30 Years ago today - the largest UK maritime disaster since the Titanic

I know (knew) some of the divers who worked on her.

They said that with the ship in its side the engine control log panel was very difficult to reach... but somehow it had been smashed.
 
And completely unnecessary. The dangers of Ro-Ro ferries had been clearly established in the Princess Victoria sinking - the scars of which are still painful in Stranraer and Larne - in 1953, so P&O had absolutely no excuse whatsoever for their sloppy, negligent, penny-pinching practice.

Edit: Shortly before he died, my father told me of the day on which, as a geography student, he was in Greenock and Port Glasgow doing some field work. There was a fierce storm raging, and he saw a large ship on the Clyde beaten back by the conditions. "If it's like this in the shelter of the Cloch", he thought, "what on earth's it like in the North Channel?" At that moment the Princess Victoria was sinking off the Copeland Islands.
 
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I remember sailing off Dover at night a couple of years before the disaster and seeing a ferry leave harbour at a good lick. The surprising sight was the lit up car deck fully visible and a guy with a broom sweeping between the cars. It all looked well above the waterline with the wake mostly higher just aft of the bow doors. Complacency and habit, I guess.
 
RupertW said:
I remember sailing off Dover at night a couple of years before the disaster and seeing a ferry leave harbour at a good lick. The surprising sight was the lit up car deck fully visible and a guy with a broom sweeping between the cars. It all looked well above the waterline with the wake mostly higher just aft of the bow doors. Complacency and habit, I guess.
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They had to flood ballast tanks at Zeebrugge to get the bow low enough to load, that was one of quite a number of factors. They blamed the bosun for falling asleep, but there was an awful lot more wrong waiting for the accident to happen.
 
lpdsn said:
They had to flood ballast tanks at Zeebrugge to get the bow low enough to load, that was one of quite a number of factors. They blamed the bosun for falling asleep, but there was an awful lot more wrong waiting for the accident to happen.
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The assistant bo'sun was supposed to shut the door but was asleep in his bunk. The bo'sun saw that the door was open but didn't close it or tell anybody because that wasn't his job. The first officer - who was seriously injured in the accident - saw that the door was open but claimed that he thought he saw the assistant bo'sun on his way to close it. The captain assumed that the door was closed. There was no indicator in the bridge because P&O refused to pay for systems to check that crew members were doing their jobs.

The whole thing was a series of contributory cockups, but most blame must go to P&O, who worked their staff to exhaustion and ignored repeated safety warnings to save a few quid.
 
JumbleDuck said:
The assistant bo'sun was supposed to shut the door but was asleep in his bunk. The bo'sun saw that the door was open but didn't close it or tell anybody because that wasn't his job. The first officer - who was seriously injured in the accident - saw that the door was open but claimed that he thought he saw the assistant bo'sun on his way to close it. The captain assumed that the door was closed. There was no indicator in the bridge because P&O refused to pay for systems to check that crew members were doing their jobs.

The whole thing was a series of contributory cockups, but most blame must go to P&O, who worked their staff to exhaustion and ignored repeated safety warnings to save a few quid.
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Humm well I was in East Kent during that horrendous episode with that ferry, and mixed with 'others' who lived in that area, seems that the 'Dover Ferry's' hired staff during the Summer Months and laid them off at end of the Season. The question of 'drinking' on board when on duty came up quite often in discussions with those whom regularly manned those Ferry's, whether it had any bearing in this particular case I do not know.
But it always came up in discussions that the Ferry Crew were under a lot of pressure to hit the departure 'time gate' allowed them, so to start the journey on time was most important every time.
 
Capt Popeye said:
Ferry Crew were under a lot of pressure to hit the departure 'time gate' allowed them, so to start the journey on time was most important every time.
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Law was changed after this particular episode to prevent company owners and others further up the food chain avoiding prosecution in cases such as this..
 
AndrewL said:
I would recommend listening to this BBC radio drama about the disaster. It was very interesting and goes into quite a lot of the details.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b08g2r99
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Humm thank you for posting that prog, very very moving and interesting dramatized account.

I as working in East Kent just after the stranding, and as events unfolded I got to know some of the principles mentioned in the radio prog, twas a difficult time indeed, the relationship between those principles and others I found to be strange, some who knew then socially, as neighbors or family wise mainly supported those principles; others who did not rather resented them as perhaps showing a dreadful lack of something in their characters.
I had to engage the press on occasions when they (the press) invaded company premises or staked it out wanting an interview or photograph of those principles.
 
The crewman who failed to close the bow door died last year.A decent sort by all accounts who made one tragic mistake which blighted his and many others lives.
 
I studied Nautical Science at UWIST (now Cardiff University) in the mid 1980's. We were give a assignment to calculate the stability of a car roll-on roll-off ship of this type. The lack of internal water tight compartments and free surface effect (water sloshing about from side to side) meant that nobody in the class could calculate a legal rating for the ship. We thought that we were missing something.

When we handed in the assignments our Professor confirmed that these types of ships did not meet the required standards but had an exemption. It was an accident waiting to happen. Ships of this type are still exempt from the rules - money overriding safety!!

After University I got a job in Dover and played rugby with a lot of guys on the ferries. There was a big drinking culture. It was not unusual for a crew member to play rugby, drink for the evening and then go straight to work. I am not saying that this contributed to the accident, I have no knowledge of the circumstances on that day.

My wife complains when I travel on such a ship that I will not get a sleeping cabin. I stay sober / awake and near a life boat to this day.
 
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Biggles Wader said:
The crewman who failed to close the bow door died last year.A decent sort by all accounts who made one tragic mistake which blighted his and many others lives.
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In many ways I think he was the least to blame. He shouldn't have been asleep in his bunk, but there are many reasons why he might not have closed the door (illness or injury, for example) and the system had no interest in checking whether he had been able to do what he was supposed to, because it cost too much to do so.
 
I spent many long days fishing with my father on the harbour wall in Zeebrugge in the seventies and I clearly remember that the Townsend Thoresen ferries quite regularly departed the harbour with their bow doors open.. On the older ships the bridge team could not fail to spot that, as the complete bow swang upwards. Not so on the Herald, but it was rather common practice to secure the ship as it proceeded to sea.
As luck would have it, I took a ferry from Oostende to Dover that very same afternoon, a few hours earlier. The sea was very quiet, there was not much wind, so we had an uneventful crossing. It was only when I arrived in Southampton by train later that evening that I learned of the tragedy.
We were due to sail a boat back to Belgium, but the next days the weather turned foul so we went back by ferry, not a cheery prospect at the time.
 
JumbleDuck said:
In many ways I think he was the least to blame. He shouldn't have been asleep in his bunk, but there are many reasons why he might not have closed the door (illness or injury, for example) and the system had no interest in checking whether he had been able to do what he was supposed to, because it cost too much to do so.
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Humm quite agree with your statement kind Sir, having talked, through work, many times with the person who appeared to have been responsible or in command at the time for the checking of the bow doors closing on that day and I have formed my own ideas on the reasons that a attention lapse led to the incident.

Its not apparently referred to in any of the reports that I have since read, but it might be an additional reason that a crew member was asleep in his bunk, who knows?
 
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