the crack, and saw the rock outcrop that caused it, and left that part out. Even after he'd noted the wreck had shifted since it first sank.




Because in 1994/1995, the ship was laying at an angle that didn't allow divers or ROVs to get under the hull.





The wall fell in 1989. The Soviet Union followed in 1991. The Estonia sank in 1994.



The Russians were being kicked out of Estonia.


And? (spoiler alert, most Soviet gear is borderline line junk. See Ukraine)



And?



Mostly for comic relief.



And?



Which sounds cool unless you read the actual report, and discover the Swedish government was cooperating with the US and NATO countries because they were (and are) cooperating with Sweden.




Could have been extraterrestrial technology too.



No.



No, but the open bow ramp, combined with the ship sailing at flank speed into the huge waves was the better and true explanation.



Has nothing to do with a bad bow and ramp design, for a ship never designed for open ocean transit, sailing too fast into high seas.

The hardest lesson I had to learn and accept, as a former conspiracy theorist, is the fact that it is possible for a number of things to be true, without any of them being directly linked. All the things you listed may be true, but none of them have anything to do with poor seamanship, and structural failure.

The MS Estonia is getting the same 3D treatment RMS Titanic received. They've already posted high resolution side-scan sonar images of the wreck. No signs of sabotage.

Any half-educated bod on the investigations board would be well aware of the Baltic Sea's rocky seabed. Eastern Sweden, Estonia and the whole of Finland used to be the equivalent of the Northern Alps - it was a mountainous region with peaks as high as 4km, covering the whole area. It was the passing of the Ice Age that caused the formation of the Baltic Sea in the first place.

These days of course, due to eventual erosion, no mountain (>587 of them) is higher than 300m. Likewise the rocky bed of the Baltic varies tremendously from between just 30m deep to exceptionally deep. It would have been known that wherever the Estonia landed it would be near some rock or other. Where it did land, only the beam was near hard rock, the rest lies on an incline with a trench alongside on moravian sediment (these are fine soil-like granules composed of ground quartz and other sediment.

It is not a given that a rocky outcrop caused the massive breach along the hull, which is in almost a straight line. It is a working theory.

It doesn't follow that because it landed amongst rocks that therefore the rocks did the damage.

For a 15,000 tonne vessel to sink in 80 metres of water, it will and with a force of some 803.6 meganewtons. However, that doesn't mean it will ipso facto fracture the ship.

 

[LondonJohn]

Where it (The Estonia) did land, only the beam was near hard rock, the rest lies on an incline with a trench alongside on moravian sediment (these are fine soil-like granules composed of ground quartz and other sediment.

Ummmmmm..... the beam of a ship is not a physical part of the ship: it is its (widest) width (in normal orientation when afloat). To write something like "only the beam was near hard rock" is utterly nonsensical, and further illustrates your ignorance of the subject matter.

For a 15,000 tonne vessel to sink in 80 metres of water, it will and with a force of some 803.6 meganewtons. However, that doesn't mean it will ipso facto fracture the ship.

This is pitiful. Unless you know the relative buoyancy of the ship just before it hit the sea bed, you can have no understanding whatsoever of the force with which it impacted the sea bed. You're scientifically illiterate.

 

[Vixen]

Ummmmmm..... the beam of a ship is not a physical part of the ship: it is its (widest) width (in normal orientation when afloat). To write something like "only the beam was near hard rock" is utterly nonsensical, and further illustrates your ignorance of the subject matter.






This is pitiful. Unless you know the relative buoyancy of the ship just before it hit the sea bed, you can have no understanding whatsoever of the force with which it impacted the sea bed. You're scientifically illiterate.

Are you sure about that?

Using https://www.aichatting.net/ with the prompt "how much force does a vessel weighing 15,000 tonnes exert on the seabed when it hits the bottom of 80m deep water"

Please see the updated rule 4 regarding AI-generated information.

Posted By: zooterkin

To determine the force exerted when a ship hits the seabed, we need to consider the concept of pressure. Pressure is defined as force per unit area. We can calculate the force exerted by the ship using the formula:

Force = Pressure × Area

Given that the ship hits the seabed at a depth of 80 meters, we need to calculate the pressure at that depth. The pressure in a fluid increases with depth due to the weight of the fluid above. The pressure at a specific depth can be calculated using the formula:

Pressure = Density × Gravitational acceleration × Depth

The density of seawater is typically around 1,025 kilograms per cubic meter, and the gravitational acceleration is approximately 9.8 meters per second squared.

Let's calculate the force exerted by the ship:

Pressure = Density × Gravitational acceleration × Depth
= 1,025 kg/m³ × 9.8 m/s² × 80 m
≈ 803,600 Pa (Pascals)

Next, we need to determine the area over which the force is distributed. Without additional information about the shape or size of the ship's contact area, it is difficult to provide an exact value. However, we can assume a simple approximation that the area of contact is the same as the ship's bottom surface area.

Let's say the ship has a bottom surface area of 1000 square meters (just for illustration purposes).

Force = Pressure × Area
= 803,600 Pa × 1000 m²
= 803,600,000 N (Newtons)

Therefore, if the ship weighs 15,000 tonnes and hits the seabed at a depth of 80 meters, it exerts an approximate force of 803,600,000 Newtons (or 803.6 meganewtons) on the seabed. Please note that these calculations are based on estimations and assumptions, and the actual force may vary depending on the ship's design and the specific circumstances of the impact.

 

[Steve]

Ummmmmm..... the beam of a ship is not a physical part of the ship: it is its (widest) width (in normal orientation when afloat). To write something like "only the beam was near hard rock" is utterly nonsensical, and further illustrates your ignorance of the subject matter.






This is pitiful. Unless you know the relative buoyancy of the ship just before it hit the sea bed, you can have no understanding whatsoever of the force with which it impacted the sea bed. You're scientifically illiterate.

"Forget it. (S)he's rolling." /Boone

 

[LondonJohn]

Are you sure about that?


To determine the force exerted when a ship hits the seabed, we need to consider the concept of pressure. Pressure is defined as force per unit area. We can calculate the force exerted by the ship using the formula:

Force = Pressure × Area

Given that the ship hits the seabed at a depth of 80 meters, we need to calculate the pressure at that depth. The pressure in a fluid increases with depth due to the weight of the fluid above. The pressure at a specific depth can be calculated using the formula:

Pressure = Density × Gravitational acceleration × Depth

The density of seawater is typically around 1,025 kilograms per cubic meter, and the gravitational acceleration is approximately 9.8 meters per second squared.

Let's calculate the force exerted by the ship:

Pressure = Density × Gravitational acceleration × Depth
= 1,025 kg/m³ × 9.8 m/s² × 80 m
≈ 803,600 Pa (Pascals)

Next, we need to determine the area over which the force is distributed. Without additional information about the shape or size of the ship's contact area, it is difficult to provide an exact value. However, we can assume a simple approximation that the area of contact is the same as the ship's bottom surface area.

Let's say the ship has a bottom surface area of 1000 square meters (just for illustration purposes).

Force = Pressure × Area
= 803,600 Pa × 1000 m²
= 803,600,000 N (Newtons)

Therefore, if the ship weighs 15,000 tonnes and hits the seabed at a depth of 80 meters, it exerts an approximate force of 803,600,000 Newtons (or 803.6 meganewtons) on the seabed. Please note that these calculations are based on estimations and assumptions, and the actual force may vary depending on the ship's design and the specific circumstances of the impact.

Yes. I'm sure about that.

 

[JayUtah]

Are you sure about that?

Oh God, Vixen, please stop pretending you understand physics. Please stop pretending you're the teacher here.

To determine...

No. This is comically wrong on so many levels.

 

[JayUtah]

What about Bollyn? My quoting someone is not an endorsement of what they are saying.

You cited him as a source. You literally asked us to respect his purported authority on the point being made and the facts being reported. Explain how that can be done without endorsing what they are saying.