“Yes, yes, give the signal,” shouted Captain Calamai from the bridge wing.
The second officer switched off the automatic fog signal and sounded two sharp blasts, the required signal for a left turn. Then he was struck with the thought that the ship was still plunging on at full speed.
In three strides, he was at the engine telegraph, ready to jerk the handles back to stop the ship. “Captain, the engines!” he cried.
“No, don’t touch the engines,” the captain yelled at him. “She turns faster.”
Captain Calamai had decided that it was too late to try to stop the Andrea Doria. Her turbine engines, with only 40 to 60 per cent backing power, could not halt the 29,100-ton ship in fewer than three miles. His only hope was in the Doria’s speed. He had decided that he must outrace the other ship, turning left faster than she could swing to her right. If that failed, he thought, perhaps the two ships might brush one another side by side as they turned in tangent arcs and escape serious damage.
But the huge Andrea Doria could not be turned like an automobile. Captain Calamai gripped the bridge railing, unconsciously trying to push his ship around in her turn. But the speeding ship, under the impetus of her forward motion, skidded forward in the water perhaps a full half-mile before she even began to turn.
“Is she turning? Is she turning?” Giannini screamed at the helmsman.
“Now, she is beginning to turn,” Visciano said as the gyrocompass could be heard to click off the degrees—two clicks for each degree—as the giant liner began to swing crabwise in the water, the bow turning left first as the ship plunged on forward and then the bulk of the ship finally skidding after the front end as the rudder took effect.
But it was then too late. Captain Calamai saw the dim outline and then the bow of the other ship as it came out of the night at the Doria.
The slender bow seemed aimed directly at him as he stood transfixed on the bridge of his ship, realizing that no matter what he did, his ship could not get away. At the last moment, instinct for self-preservation prevailed. Captain Calamai retreated from the horror before him, backing away toward the door of the wheelhouse. Then the Stockholm struck!
Chapter Four
“WHY DID SHE TURN SO?”
A ship because of the mass of weight above water leans away from her turn, and the Andrea Doria under a hard left rudder heeled over on her right side, toward the Stockholm, when she was struck just aft and beneath her starboard bridge wing. Teen-ager Martin Sedja, Jr., standing on deck near the Doria’s cabin class swimming pool, saw the lights of the Stockholm and thought the ship was swerving to avoid the Doria. “It was coming in at an angle, like it was trying to keep from hitting us, but it couldn’t get away in time.” He didn’t wait there to see it happen.
On the Stockholm Dr. Pettit literally risked his neck to see it. After warning his wife, he jutted his head out of Cabin M-6, on the forward port side of the Stockholm, and watched.
The Stockholm, driven by 14,600 horsepower, sliced through the Doria’s steel hull like a dagger stabbed into an eggshell. The Stockholm bow was constructed of two rows of extra-heavy steel plating an inch thick, separated by an air space two feet wide. It was designed not as an icebreaking bow but rather to follow an icebreaker through ice fields off the Scandinavian coast.
With the force of a battering ram of more than one million tons, the Stockholm prow plunged into the speeding Italian ship, crumbling like a thin sheet of tin, until her energy was spent. With the Stockholm pinioned in her, the Andrea Doria, twice her size, pivoted sharply under the impact, dragging the Stockholm along as the giant propellers of the Italian liner churned the black sea violently to white. Only then did Dr. Pettit draw back into his cabin to see his wife rigidly stretched out in her lower bunk, both hands clutching the sides of the bed.
Death and destruction had been wrought in a matter of seconds. Then the two ships separated. The Doria, her turbine engines still producing 34,000 horsepower, broke free of the dagger in her side. The Stockholm, her entire forward force expended in the penetration of the Doria, slid and bounced against the side of the Italian liner, from the hole beneath the bridge to the extreme stern of the ship. Steel scraped steel and a fiery blast of sparks shot up skyward and cascaded back to the sea in a shower of orange and yellow flashes on the black background of the night.
Even before the sparks lighted the night, Carstens had been impelled to act. Numb in the shock of catastrophe, he had clung to the engine telegraph on the bridge wing until the two ships struck. The Stockholm sliced through the hull of the Andrea Doria so cleanly that Carstens hardly felt a jolt. His mind was on the watertight doors at the moment of collision, for he thought the Stockholm could very well sink in a matter of minutes if he did not shut the watertight doors. Leaving the engine telegraph at FULL SPEED ASTERN, he flew into the wheelhouse, pressed the alarm button to signal the closing of the doors and then he cranked a small wheel which controlled two doors on B-Deck aft. The other doors were closed manually at the sounding of the alarm by men stationed at the door locations.
So fast did he move that he still saw the sparks from the collision as he headed blindly and instinctively toward the chartroom and the stairway beyond it to summon the captain.
Captain Nordenson was halfway up the stairway to the bridge when the ships collided. Jogged only slightly, the sixty-three-year-old seafarer did not miss a step. He never “dreamed” the true meaning of the jolt as he pounded up to the bridge.
The captain and third officer collided at the door between the wheelhouse and the chartroom. “What happened?” demanded the captain. At worst he thought the ship had brushed a submerged wreck.
Carstens sputtered out disjointed words. “Collision … we collided with another ship … she came from the port … from the port …”
“Shut the watertight doors.”
“They’re closed,” said Carstens.
A glance at the five-by-ten-inch control panel with the two red button lights shining in the dark wheelhouse confirmed for Captain Nordenson that the doors indeed were closed. Without breaking his long stride, the captain reached the port wing of the bridge, with Carstens tagging at his heels, in time to see the stern of the other ship about one ship length away. She appeared to be speeding away, ahead of the Stockholm to the north.
“Who is she?” the captain demanded, peering into the dark night.
“I don’t know,” said Carstens almost with a wail.
From the shape of the round spoonlike stern, Captain Nordenson thought it might be the old Kungsholm, which he had once commanded. The ship, sold and resold, was now sailing as the Italia of the Home Lines.
The fog which had engulfed the Andrea Doria earlier now moved slowly in on the two ships as the captain and third officer stood on the bridge of the Stockholm watching the lights of the other ship grow dim as distance between the two vessels increased.
“Why didn’t you call me?” the captain demanded, turning on Carstens.
“There was no reason in the world to call you,” exclaimed Carstens. “I had good visibility …” the young officer started to explain in a sputter of words, but the captain had no time then for disjuncted explanations. As Carstens kept repeating that the other ship had turned to port for no reason, the captain noticed the engine telegraph was still on FULL SPEED ASTERN, although he did not notice that the Stockholm was making no headway in the water. The captain moved the handles up to STOP and then he strode across the wheelhouse to the radar set.
Meanwhile, the lights of the other ship had faded away. Captain Nordenson could see only one white spot of a light in the distance. “Now, I must find out the distance,” he told himself and strode into the wheelhouse to the radar set near the starboard door. A glance showed him the other ship was 1.9 miles away to the port of the Stockholm.
Officers and men, meanwhile, were rapidly streaming into the dark wheelhouse. Perhaps all of two minutes had passed since the collision.
Engineer Svensson, ha
ving reversed the starboard engine, had just reached the port engine control wheel when the collision hurled him ten feet away, sprawling on the steel deck grating. But then he scrambled to his feet and stumbled to the port engine wheel to complete the maneuver for full astern. By that time Third Engineer Edwin Bjorkegran, who had seen the signal on the telegraph repeater in the Auxiliary Engine Room, had reached the control platform in the Main Engine Room. He had been only a yard away from the starboard engine controls when the collision threw him forward on his face. When Captain Nordenson’s order came down to stop both engines, Bjorkegran handled the starboard engine while Svensson stopped the port engine.
Chief Engineer Assargren was in the embarrassing posture of having his trousers half on and half off when the collision sent him sprawling in his cabin on the Sun Deck. Hurriedly he struggled into his trousers, threw on a shirt, grabbed a flashlight and headed for the Engine Room. The hallways and stairways were crowded with passengers, lost and confused by an unexpected shock on the first night out on a strange ship. One woman passenger on A-Deck, not far from the main entrance to the Engine Room, was most distraught, thinking she was the cause of all the chaos. She had flicked the light switch in her cabin at the precise moment of the collision and now she was running through the hallway trying to explain that she must have set the emergency brake of the ship.
Chief Officer Gustav Herbert Kallback, who had started out of his cabin next to that of the captain when he had heard the telegraph bells, was the first officer after the captain to reach the bridge. Second Officer Enestrom and Second Officer Junior Sven Abenius, both asleep at the time of collision, reached the bridge some minutes later.
The officers headed toward the captain for orders. “What shall I do?” asked Kallback as soon as he could get the attention of the captain. The officers all came away with the same impression of Captain Nordenson under stress. He was calm and commanding. He moved about the bridge with a nervous agility that was surprising for a man of his years. The captain himself set about checking the various indicators on the bridge, the inclinometer, the engine speed indicator, the lights of the ship.
As each of the officers reached the bridge, he was sent forward to check the damaged area of the ship and ordered to report conditions on the bow to the bridge. One after another, first Kallback, then Enestrom and then Abenius, went forward to the bow.
Carstens meanwhile wandered about the bridge in a daze. He felt alone and left out. The captain seemed to have no time for him. Lost in the hubbub on the bridge, his teeth began to chatter, shivers ran up and down his back and he found himself unable to control his vibrating body. The attack came upon him suddenly. Wandering about the bridge, he tried to force his attention upon his colleagues. No sooner had Enestrom reached the bridge, not fully awake from a deep sleep, than Carstens grabbed his arm and demanded, “Why did she turn so? Why did she turn to port, why?” But all this was incoherent to the sleepy second officer.
Carstens, in those terrible moments, felt the weight of the world fall upon him. What had he done? Everything had been routine and then the terrible thirty seconds and the collision. Had he done something wrong? He didn’t know. He could not think of anything that he had done contrary to what he had been taught at school. Yet there had been a collision. It seemed it was all because the other ship—whatever ship that was—had turned left when no ship under such conditions is supposed to turn left. Why did she turn left? Why? In his bewilderment, he kept asking that question on the darkened bridge of the Stockholm. But no one had the time or inclination to answer him.
The trim indicator on the bridge showed the ship was down three and one-half feet by the bow and listing four degrees to starboard. Captain Nordenson telephoned the Engine Room. “Start the ballast pumps on the bilges. Check the forwards compartments for water. Correct the list for four degrees to starboard.”
To the ship’s carpenter he ordered, “Take soundings around the ship, starting forward and working aft and report back to the bridge.” Soundings of water in the bilges would indicate the amount of sea taken into the Stockholm and hence the amount of her loss of buoyancy.
Meanwhile, Chief Officer Kallback led the first work party forward to the bow. He took the open deck route, free from passenger traffic, down the ladder from the bridge to the Verandah Deck and then forward to a stairway leading to the forecastle, which was the open deck extension of Upper Deck. At the head of the stairway he saw a view of the bow, where an hour earlier he had had three men scrubbing down the deck. Despite his thirty years at sea, Kallback’s stomach turned and for an instant he thought he would be sick. Before him what had once been a slender, graceful bow had been crumbled into a mass of ugly, jagged steel, heaped with debris and wreckage. He went swiftly down the stairway to the deck, into a doorway, and down to the crew’s quarters on Main Deck inside the ship.
Chief Purser Curt Dawe, reporting to the bridge, was told to organize his stewards and pursers. All passengers were to be instructed to wear lifebelts and report to the ship’s public rooms until further word. Every cabin was to be checked. Every porthole on the starboard side of the ship was to be closed, bolted shut and secured. The names of all passengers were to be checked from the passenger list and all crewmen were to be checked off the roster to determine if anyone was missing or injured. The hospital was to be organized for care of the injured. The ship was to go on an emergency basis. All crew was to stand by emergency stations until further orders.
There was no sense in sounding the general alarm for the passengers, Captain Nordenson decided. There had been no emergency drill on the first day out. It was scheduled for the following day, which would have been the first full day at sea, the usual time for lifeboat and emergency drills on the Stockholm as on other vessels. The crew had been alerted by alarms which went off automatically at the moment of collision.
The collision in smashing back the entire bow had ruptured all of the water-pipe lines in the forward end of the ship. Water splashed everywhere, adding to the general confusion in the crew’s quarters in the bow of the ship. The rupturing of the sprinkler-system pipes set off the wailing typhoon siren of alarm in the crew’s quarters, sending the men fortunate enough to survive the collision dashing to their emergency stations even before they had realized what had happened.
Chief Purser Dawe relayed the captain’s orders via the ship’s assistant chief pursers and head stewards to the 150 men in his department. The stewards found that most of the passengers, even without a drill, had indeed found their own lifejackets and were only too eager to be told what to do and where to go. A surprising number of passengers, according to the stewards, had slept through the collision and had to be awakened.
Of panic, there was none. The damaged area of the ship had been confined to the crew’s quarters in the bow. Passengers in other parts of the ship could sense little or nothing wrong. The lights were burning brightly throughout the ship, she seemed to be on an even keel, there was no sign of any damage or danger that any passenger could see, with one exception. The water freed from the ruptured pipes in the bow flowed rapidly through the corridors of A-Deck and the Main Deck. Salt water mixed with fresh water soon rose to a level of between 18 and 24 inches in the main fore-and-aft corridor of the two decks. The water flowed toward the rear of the ship against an uphill incline, reaching about the midway point of the ship before leveling off.
On the bridge, Captain Nordenson could see from the inclinometer that the Stockholm was down by the bow three feet seven inches and listing four degrees to starboard. The question was: Would the Stockholm survive?
The Stockholm was a nine-compartment ship built to the highest construction standards of the Lloyd’s Register of Shipping. She was designed to withstand the flooding of any one of her nine watertight compartments. That is to say, if her largest compartment was open to the sea, the Stockholm would remain afloat, but if two compartments became flooded, she might, although not necessarily, sink. It was the 1948 International Conferenc
e which raised the standards for all passenger ships. Ships whose keels were laid after the 1948 convention had to withstand the flooding of any two compartments, even the two largest adjacent compartments.
The forward compartments on the Stockholm, as of any ship, were the smallest, and the danger of sinking was less with the forward compartments flooded than if the larger sections of midships had been flooded. Yet there was the danger.
In the damaged area, Chief Kallback, a sensitive, quiet man who had devoted his life to the sea for the past thirty years, fought to control his emotions. He fortified himself with the reminder of a Swedish rule of life which he had always lived by. “In a bad situation, you make the best of it.” Sloshing through the flowing water in the dark of the narrow corridors, Kallback and an advance party of seamen surveyed the damage. As they worked their way forward, Kallback assigned men to organize other work parties to force their way into each cabin in the area. The cabins had been smashed back, one on top of the other, like a closed accordion, their sizes reduced to half and less. Inside several jammed cabins the rescue party could hear the cries and moans of trapped kitchen and pantry workers.
The chief officer could force his way forward only to the ship’s collision bulkhead, the first transverse wall 53 feet behind the bow. The bulkhead, designed to protect the ship from flooding in the event of collisions, had been shattered. Behind the collision bulkhead, on Main Deck, the first six cabins on the port side of the ship and the first five on the starboard side also had been smashed. The first of these cabins had been torn open, the others compressed one into the other.
On A-Deck below, where the cabins began farther aft, the forward cabins on each side of the ship, 1-A and 2-A, had been smashed open. But access to these cabins still was possible because they were above the C-Deck waterline. Crew’s cabins were located on B-Deck behind the second watertight bulkhead some 127 feet behind the bow.
It soon became apparent to Kallback that the safety of the ship depended on this second bulkhead. The No. 1 cargo hold, 80 feet behind the bow, had been opened to the sea, apparently from the concussion of the impact. The cargo hold was filled to the 11-foot mark with sea water, reaching the beams of B-Deck. If the water rose one deck more, to A-Deck, it would overflow the top of the bulkhead and successively flood the whole ship.
Collision Course Page 7
