Collision Course

by Moscow, Alvin;

  While changing any of the Rules of the Road is a complex problem involving considerable study, there seems little reason why the next Conference could not require every deck officer to use his ship’s radar properly, something radar experts claim is not done by more than 90 per cent of navigators. This would make the plotting of relative-motion radar observations mandatory under law. At present, there is in reality no law governing the use of radar. The 1948 Conference decided that radar then was too recent an innovation to be the subject of binding regulations—but that was eight years before the collision of the Andrea Doria and Stockholm.

  United States authorities no doubt will press at the next Conference, as they did at the last, for higher stability requirements for passenger ships, matching those in this country. While it is physically possible to build an absolutely unsinkable ship by intense compartmentalization, that extreme must be reconciled with the need for passenger comfort and the high cost of building such a ship. Some compromise must be found between the truly unsinkable ship and the feasible, profitable passenger liner which private companies would be willing to build and operate.

  Yet whatever success there be in this regard, the next Conference must face the question of how to enforce its stability requirements. Strangely enough, at present each country administers the stability code of the Conference, and in nations such as Italy, where the shipping industry has been nationalized, this means that the government, which is the shipowner, passes upon the standards of construction of each of its own ships.

  For the safety of the 50,000 men, women and children who are estimated to be traveling daily on the North Atlantic, an international agency, perhaps under the United Nations, must be empowered to pass upon the design, construction and stability of all passenger liners. Every passenger ship also should be subject to periodic checks as to its construction, ballasting, watertight compartments and doors, its alarm systems, lifeboats and other items bearing upon the safety of its passengers. Whether or not foreign nations and shipowners would submit to such international supervision is another question. But if they refused, it would seem that the United States could then argue for the right to pass upon all construction stability matters which bear upon the safety of American citizens, who constitute the majority of passengers on ships that ply the North Atlantic.

  Mandatory sea lanes across the North Atlantic is another problem for the experts to solve, if possible. Any acceptable solution would have to rearrange the present recommended tracks to allow Scandinavian and northern-bound vessels to use the northern-most (and shortest) route across the Atlantic, shifting English Channel and Mediterranean-bound ships to a more southerly and longer route. This is indeed a most difficult problem in logistics, but for any solution to be of any value, the new routes must be binding upon all oceangoing ships, which are not subject now to any track agreement, for cargo ships and oil tankers are as liable to cause collisions as are passenger vessels.

  To correct the total lack of enforcement of the rules of safety on the high seas will require the highest statesmanship at the next Conference. While airplanes, railroads, buses and even automobiles are governed by policing agencies, there is no one with the authority to compel sea captains to obey the basic precepts of prudent seamanship. Court action after a collision or shipwreck hardly provides preventive law enforcement. This could be accomplished by an agency established within the United Nations, but only if the thirty-odd maritime nations of the world consented to relinquish that much of their sovereignty. Ships could be required at little expense to carry motion picture cameras which continuously photograph radar observations. The film could be checked periodically by the UN agency as a monitor insuring good seamanship and, in the event of an accident at sea, the film would serve as convincing proof of who is to blame. Yet it must be recognized that captains will not readily agree to carrying aboard their ships such telltale cameras, which have been available and not used for many years.

  In, the light of the Andrea Doria—Stockholm disaster, the next International Conference will no doubt wish to review the efficacy of present-day lifeboat operations, loudspeaker systems, abandon-ship plans and a host of other questions.

  There can be no doubt that new laws are needed to make ship construction and operation safer. Lloyd’s of London has published statistics showing that an average of nearly three ships a day collide throughout the world—or more than 1,000 ships, each of more than 500 gross tons, a year. In addition, it has been conservatively estimated that there are about three “near misses” a day, in which ships narrowly avoid collision by emergency last-minute action.

  Yet there remains a limit to what any law, rule or regulation can do to reduce the risk involved in any means of travel. The primary responsibility for safety of life at sea remains, where it has always been, with the navigator on the bridge of each and every ship.

  It would be remiss not to point out the obvious: travel on the modern ocean liner is by far the safest means of mass transportation in the world today. The collision of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm was the first such disaster in history involving two passenger liners. It broke a peacetime safety record dating back to the end of the first World War. The Trans-Atlantic Passenger Conference, an association of passenger shipowners, points out that in the peacetime years since 1919, regular passenger ships carried approximately 27,000,000 persons across the North Atlantic without losing or injuring a single passenger because of collision or shipwreck. This adds up statistically to 81,000,000,000 passenger miles without such an injury or fatality.

  Thus, with the statistics of Lloyd’s of London and those of the Trans-Atlantic Passenger Conference at hand, one can only speculate on the likelihood of another Andrea Doria—Stockholm type of disaster. Circumstances and carelessness may combine tomorrow, or not for a generation, or perhaps never again, to bring about another improbable but possible collision in the open waters of the North Atlantic. One cannot foretell.

  Chapter Sixteen

  SALVAGING THE DORIA

  Twenty-five years later, the Andrea Doria lies quiescent, still settling down in her briny grave upon the sandy bottom of the North Atlantic some fifty-three miles southeast of Nantucket Island. The fatal forty-foot wound in her starboard side is beneath her and out of sight, covered now with three or four feet of sand and silt.

  But in all those years, the Andrea Doria has not been forgotten. At considerable risk to their own lives, teams of underwater explorers have dived down 200 and 240 feet in search of whatever they could find out about the luxurious Italian liner. Men have planned and plotted and dreamed of bringing the ship back to the surface for all to see again, or, short of that, of salvaging the treasures buried aboard her.

  In the busy shipping lane leading to and from New York, ships pass over her grave every day. There is not a navigational officer who does not personally recall or know about the sea disaster of our time, of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. A good many navigational charts are still marked with a tiny red X to note the site where the Andrea Doria went down. And yet, with all that open sea around them, with all the lessons that should have been learned, the officers of other ships continue to disregard collision courses—and time after time they pay the consequences.

  I sailed aboard the Stockholm in the spring of 1957, shortly after the ship had been repaired and returned to service, and once again the Stockholm found herself on a collision course. It was the first night out of New York, approaching the Nantucket Lightship once again. Dessert and coffee were being served in the dining room when the Stockholm suddenly shuddered and rumbled, like a heavy truck bouncing on wet cobblestones with the brakes applied. None of the other passengers seemed aware of the tell-tale signs. But the waiters knew. One could not resist rushing to a porthole to peer out into the black night.

  The following night, taking an after-dinner brandy with the captain and other passengers in the lounge, I leaned over and whispered in his ear: “Did you reverse engines last night?”

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bsp; “Yes,” he replied softly. “I’ll tell you about it later.”

  In his cabin the next morning, Captain Nordenson confided in me: At a distance of about twelve miles, a ship was sighted on radar, its course and speed plotted on the radarscope, traveling at nineteen knots on a reciprocal course, head-on or nearly head-on, to the Stockholm. Captain Nordenson called for a course change to starboard for a safer passing. He had one of his officers plot the course of the other ship again. They were still on a collision course. He ordered a clearly perceptible twenty-degree change of course to the right. He plotted again. The two ships were still on a collision course. He could hardly believe this was happening. The other ship was turning to its left. That was contrary to all the Rules of the Road, contrary to even the rudiments of good seamanship, contrary to anything sensible under the circumstances. Captain Nordenson ordered a third, more radical change of course to starboard. He plotted the other ship on radar and had visions of the Andrea Doria. It seemed to him as if the whole disaster was being played out again. The unknown ship bearing down upon him had changed its course further to port. They were still on a collision course. In the dead of night when the lights of the other ship hove into sight, Captain Nordenson, a calm man under most circumstances, shouted out his order: “Hard starboard rudder! Full astern!”

  The Stockholm rumbled and shook with the sudden reversing of the engines. Her bow swung sharply to the right. At the end of her turn, the Swedish liner had come completely around, 180 degrees, and was heading back to New York. The other ship slipped by within a quarter-mile of the Stockholm. Then she was gone, gobbled up in the blackness of the night. Captain Nordenson speculated that the other ship was a freighter. More than that, he did not know. It had been a near miss, a near catastrophe. If there had been a disaster, who would believe Captain Nordenson’s tale of another collision at sea?

  On my return from Europe aboard the Italian liner Conte Biancamano, I asked an officer on the bridge how the radar worked. He replied innocently that you could see the blip of another ship on the radar screen and trace its course in your mind’s eye. No, he said, there was no need to plot the positions of the other ship on the graph. That was unnecessary work. On the second day out, I asked my room steward if I absolutely had to go to the lifeboat- and abandon-ship drills. “Oh, no, sir,” he replied with a conspiratorial grin, “Just stay out of the way of the officers.”

  Just ten days after Collision Course was published (on March 16, 1959), the newest and most luxurious of the Grace Line’s cruise ships, the Santa Rosa, smashed into the superstructure of the 10,000-ton oil tanker Valchem. It was three o’clock in the morning with variable fog in the North Atlantic, twenty-two miles due east of Atlantic City, New Jersey, and seventy-five miles south of the tip of Manhattan. Another collision on the open sea. Four crewmen aboard the Valchem were killed. I was assigned to cover the Coast Guard investigatory hearings as a reporter for The Associated Press. Once again I heard the same tale of woe and human error as I had observed in the Andrea Doria—Stockholm pretrial hearings.

  The $25 million luxury liner, heading back from a Caribbean cruise to New York City with 247 passengers and a crew of 265 aboard was speeding in fog. At FULL SPEED AHEAD, her two giant steam turbine engines were turning her twin propellers 118 revolutions per minute. The Santa Rosa was making 21.5 knots through the water. Captain Frank Siwik, who had twenty-nine years’ experience at sea, all with the Grace Line, had been called to the bridge when visibility became low. The radar was turned to the six-mile range as the Santa Rosa maneuvered to overtake a slower freighter, also bound for New York. No one bothered to switch the radar back to the customary sixteen-mile range. So, when another ship was spotted on the radar, at a distance of about five miles, the second mate on watch had time to plot only two sightings. He could see that the other ship was heading towards the Santa Rosa. With their combined speeds, the two ships were closing fast. Thick fog was settling down upon them. Visibility was reduced to about one-half mile. Captain Siwik called for a slight turn to port, to the left in anticipation of a starboard-to-starboard passing. Then he called for another turn to port, a slight one. And then another. But all this time no one aboard the Santa Rosa knew or could know that the other ship was turning to its starboard for a port-to-port passing. The second mate would have had to take three sightings of the other ship and plot them out on his maneuvering board in order to see that the other ship was turning—and turning toward the Santa Rosa. But there was no time for this. When the other ship hove into sight, less than half a mile away, it was too late. Captain Siwik saw the lights of the ship as she was crossing his bow. He cried out, “Hard right!” The second mate rang up FULL SPEED ASTERN on the engine telegraph. But a ship does not have the brakes of a car.

  The Santa Rosa sliced into the left side of the aft superstructure housing of the Valchem, just forty feet ahead of the stern. The liner’s bow cut more than halfway through the tanker’s boiler room and crew’s quarters. Two crewmen, asleep in their bunks, were killed upon impact. Another was swept overboard and lost. A fourth was pulled out of the wreckage and flown by a Coast Guard helicopter to a hospital in Jersey City. He died enroute. Minutes after the collision, the Santa Rosa lowered eleven of her lifeboats and picked up seventeen crewmen of the tanker who had fallen or jumped overboard. The Valchem, adrift in the water, fortunately was not loaded with oil. Having delivered her cargo in Jersey City, she had been enroute to Texas in ballast. If the Valchem had had oil aboard, both ships could have been engulfed in a raging fire that would have taken more lives than had been lost on the Andrea Doria.

  Human error was also blamed for the collision between the American Export liner Constitution and the Norwegian freighter Jalanta just outside New York Harbor on March 1, 1959. Once again it was FULL SPEED AHEAD in dense fog. Captain James W. La Belle told the Coast Guard hearing that he was relying upon his radar for safe passage, but he was not plotting the pips of other ships seen on his radarscope. As the Constitution, coming from Newport News, Virginia, headed towards the mouth of New York Harbor, Captain La Belle noted on his radar that he was in a head-to-head situation with a ship leaving the harbor (which was the Norwegian freighter Kingsville, bound for Savannah, Georgia). For a safer port-to-port passing, Captain La Belle ordered a 20° turn to starboard.

  The Constitution ran right into another ship, the Jalanta, which Captain La Belle had not seen at all. The Constitution hit with such force that it sliced off part of the Jalanta’s bow. Captain La Belle was found at fault for his failure to search. Without plotting all the pips on his radar scope, there was no way he could tell what other ships were doing in the area. Despite his thirty-two years at sea, the captain had no defense. He was charged by the Coast Guard with negligence, his master’s license was suspended for one year.

  The Andrea Doria—Stockholm disaster, if it did nothing else, convinced just about every shipping company of the need for every one of its watch officers to be trained in the proper use of radar. New radar schools were opened in the United States and in most major seafaring nations of the world. In the United States, a man had to complete a radar course before he could qualify to stand a watch on the bridge. As a result, we now have a whole generation of navigators who have never sailed a major ship without radar. Radar is recognized today as the biggest advance in navigation since the chronometer. At the 1960 International Conference for Safety of Life at Sea, the delegates tried to legislate the proper use of radar in navigation. It was not an easy task. To a limited extent, for the first time, radar was recognized in international law as a valid instrument of navigation, extending the eyesight of seamen on watch. But it was not until the next International Conference, in 1972, that important and major clarifications of the Rules of the Road, as they applied to the use of radar, were actually put into international law.

  The new Rule 19 provides that in restricted visibility “a vessel which detects by radar alone the presence of another vessel shall determine if a close-quarters situat
ion is developing and/or risk of collision exists. If so, she shall take avoiding action in ample time …” With this new rule, there was now no mistaking that maritime law required ships using radar, which included virtually all major ships at sea, to take early and positive action to avoid collisions or even the risk of collisions. With the use of radar, ships were allowed to proceed at a “safe speed,” rather than the previous “moderate speed,” so long as navigators obeyed all the other rules of the roads in avoiding collisions. In effect, the new rules were saying to all captains: If you use radar, you can proceed at a “safe speed” in fog, obeying all the other rules. If you did not use radar, a legally defined “moderate speed” in dense fog might well oblige you to stop dead in the water in dense fog.

  Despite the new navigational rules, despite the new and more sophisticated technology in radar and other aids to navigation, despite the improved training of ship officers, down through the years, ships of all sizes, shapes and configurations have continued to collide with one another in the open sea and upon inland waters. In 1979, the Norwegian oil tanker Team Castor and the Liberian flag tanker Gino smashed into one another off the coast of Brittany, France. The Gino sank, spilling much of her 40,000 tons of oil into the Atlantic. Another 10,000 tons of oil were lost when the tanker Fortune, collided with the U.S. aircraft carrier Ranger in the South China Sea. Two Japanese tankers, the Miya Maru 8 and the Daikoku Maru 18, collided in Japan’s Inland Sea and fouled the waters with 540 tons of crude oil. With the increased oil transport industry of recent years, tanker collisions, some major and some minor, are an almost common occurrence, numbering more than a thousand in each year of the last decade.