The Estonian car ferry M/S Estonia left Tallinn on its last trip on the evening of September 27, 1994.
The ship had been sailing to Stockholm and Tallinn for a year and a half. Also on that autumn evening, the anchor was raised and the four main engines roared into action as usual.
It was supposed to be the usual fun sea trip with dinners, shopping and nightclubs for Estonians heading for a Stockholm holiday and Swedes returning home. There were also ten Finnish citizens among the 803 passengers. There were 186 crew members.
It was raining, but sailing along the coast was not rough. According to the weather forecast, gale force winds of up to 25 meters per second were expected at sea, but the weather was not impossible for car ferries even though it made fishermen stay in the ports.
In addition to the then Estline shipping company Esto, Silja Line’s Europa and Viking Line’s Mariella were also leaving for the same waters.
“A disturbance, a disturbance, laeval is a disturbance”
emergency announcement in Estonia
As the journey progressed, the wind picked up, and the waves, which rose to more than four meters, drove some of the passengers seasick to their cabins. However, some continued the evening, entertained by the orchestra and dancers.
After being at sea for just under five hours, the stewardess heard a metallic bang from the bow as the Estonian hit a big wave. It was a little before one in the morning at that time.
On inspection, everything seemed to be fine on the car deck, but the strange noises continued. According to one passenger, it sounded as if someone had hit the frame with a large rock.
Fifteen minutes later, the visor protecting the ship’s bow came off, tearing open the bow ramp at the same time. Seawater flooded the car deck, and the ship quickly began to list to the right. Reducing speed and trying to turn the vehicle to the left did not help.
“It looks really bad, really bad here now.”
last message from Estonia
Only some had time to put on a life jacket, and even fewer were able to get on the rubber life rafts. The waves tossed the rafts around and took away some of the people on board. Injuries to people worsened the situation on the ferries, whose doors were pelted with cold water by the waves.
When Estonia was on its side, the ship’s fog siren started howling the last message: Everyone save themselves. Only 28 minutes had passed since the first distress call, when the ship disappeared from the radar images of other ships in the area.
According to eyewitnesses, the visor was gone when the ship turned once more and sank stern first in the moonlight to a depth of about 80 meters. At that time, Estonia was south of Utö, in international waters but in Finland’s maritime rescue zone.
Four ships rushed to help those who managed to escape from Estonia. More than an hour later, the helicopters arrived. Only 138 people were rescued, one of whom died in hospital. In Estonia, only five percent of the women who set off on the journey were saved, 22 percent of the men.
In his first TV news, Ylen told the merciless truth: those who fell into the sea had little hope of survival, even though helicopters tried to pick them up. At the time, the main reason for the ship’s capsize was suspected to be the shifting of the cargo in strong winds.
The sinking of Estonia aroused both great sadness and horror and many questions. Was the ship unseaworthy? Was the crew not up to the task? Was the Weather Report neglected too little?
The Estonian-Swedish-Finnish commission of inquiry set up to find out the causes of the accident sought answers from, among other things, the shipyard, the wreck and simulation tests.
The ship that sank in Estonia was originally intended specifically for Baltic Sea traffic. The 157-meter ship was the largest passenger ship in the Baltic Sea on its maiden voyage in 1980. There was space for 2,000 passengers.
For 14 years, the ship saw between Turku and Stockholm, Vaasa and Umeå, and finally Tallinn and Stockholm. There were four owners, as were the names: Viking Sally, Silja Star, Wasa King and Estonia. The Estonian vessel was registered in the year before the accident.
The ship was built at the German shipyard Meyer-Werft, which became a vocal party in the investigation of the accident. According to the shipyard, Estonia would have survived the wave of its fateful night when it was new, but since then the ship’s maintenance had been badly neglected.
The structure of the visor was the main reason for the destruction
According to the research commission, Estonia’s bow visor did not match the construction drawings in all respects. The maintenance weldings were also partly incomplete. However, the bow was quite typical in Baltic Sea traffic at that time.
At the time of the ship’s construction, there were no detailed requirements for the structure of the visor in the international regulations. The Estonian ramp was directly connected to the visor through its protective case.
According to the research commission, that was the decisive factor in the sinking of Estonia. When building the vessel, it was not taken into account that in a storm individual waves could hit the bow with unusually strong force. The visor should have been able to withstand those occasional blows as well.
However, according to the commission, Estonia was seaworthy. On its last day, the ship even happened to be a training target when the Estonian Maritime Administration was training new inspectors. Small defects were observed, such as wear and scratches on the visor’s rubber seals, but the inspectors felt that there was no immediate need for replacement.
Both the participants in that exercise and the accident investigation commission concluded that Estonia’s manning was appropriate and that the crew was professional. The captain who died in the accident was one of Estonia’s most experienced sailors.
Due to the forecasted strong wind at sea, the chief mate had ordered to secure the heavy cargo more carefully than usual. The cargo was slightly unbalanced, which was corrected by filling the left tilt tank.
Estonia had previously sailed in similar weather conditions only a couple of times. Between Turku and Stockholm or Vaasa and Umeå, the visor fasteners were not compromised because there was little open sea. The fateful wave was also against the side, unlike on the Finnish routes.
according to the research commission’s report
Estonia was by no means the first of the East and North Sea car ferries whose bow visor attachment devices partially or even completely failed. This had also happened to Finnish ships, for example Diana II the previous year. Diana II was almost the sister ship of Estonia.
The damage was not considered serious. For example, on the Viking Saga in 1980, a large part of the visor shell and one of the frame arches buckled and the side locking devices were damaged in a wind that blew 14 meters per second.
In general, visor damage was not reported, and thus information about it was not collected anywhere.
After the accident in Estonia, the authorities and classification societies carried out a thorough inspection of the condition of the locking devices and hinges on all ro-ro ships, which Estonia was. Fractures and other defects, although mostly small, were found in almost a third.
More than 500 of Estonia’s victims were Swedes. The fact that hundreds can disappear in an instant and the relatives are not even left with a grave was even more difficult to accept in Sweden than in Estonia, which has a different history. It lost more than 280 of its citizens in Turma.
From the beginning, the governments of Estonia and Finland were of the opinion that there was no reason to raise Estonia or, according to it, those who sank to the bottom of the sea, but that the wreckage should be made into their grave monument.
In Sweden, especially the relatives of the victims put a lot of pressure on the government to retrieve the wreckage and bodies. Six out of ten wanted the opportunity to get their loved ones in the domestic multi, and many were of the same opinion for years after the accident. However, the government ended up declaring peace in the grave.
Initially, it was planned to cover the wreck with concrete, for which the seabed in the area had already started to be strengthened, but the work proved impossible. What remained was guarding the wreckage.
It has not prevented all diving, and the conspiracy theories about the reasons for the sinking of Estonia have not disappeared over the years, although they have diluted.
Did a bomb explode in Estonia? Were former KGB agents involved who wanted to prevent Russian weapons technology that was secretly in Estonia from reaching the West? Among other things, such ideas have been tossed around.
Next year it will be 30 years since the accident in Estonia. The production company, which is currently making a drama series about the accident, believes that Turma will continue to do well in the world as well. They say their series is the most expensive documentary series ever produced in Finland.
For that, the wreck of Estonia has been photographed by a diving robot from a ship sailing under the German flag. Germany has not signed an agreement on Estonian burial peace. Last fall, two Swedish men in the group were fined for breaking the grave peace.
Since doubts about the causes of the accident have returned to the headlines over the years, the authorities have also returned from time to time to investigate the accident. At the moment, the documentary makers are talking about a previously unknown tear in a wreck that has been decaying on the seabed for almost three decades.
At Monday’s press conference in Tallinn, the latest interim report of accident investigators from Estonia, Sweden and Finland was reported.
According to the interim report, the shape of the rock at the bottom of the sea seems to match the damage of the Estonia wreck. No signs of an explosion or collision have yet been found, the researchers say.
On the other hand, the conclusion about Estonia’s seaworthiness presented in the original investigations of the accident was not confirmed by the director of the Estonian Accident Investigation Center Rene Arikas according to be true. The ship had not been inspected properly, he says.
Deputy Director General of the Swedish Accident Research Center Jonas Bäckstrand According to
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“Mayday, mayday, Estonia please”