M/S Estonia accident radio transcript
oona.windytan.com
oona.windytan.com
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2004/05/a-sea-st...
It would be nice if someone could please not stick a fatuous "TLDR" here.
It's funny, you wouldn't think, even 20 years ago, that this sort of stuff could still happen. But humans are still human, and the sea is still the sea.
It seems very weird to me that ultimately, according to Wikipedia, they buried he ship with pebbles. Why was this done, I thought most sunken ships were left alone.
Then in this information vacuum ordinary people do the rest by alleging anyone who questions the official line is a "conspiracy theorist".
I mean science can answer so many questions, but only when you have trace evidence to examine.
The reason for covering the wreck is that the disaster was a major national catastrophe; if 800+ hadn't died it would never have been considered.
Says Wikipedia:
"In the aftermath of the disaster, many relatives of the deceased demanded that their loved ones be raised from international waters and given a land burial. Demands were also made that the entire ship be raised so that the cause of the disaster could be discovered by detailed inspection.[27][28]
Citing the practical difficulties and the moral implications of raising decaying bodies from the sea floor (the majority of the bodies were never recovered), and fearing financial burden of lifting the entire hull to the surface and the salvage operation, the Swedish government suggested burying the whole ship in situ with a shell of concrete.[29][30] As a preliminary step, thousands of tons of pebbles were dropped on the site.[28] The Estonia Agreement 1995, a treaty among Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Russia and the United Kingdom, declared sanctity over the site, prohibiting their citizens from even approaching the wreck.[31]"
The Titanic was different; it lies below 4000 metres of water.
In this case, I think its reasonable to thing that covering up the ship and bodies are to protect dignity.
Your clothes analogy is a straw man. People conspire all the time. There are many, many instances of people conspiring. There are many instances of conspiracy theories thought to be rubbish that turned out to be true. Watergate, anyone? Or more recently, if you had suggested that the NSA had tapped every major network in the world and created viruses that burrow down into the chips themselves and so on, you'd have been called a conspiracy theorist. Then came Edward Snowden.
Yes, covering with pebbles doesn't provide any evidence for a conspiracy theory. But equally your argument provides no refutation that it's a conspiracy.
Science however can offer concrete facts. For example: laboratory tests on debris recovered illegally from Estonia's bow yielded trace evidence of an explosion.
So how do you review that? By performing independent tests on other salvaged material. Which could be quite simple to do, if it wasn't covered in stones. Just think, if it wasn't covered in stones, you could recover some of the wreck, test it and show that there is no trace evidence of any explosions.
Now that we only have that trace evidence, I suppose we just have to be content with the idea that it was sunk with an explosion. Unless you have some kind of evidence that refutes it?
You may think the reverse, that this evidence cant be trusted, and that the official line should be trusted. But you would be wrong. That is unscientific. You would have to prove that the work done by Jutta Rabe is false by doing your own lab work and making your own observations.
Interesting how the pebbles stop all further investigation, isn't it? But I know, I know. Governments would never do that. They are so trustworthy. They never lie. etc. etc.
Good luck with your understanding of geopolitics, clothes and carpentry...
second, the sea is one of the few places where there's still some sort of non-monetary, honour-based system where people will help each other if needed. I've personally helped folks in trouble with risk to my own boat, and I'd expect someone else to do the same if I was in a tight spot. It probably has to do with the environment - the sea is very lonely. If you are having an emergency there will be no police, ambulance or firetruck coming. You have to fix it yourself. If you're lucky another ship is close by.
I mean I hear you, it's a wonderful thing, but I don't see how it's in any way strange or surprising.
But yeah, definitely haunting stuff. Recordings from astronauts always get me, like Komarov's, or the supposed one of a female astronaut in 1961 both during failed re-entry.
Aftonbladet had a pretty interesting (and very long) article about it: http://story.aftonbladet.se/?id=602 (in Swedish)
These huge ferries just had to wait there and about a hundred people died right outside in the sea.
Just running a regular rubber boat in normally windy weather on the Baltic is next to useless as the propeller spends a large portion of time out of the water and you can't get anywhere. Coast guards and specialized rescuers have better high speed RIB boats. And in the Baltic it's probably nothing compared to North Sea weather.
If one could develop a large enough quad- or hexacopters that could be stored on all ferries and deployed to pick up people and lower them to ferry decks, that would help a lot. Hypothermia kills people so quickly there's often not enough time to send specialized help craft from far away.
Unfortunately, quadcopters can not be scaled up because the physics of multirotors doesn't scale nicely. The inertia of the blades goes up to the fifth power of the blade length. Double the blade length, 32x inertia. This would give prohibitive power and mass requirements.
A lot of quadcopter research focuses on using multiple copters for lifting co-operatively because building big ones is not feasible.
Multirotors are not particularly good in high wind conditions either. Even the specialized search and rescue helicopters (e.g. Super Pumas and SeaKings) had difficulty operating (and some were unable to operate) in the hostile weather conditions during the Estonia disaster.
Short of carrying on board search and rescue helicopters (and trained crews) and and other hoisting equipment, there is very little that can be done to rescue humans from the sea in storm conditions.
On the other hand, if you're just lifting the copter itself and one person, it doesn't have to be the size of a full blown helicopter. Then again, its utility is limited then.
http://dynamic.hs.fi/2014/estonia/
There was also a similar article made about the Plura cave diving accident with all that stuff and a friggin minimap of the divers!
Ex. Snow Fall: The Avalanche at Tunnel Creek http://www.nytimes.com/projects/2012/snow-fall/#/?part=tunne...
There was some initial plans to cover the wreck, but I don't think that was actually done.
Warning: It is pretty bloody harrowing.
what fun. with no degree in Naval or Maritime Engineering does the human obervations fit with the official explanation of the PROCESS and using open source basic stability calculations / physics?
What is disturbing is that the human process is flawed similar to the Costa Concordia - Italy Cruise Ship. The captain can just decide to change course to a dangerous path and there are FEW CHECKS on the captain or LEADER OF THE TITANIC.
Full Speed Ahead! Damn the icebergs. Welcome to Bash shellshock and the process 'fork bomb'