Breaking News: Antarctica Tourist Ship’s Sinking Blamed on “Inexperienced” Captain

April 15, 2009

by

  4 Comments

Eighteen months ago, standing on the bow of the National Geographic Endeavor watching survivors of Antarctica’s first tourist-boat sinking be plucked from lifeboats, the hushed conversations on deck were all asking the same question: What happened?

Now we know. Or know more. According to the official report on the sinking, undertaken by the Liberian Maritime Bureau, the country where the vaunted tourist ship Explorer was registered, an “inexperienced and overconfident” captain caused the accident.

Swedish captain Bengt Wiman had been to the Antarctic many times, as first mate. That November 2007 trip aboard the Explorer was his first in charge; the report says succinctly that he misread the ice – which was not new ice, but harder, older ice – and ran the ship too fast into it. The report criticizes him for entering the ice field in darkness and for failing to slow the ship as it approached and then hit a “wall of ice”.

The 91-page report reads like a true adventure novel. The U.K’s Independent broke the story and highlights “a litany of errors that might have led to the biggest shipping disaster in Antarctica.” The report describes how the ship was fatally holed by ice – not the “fist-sized hole” first reported by the ship’s crew, but more like a ten-foot-long slice in the hull – and began to flood rapidly as it attempted to sail through an ice field at night. As water poured into the ship, passengers described how they had to wade shoeless through freezing water in the pitch black to get to safety while crewmen fought to stem the rushing water with pillows and wood. The crew’s fight to save the ship was undermined after it lost all power: water flooded emergency generators when a watertight seal failed. The ship’s main engine room was swamped after other watertight doors were not closed.

The report goes on to describe how chaos reigned on board when orders to take to the lifeboats were given. Georgie Hale, a passenger from the U.K, said that pandemonium ensued: “It was absolute chaos at that point. People just went where they wanted to. The lifeboats were deplorable – there was no organization at all. The thermal blankets were like nylon body bags and the zip was corroded on all of them.” Investigators said some lifeboats were so crowded people had to stand. One of the most damning revelations was that three of the four engines on the lifeboats did not work.

“Once we were in the water, the lifeboats drifted up against the side of the ship,” said Eli Charne, an American passenger. “The lifeboats were packed nearly to capacity and because they were open, it felt like you were in a big rowboat.

“The crew tried to push away with the oars, and when that failed they attached a metal object to the end of the oars. I later found out that the metal object was a piece of equipment that was meant to identify us on the radar.”

For me, perhaps the scariest part of the report are in the words of passengers whose cabins were the first to flood, describing reaching over from bed and finding a foot of water already on the floor and within minutes it rising to knee-level.

Last night I asked a friend, a ship’s officer who has sailed many times along the Antarctic Peninsula if he’d read the report. He had not, but when heard its conclusion was not surprised. “Of course, it’s easy to blame the captain.”

There are many details in the report regarding the ship’s age and lack of fitness. It was 40-years-old, its hull corroded in spots and had been patched a variety of times. It had failed recent inspections. G.A.P. Adventures, the Toronto-based company that owned the ship at the time of its sinking, has so far not commented on the report. But many passengers complained in it about the treatment they received after the fact from the company.

One curiosity in the report is that the captain failed to grab the ship’s Voice Data Recorder, which could have helped explain the accident. He said he simply forgot in the rush to safeguard the passengers. The box, now at 4,300 feet below the surface of the Southern Ocean, has a life of two years, which means the real and final details of what happened on November 22, 2007, will remain locked up for good.

The engine crew on the sinking ship gets high marks for kick-starting the ship’s power, which went down during the flooding. Without power it would have been impossible to lower Zodiac’s, which ended up pulling the lifeboats with dead engines out of harms’ way. No generator, no Zodiacs, everyone goes down with the ship.

As for the captain, in an emailed response included in the report, he maintains he acted as experience had taught him. He wonders why the bilge pumps were not able to keep up with the hole in the ship’s hull. But the report is implicit in describing the penetration not as the size of a fist but as a tear running through at least three cabins.