Ship sunk in the red sea + than thousand dead.

Dreadful thing...an Egyptian big passenger ship sunk...more than 1000 people dead. How can this happen with just a little bit of bad weather?
I remember that last year a big Italian passenger boat was also in big trouble in the Med..Are these boats safe?

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/4676916.stm

"MENA said the Saint Catherine, another ferry travelling the same route overnight in the opposite direction, received a distress message in which the Al Salam captain said his ship was in danger of sinking. The agency did not say how the Saint Catherine reacted.

Coastal stations received no SOS message from the crew, said Adel Shukri, head of administration at the Cairo headquarters of el-Salam Maritime Navigation.

The weather had been very poor overnight on the Saudi side of the Red Sea, with heavy winds and rain, he said. But visibility should have been good out at sea, he added."

http://www.alertnet.org/thenews/newsdesk/L03606631.htm

"Rear Adm. Mahfouz Marzouk, head of the Suez Port Authority, said a collision along the congested waterway could not have been to blame.

"It is not possible because we covered all these areas with radar," he told CNN. "If it were something like that, of course, we would have another ship or a distress signal or something like that. We didn't pick up any contact by wireless communication or by radar."

It was not immediately clear what caused the ferry to sink."

http://edition.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/02/03/egypt.ship/index.html

 

Islamic pirates, maybe?

 

Allah moves in mysterious ways my brothers! Was it not some time shortly that these same people were getting a wee bit upset about some cartoons?

It would appear he does have a sense of humour - and an interesting one at that! I like that 'omnipotent one' he's somebody after my own heart!

 

OK, I'll stick my neck out!

I would venture to speculate, that this vessel was designed to meet ALL of the "relevant" rules of the classification societys representing the various naval architecture schools of vessel design...

I am betting it even passed "rigid stability criteria" and also had ALL the required life rafts and fire fighting equip etc etc etc.

You know what - I'm prepared to go so far as to say - that the fact it satisfys all those criteria's was probably a contributing factor to it's sinking.

I honestly believe (with some justification), that all the darn rules and regulations end up with vessels designed to meet them - rather than meet their primary role...of being a boat - first and foremost!

My own vessel, is supposedly "state of the art" and designed to be able to carry it's rated passenger load in safety, and meets EVERY rule of the so called experts - designed to do just that.

In my own opinion, it's probably not safe to be let out of the bath tub in anything over 5 knots of breeze.

Why?

Because its down right dangerous in a following sea.

The sponsons added to meet the strict static stability criteria, in a following sea tend to want to dig in and make the vessel heel almost to angle of flooding, and cause it to want to violently slew against the helm & broach!

It is a design disaster, but - "it meets all the rules".

Frankly the rules are F*(&%Ked...and the naval Architects who dreamed them up and had them enacted into legislation, want to be hung by their balls IMHO.

I liken it to a camel....being a horse designed by a committee...

IMO - some "expert" somewhere, and some crazy rules enacted into legislation probably, caused the loss of so many lives - not that any of the experts will want to shoulder any of the blame.

Soo..

Who wants to take responsibility for the crap design of a surveyed passenger vessel - with handling chartacterists - so unsafe it shouldn't be aloowed outside a river? even tho it meets all the required rules?

Anyone putting their hand up?

Didn't think so.

Panty wads the lot of them!

Cheers!

 

Hi Trouty, Maybe the age of this particular vessel was a contributing factor - apparently 35 years old - being that age (and having recently been on a 25 year old vessel that held "valid certificates" and had worked not far from the Red Sea) I can easily picture a vessel that on paper complied with the laws in force but in reality was a disaster waiting to happen.

 

saw the ship on tv and it seemed on the tall side, my first thought was stability in 6 to 7 wind by 3 to 4 meter waves.
i was in safaga on a bit smaller ship, the bridge showed big black holes marking places where navigation panels once were, but that was 20 years back.
very very nice waters there and the storm may have been a suprise?

 

I thought the same, in the pictures i have seen it appeared to be unusually tall for it's length.

 

Rigger you got it - i'm over 35 years old have all the necessary papers and am still a bit crook!

Wouldn't think that maybe a few cowrie shells changed hands do you! No that's not the Egyptian way is it?

 

well... talking about low qualitie crews...this is too bad to be true...


"Survivors of the Red Sea ferry disaster have said the captain and his crew were first to flee the burning ship by lifeboat and abandoned them to their fate."

"Shirin Hasan, the head of the maritime section of the Egyptian Ministry of Transport, told state television that the fire seemed to have broken out in a vehicle on the lower car deck. "

Rifat Said, 34, a passenger from Giza, near Cairo, said: "We asked why there was smoke and they told us they were putting out the fire but it got worse. The ferry sailed on for two hours listing to the side. Then it just went onto its side and within five minutes it had sunk."

"There was a fire but the crew stopped the people from putting on lifejackets so that it wouldn't cause a panic."

"We were wearing lifejackets but they told us there was nothing wrong, told us to take them off and they took away the lifejackets," he said. "Then the boat started to sink and the captain took a boat and left."

It was not immediately clear what happened to the captain, named al-Said Umar, or why coastguards did not appear to have received any distress signal from the ferry.

State news agency MENA said that on Friday morning a ship did pick up a message from the ferry's captain saying he was in danger of sinking. It did not say how the ship reacted. "

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/D0ABA196-CC68-4C93-A336-A3592A087C0D.htm

 

"According to shipping expert Yvan Perchoc, the Al-Salam Baccaccio 98 is one of several old Italian ferries to which extra levels were added to boost passenger capacity, sometimes threefold."

http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/1D6BC8BD-D39D-4A09-8B86-7FE6DBBA4BC0.htm

 

So we have an old, poorly maintained vessel, with modifications that substantially raised its centre of mass, being operated by an incompetent crew and carrying insufficient safety equipment, in bad weather, at maximum load.
If the above does not spell "disaster about to happen" to you, please hit yourself on the head with your keyboard.
Sadly, with no regulations in place to stop this kind of thing, disasters like this will continue to happen. Needless to say, I'm going to be rather more cautious about what vehicles I travel in.....

 

Hi Marshmat,
I think you may find there are rules in place to stop this, but with corruption abounding in many places, accidents like this one will keep happening. When it is cheaper to bribe the officials than to comply with the rules, guess what the company will do.
All the rules in the world will not prevent it happening unless they are enforced. Mind you along with enforcement of the rules / regs, you need well trained crews and something called "good seamanship" being used, without these ships will continue to be lost as well as lives.

 

Regulations are only regulations if they're enforced.... if they aren't, they're just a lot of meaningless scrap paper.
Thankfully, ships are still the world's safest mode of transport, even with the culture of bribery and corruption that flourishes in so many places. Even still, there's no reason why we shouldn't try to make them safer.

 

First I'll say I'm surprised at the silly and unfounded statements above, especially concerning such an important subject. I expected better here.

Most of the ships crew are missing, yet you jump to stating they were incompetent? I'm sorry but it's way too soon to decide that. The vessel was not at maximum load, very much less as far as vehicles.

It sounds like the capsize was caused by free-surface effect of the water used in fighting the fire.

Unfortunately we've (here in BC Canada) come within a hair's breadth of the same scenario. This can happen when management of the vessel is taken out of the hands of the captain.
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Please take the below (from CNN) with caution, this is one person's view!

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Ferry 'pressed on despite fire'
Testimony: Water sprayed on fire caused vessel to tilt
Sunday, February 5, 2006; Posted: 12:07 p.m. EST (17:07 GMT)
SAFAGA, Egypt (CNN) -- A crew member of the ferry that sank Friday in the Red Sea said Sunday water used to extinguish a fire aboard caused the ship to list in heavy winds.
The crew member said the fire occurred shortly after the ferry with 1,401 people aboard left the Saudi port of Doha, but that the ship's captain chose to continue the 195-kilometer (120-mile) voyage to Egypt.
Radar contact with the ship was lost at midnight Thursday, three hours after it left port.
The crew member said the fire alarm sounded as a result of a fire in a truck on the second level of the ship.
The ship's cargo included 22 cars and 16 trucks, said Maher Abdel-Wahed, Egypt's attorney general.
Transportation Minister Mohammed Mansour said initial reports indicated the fire started in a storage luggage area, then spread to the ship's mechanical room.
In the first detailed accounting of who was aboard the ship, Abdel Wahed told the government-owned newspaper Al-Ahram that the ferry was carrying 1,193 Egyptians, 99 Saudis, six Syrians, a resident of the United Arab Emirates, a Palestinian, an Indonesian, a Sudanese, a Filipino, a Yemeni, and a Canadian.
In addition, it was carrying 96 crew members, all of them Egyptian.
The total is just shy of the ship's capacity of 1,487 passengers.
Around 1,000 people are feared dead in the accident. Officials say about 400 people have been rescued.
The Cairo-based company that owned the 35-year-old ferry defended the vessel's performance and said Saturday that it was too soon to determine the cause of the sinking.
"It is quite early to determine the actual causes as all the authorities and company efforts now are mainly concerned with the search-and-rescue operations as first priority," said El Salam Maritime Transport Co.
The company said the vessel had complied "with all the international safety regulations and treaties and has been certified to make international voyages." It said crew members were certified to do their jobs and were "highly trained."
The ship was thought to be carrying people who attended the recent Hajj, the annual Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in Saudi Arabia.
The company identified the ship captain as Sayed Omar, a 1965 graduate of the Egyptian naval academy who was certified as a master in 1972.
He joined El Salam Maritime Transport Company in 1998.
The company said only 17 of the 96 crew members had been reported alive.
Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on Saturday visited a hospital where victims were being treated and told reporters the government would pay emergency compensation to survivors and relatives of the dead.
Survivors are to receive 15,000 Egyptian pounds ($2,600) and families of the dead are to get twice that.
Hundreds of relatives -- many of them sobbing -- kept vigil near the Safaga port during the weekend, waiting to find out the fate of the missing. Some angry relatives threw rocks at police as they awaited information.
CNN's Ben Wedeman.

 

If any one has been to Egypt then you would undestand how this could happen due to
1. The state of the ship
2. The state of the vehicles
3. The attitude to life / death (it was Allah's will)

Unfortunately the western world standards are not adhered to or considered in spite of any legal requirements