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

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Vixen said:
Part 12 of the Fokus Group presentation. One key finding of Margus Kurm expedition Sept 2021: the bow visor locks did not break off.



English subtitles.

Did you really believe that all three locks could fall off simultaneously?
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Locks were still in the close position but they were ripped apart.
 
Vixen said:
13.2.5

JAIC Report


There is no damage seen to the bulbous bow.
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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?
 
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Edited by sarge: 
removed minor rule 0/12 violations


As you are (hopefully) aware by now, ignoring questions doesn't make them go away. In that spirit, I again reiterate my questions from post #2004 (again, spoilered for space):

junkshop said:
...if this:

Vixen said:
At least my posts are sourced, cited and properly referenced, even if people don't like them. (cf. James Meek.)
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source
and this:

Vixen said:
I never make anything up. All of my comments are sourced, unless I state 'IMV'.
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source
are true, how do you explain this:

Vixen said:
The Third Reich nazis deliberately and wickedly targetted the Lusitania. Even had she been half an hour late, the U-Boat would still have been skulking in waiting.
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?
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JayUtah said:
Try to think about why.



The report mentions a sequence of waves. You keep rewriting that to be a single "strong wave." You've been corrected too many times now to count.
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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!!"
 
Vixen said:
Part 12 of the Fokus Group presentation. One key finding of Margus Kurm expedition Sept 2021: the bow visor locks did not break off.



English subtitles.

Did you really believe that all three locks could fall off simultaneously?
Click to expand...


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.
 
Vixen said:
Or posters who unfailingly believe the hoax of a 'strong wave' because 'that's what the report says'.
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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.
 
After all, you have claimed it was a torpedo, or a mine, or a British sub, or a Swedish sub, or a Russian sub or...there seems to no end to the claims you are willing to make.
 
There is impact damage to the bow in the form of rippling caused by the hammering of the bow-visor. That's kind of a big clue. The bow doesn't have that kind of damage, and it struck the bottom first. In fact, I can't think of a large wreck that has that kind of damage, even from impact from the bottom at great depth.
 
Vixen said:
Heh. It was a careless mistake as I didn't check the date the Lusitania sank. Nobody is mocking Jay Utah though, for his ridiculous example of what horrors can befall a ship sailing on schedule.


Or posters who unfailingly believe the hoax of a 'strong wave' because 'that's what the report says'.
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Steve said:
I know this is futile but anyway - show us where the report says "strong wave".
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Vixen said:
13.2.5

Shortly after one o'clock a few wave impacts on the visor caused the visor attachments to fail completely The visor started cutting openings in the weather deck plating and associated structures. Soon the back wall of the visor housing came into contact with the ramp, hitting its upper edge and thus breaking its locks. The ramp fell forwards and remained resting inside the visor. In a few minutes the visor started falling forwards.

The ramp then followed the visor in a forward, tumbling motion. The starboard side actuator was extended to its full length and was torn out of the hull during the final stage of the sequence. The visor subsequently tilted over the stem, left the ramp fully open allowing large amounts of water to enter the car deck, and as it fell collided with the bulbous bow of the vessel.
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JAIC Report


There is no damage seen to the bulbous bow.
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Can you show us where the report says, “strong wave”?
 
Vixen said:
You will concede that Carl Bildt did urge within hours of the accident that all bow visors of all ferries should be inspected...?
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I have no clue what Bildt said within hours of accident, but I do know that your reporting is not accurate. So whatever it was, it wasn't what you claim it to be.

And did not Lehtola take up the same theme?
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I notice that you don't give a reference to Lehtola saying that the bow visor faile on the day one.

Because there is none.

Prove me wrong. Show where Lehtola said that on Day One. I dare and double-dare you. Prove me wrong.

It is utter nonsense to deduct from Sillaste and Kadak's interviews that the bow visor fell off. All they claimed to see was water on the car deck. And we have to ask ourselves why Sillaste and Kadak were so eagerly pushed in front of the TV cameras.
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The guys are still in the hospital when they are being filmed.

They were interviewed because the TV crew interviewed a lot of people and they were surviving crew members. Then their interview was chosen to news broadcast because they were the only interviewed survivors that knew anything concrete about what happened to the ship.

You are trying to get us believe that in the few hours after the accident Bildt had time to come up with a fake story, coach it to someone who then flew to Turku to find surviving crew members, find Sillaste and Kadak in the hospital, somehow convince them to lie to the cameras, and teach the story to them. Yeah, right. Sounds sensible.

How can this guy all of 160cm be the expert opinion on why a 15,500-tonne ship sank? It is all complete and utter nonsense.
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So not being a six foot tall blonde übermensch is a strike against Sillaste's credibility? I wonder if he is actually one of those beasts in the fields that populated Estonia before the Germans came there to civilize them. (Note to onlookers: that's how Vixen described medieval Estonians a few years ago in another thread: "living like beast in the fields." )
 
Vixen said:
However, it is a fact that Carl Bildt ordered all of the ferries to be inspected for bow visor faults.
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I'm glad to see that you finally have understood what Bildt did.

  1. He specifically did not name the bow visor as the cause of the accident in a press conference or in a press release, instead he deferred to the JAIC.
  2. He did not instruct JAIC only to look at the Bow Visor.
  3. He was not the first to report about the Bow Visor - from what I've found so far, that was the news agency TT, while Bildt was on the plane to Finland.
  4. He did appoint the Government agency Statens Haverikommision (Swedish Accident Investigation Authority) for the JAIC.
  5. Then he (via his Minister of Transport) instructed the Swedish Maritime Administration to review Bow Visors at other ferries
.

Sources for the above - Analysgruppen, as has been linked if you go back to the quote from the previous iteration of the thread that I responded with in my previous post.

My thoughts on the last point: If I'm the Prime Minister, and got told that bow visor potentially had failed, causing a disaster, I would also ensure that the relevant authority acted immediately. It's a simple risk exercise:
  • If it was the bow visor, by acting I could potentially save lives.
  • It it was not the bow visor, by acting I've just caused some additional work for a government agency and some ferry operators.
 

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JayUtah said:
No. And that's not the contemplated failure sequence.
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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.
 
JayUtah said:
No. And that's not the contemplated failure sequence.
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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.
 
Captain_Swoop said:
The point of the Estonia reference was to do with my point that a ship can't always enter a harbour on a fixed schedule. weather and tide have to be taken in to consideration.

Where has anyone said that a 'strong wave' was the cause?

What is your evidence for a hoax? This thread has been running for months and you haven't given us anything yet.
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A moment's pause for thought should tell you it is nonsense.
 
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