MS Estonia

1994

Baltic, bow visor failure, 852 dead Location: Baltic Sea, 22 nmi south-southeast of Utö, Finland · Coordinates: 59.37°N 21.70°E · Casualties: 852 · Survivors: 137 · Depth: 80 m · Cause: bow visor failure — The bow visor's locking mechanism failed in heavy seas during the overnight run Tallinn to Stockholm on 28 September 1994. Water entered the vehicle deck; within thirty minutes she had listed past the point of righting. She rolled and sank bow-first. · Fate: continental shelf · protected grave · Type: roll-on/roll-off car ferry · Tonnage: 15,566 tons · Crew: 186 · Flag: Estonia · Launched: 1979 Baltic car ferry, Tallinn to Stockholm, the night of 28 September 1994. Her bow visor locking mechanism failed in heavy seas; water poured onto the vehicle deck and the ship listed past righting within thirty minutes. 852 dead, the deadliest peacetime European maritime disaster since the Titanic. The wreck is protected as a grave by treaty between Estonia, Sweden, and Finland, and the official cause remains contested by survivor groups and independent investigators three decades on. The Vessel The MS Estonia was a roll-on/roll-off passenger ferry built in 1980 by Meyer Werft at Papenburg, West Germany, as the Viking Sally for the Finnish operator SF Line on the Turku-Mariehamn-Stockholm route. She was 157 metres long, 15,566 gross tons, certified to carry 2,000 passengers and 460 vehicles, and featured the characteristic bow-visor opening of the 1970s-1980s Baltic ro-ro design. She was sold through a sequence of operators in the late 1980s, renamed Silja Star in 1990 and Wasa King in 1991, and was acquired in January 1993 by Estline, a joint venture between the Estonian state shipping company and the Swedish Nordström and Thulin group. She was renamed Estonia that autumn in a ceremony in Tallinn attended by the Estonian president Lennart Meri, who described her as "the ship that ties Estonia back to Europe". She took up the Tallinn-Stockholm overnight route, the principal maritime link between the newly-independent Estonian state and Western Europe. Her bow visor, the upward-lifting cover that closed over her vehicle-deck ramp, was of the Atlantic Hydraulic design common to Finnish-Swedish ferries of the period. The design had been identified in a series of internal technical reports by Finnish classification society Veritas as having potentially inadequate locking provisions under certain wave-impact conditions. None of these reports had been published; the visor design remained approved. She had been built, inspected, and certified to all applicable standards. The Disaster She capsized and sank in under forty minutes. At 01:22 the wireless operator Andres Tammes transmitted a Mayday; at 01:30 contact was lost. The Finnish Helsinki Radio received the Mayday and dispatched the nearest response vessels, the passing ferries Silja Europa, Mariella, and Isabella, each of which diverted to the scene. The Mariella was the first to arrive, at 02:12; by then the Estonia had been gone for 30 minutes. Of the 989 aboard, 137 survived. 852 died. Most of the dead were asleep in their cabins at the moment of the visor failure; the capsize was so rapid that those who did reach the upper decks had perhaps six to eight minutes between the sounding of the general alarm at 01:24 and the final capsize. Water temperature that night was 10 degrees Celsius at the surface; a human in those conditions without an insulated survival suit will lose capacity for purposeful movement in fifteen minutes. The rescue helicopters from Turku and Helsinki worked a debris field of life rafts and survival suits through the sunrise, pulling people alive from water they had been in for three hours. The Swedish, Finnish, and Estonian governments established a Joint Accident Investigation Commission (JAIC) within 24 hours. The wreck was located that afternoon at 80 metres, on her starboard side, 22 nautical miles south-southeast of Utö. The visor was found a nautical mile north of the main wreck, confirming the sequence of the failure.