MS Herald of Free Enterprise

1987

Zeebrugge, bow doors open, ninety seconds Location: off Zeebrugge harbor, Belgian coast · Coordinates: 51.37°N 3.18°E · Casualties: 193 · Survivors: ~346 · Depth: 10 m (half-submerged) · Cause: flooded · capsized — Sailed from Zeebrugge with her inner and outer bow doors still open on the evening of 6 March 1987. The assistant bosun responsible for closing them was asleep in his cabin; the first officer on the bridge assumed they were closed. Water flooded the vehicle deck as she accelerated; she capsized onto a sandbar in under ninety seconds. · Fate: shallow water · recovered · scrapped · Type: roll-on/roll-off ferry · Townsend Thoresen · Tonnage: 7,951 tons · Crew: 80 · Flag: United Kingdom · Launched: 1980 Ro-ro ferry, Zeebrugge to Dover, 6 March 1987. Sailed with both bow doors still open; the assistant bosun responsible for closing them was asleep in his cabin. Water poured onto the vehicle deck as she accelerated into the harbor mouth, and she capsized in under ninety seconds. 193 dead; the inquest coined the phrase 'corporate manslaughter' and rewrote international ro-ro ferry safety. The Vessel The MS Herald of Free Enterprise was a drive-through roll-on/roll-off ferry built at Bremer Vulkan Schiffbau in Bremen in 1980 for the British ferry operator Townsend Thoresen, from November 1986 European Ferries. She was 131 metres long, 7,951 gross tons, certified to carry 1,400 passengers, 350 cars, or a combination; her design speed was 22 knots on twin screws. She was the eighth "Spirit" class ship on the short-sea Dover Strait routes. The Spirit class was the first generation of the full-drive-through ferry, a design in which cars and lorries entered the ship at the bow and exited at the stern without turning. The architecture required a continuous vehicle deck the length of the ship, with bow and stern doors that opened as two pairs: outer doors swinging outward, and an inner door closing over the vehicle ramp itself. The inner doors were the ship's watertight seal. They had to be closed before the ship could move. The closing of the inner doors was the responsibility of the assistant bosun. This was a matter of settled practice rather than formal procedure; no written standing order specified who should confirm closure or how confirmation should be passed to the bridge. The company's operational manuals, the inquest later established, contained no procedural description of this step at all. The bridge crew were expected to see that the bow doors were closed by looking out of the bridge windows; they could not see the inner doors from the bridge. They could not confirm The Disaster The entrance to Zeebrugge harbour is a narrow channel with a sea wall; the design of the ferry terminal required ships to gather speed quickly to enter the navigation channel of the Scheldt approach. As Herald of Free Enterprise cleared the harbour mouth and accelerated, her bow wave rose until it began to pour into the open vehicle-deck mouth. The first water entered the vehicle deck at approximately 18:27. The free surface effect was immediate. Once water is on a ship's vehicle deck it destabilises the ship in a way that no compensating action can reverse once a critical angle has been reached: the water slides to whichever side the ship is already leaning, which compounds the lean, which increases the slide. Herald of Free Enterprise's vehicle deck was open plan, 115 metres long, without subdivision. The water that entered moved to port. The ship developed a list to port of 30 degrees within 90 seconds. At 18:28 she capsized onto her port side. Had she been in deeper water she would have sunk. Her actual position, on a sandbar about a kilometre outside the Zeebrugge harbour wall, meant that she came to rest half-submerged with her starboard side still above the waterline. 193 of the 539 aboard died in the first ten minutes, most from cold shock in the water or from being trapped in compartments that flooded as she rolled. 346 survived, many clinging to the starboard side of the hull and rescued by Belgian tugs and helicopters through the next hour.