The Shipwreck Hunter
Page 7
The following year, with Proksch serving his time in Graz-Karlau prison, an appeals court reviewed his sentence and increased it to life.
It took a further six years before Daimler was ultimately brought to justice. He was tried at the regional court in Kiel, Germany, on six counts of being an accessory to murder and of attempted murder. His defence, in an equally long and complicated trial, was that he was merely an innocent and unknowing pawn of the powerful Proksch. The jury disagreed and Daimler was sentenced to fourteen years in jail.
In Proksch’s case, his life sentence really did mean life. On 27 June 2001, he died on a prison operating table during heart surgery.
* A torpedo-shaped platform containing the side-scan sonar and other electronics which is towed behind a ship.
II
MV Derbyshire
LOST WITHOUT TRACE
MV Derbyshire
SUNK 9 SEPTEMBER I980
44 died
0 survived
The success of the Lucona project established the Ocean Explorer and Magellan as the premier search-and-recovery system in the world. Eastport International had become the go-to company for anyone needing something to be found or recovered from the deep ocean, and our services were suddenly in great demand. Even before the Lucona search was completed, we were lined up for another major investigation on behalf of a criminal court. This time the object was a commercial DC-9 aircraft that had mysteriously crashed just north of Sicily with the loss of all eighty-one passengers and crew.
Once again I found we’d be working directly for a judge, Rosario Priore, although this one had the good sense to remain in Rome and forgo the pleasures of joining us at sea. As we were told to expect the project to last several months, the Valiant Service got under way to Naples with just a skeleton crew on board while the rest of us took a much-needed break. The break didn’t last very long, however, as the team was urgently called back into action by the US Navy to search for a pair of Tomahawk cruise missiles that had failed to reach their targets in Iraq. Fired on the first day of the war by a surface ship, they malfunctioned shortly after launch and fell into the deep waters of the northern Red Sea. Seeing that the Valiant Service would be transiting close to their location en route to Italy, the navy scrambled us back to the ship to see if the missiles could be found, recovered and disarmed.
After that little classified adventure was completed, we spent the next eight months recovering hundreds of pieces of wreckage, including one of the DC-9’s black-box flight data recorders, from the bottom of the Tyrrhenian Sea at a depth of 3,800 metres. The Itavia jet (IH-870) had been on a short internal flight from Bologna to Palermo on 27 June 1980 when it disappeared from radar screens as if it had just fallen out of the sky. The disaster, known as the Strage di Ustica, or Ustica Massacre, after the small island nearest to the crash site, is one of Italy’s most enduring mysteries. Various theories had been put forward as to the cause of the crash, including that the plane was caught in the crossfire of a dogfight between a pair of MIG-23 jets, one of which was supposedly carrying the Libyan leader Muammar al-Gaddafi, and several NATO fighter aircraft attempting an audacious mid-air assassination of the Libyan leader. The true cause of the crash is still hotly debated and remains a mystery to this very day.
When the rough winter weather forced the recovery operations to end in late November, we decided to redeliver the Valiant Service back to her owners in Singapore and planned a route that allowed us to conduct two short shipwreck investigations in Oman on the journey east. I had thoroughly enjoyed managing the Itavia DC-9 project, especially as it gave me a chance to experience a culture towards which I felt a natural affinity, as my grandparents on my mother’s side were both from the mountains just outside Naples, but I was keen to get back to working on shipwrecks. Lucona had given me a real taste for hunting down long-lost wrecks, and I had decided to focus on learning as much as I could about this fascinating field.
The two wreck projects in Oman couldn’t have been more different. One involved mapping and filming the wreckage field of a US Liberty ship, the John Barry, sunk during World War II, whilst the other was the search for a modern cargo vessel, the Demetra Beauty, which had been lost only the year before. Of the two, the Demetra Beauty was the greater challenge, because in addition to finding the wreck, we needed to prove that she had been purposely scuttled. If we were able to save the insurer from having to pay out on a fraudulent claim worth millions of dollars, I knew this would open the doors to more work from the Lloyd’s insurance market in London. The John Barry, on the other hand, was a straightforward salvage venture to help locate the large cargo of silver coins that our clients wished to recover.
After leaving Naples, the Valiant Service was battered by a severe storm that forced the ship to take shelter in the lee of Crete for several days. When she finally limped into Salalah, Oman, the ship was in a very sorry state and required urgent repairs. Despite this inauspicious beginning, the Oman projects went well and all our clients’ objectives were achieved. The highlight for me was locating the Demetra Beauty in twenty-six hours based on my assessment of the navigational clues we were given. This was the first time I had handled this all-important responsibility myself, so I was chuffed we found the wreck so quickly in the face of some conflicting and confusing information. The experience made me appreciate what a crucial aspect the navigation assessment is when searching for a long-lost shipwreck. It seems an obvious thing to say, but a lost object, whether a downed aircraft or a ship, will never be found if you search in the wrong place. So the analysis and assessment of navigational clues, in context with oceanographic conditions at the time of the loss, was a skill I was determined to perfect before I led my next major project: the search for the British bulk carrier Derbyshire.
Very little is known about the last hours and minutes of the Derbyshire and her crew of forty-two, plus two wives, who were lost when the ship sank in the midst of Typhoon Orchid. What is known, from their last report, is that the ship was very close to the centre of Orchid’s track and battling violent storm-force winds and seas of thirty feet. The ship was hove to, meaning that Derbyshire’s master, Captain Underhill, had pointed her bow directly into the mountainous seas to allow her to ride out the storm while maintaining little or no forward motion. Large ships like Derbyshire should be able to comfortably withstand severe conditions such as those posed by Orchid. But sometime on the evening of 9 September 1980, about 670 nautical miles short of her final destination in Kawasaki, Japan, Derbyshire succumbed to the extreme forces of nature and foundered.
No Mayday or distress call was ever received. No bodies or wreckage were spotted during the search and rescue effort that followed. More than six weeks later, one of Derbyshire’s lifeboats was sighted by a passing tanker some 650 nautical miles from her last known position. It was empty. To all intents and purposes, Derbyshire had been lost without trace. All that remained was the grief of forty-four families, devastated by the loss of their loved ones, who found it impossible to understand or accept how such an enormous ship could have inexplicably disappeared.
Losing someone at sea this way is the worst kind of bereavement, because there is no body to bury. The families can’t even find comfort in the busy work of organizing a funeral. They are left in a hellish limbo until the last remaining hope of survivors being found is completely exhausted. Some never come to terms with their loss and forever hope that a knock at their front door will be followed by their loved one walking back in. Ultimately, the presumption of death becomes a formal pronouncement, and the families are advised to move on with their lives. In lieu of funerals, memorial services are held, at the conclusion of which the Naval Ode is invariably read. For the Derbyshire families, the last lines of the Ode – ‘At the going down of the sun and in the morning, we will remember them. Lest we forget’ — were especially resonant, as the unanswered questions they had about the vessel’s sinking ensured they never would forget. In the face of a shipping industry blin
d to the evident problems with bulk carriers like Derbyshire, and government authorities unwilling to investigate further, getting to the bottom of the mystery was to dominate many of their lives for the next twenty years.
The Derbyshire was one of countless similar ships built in the 1970s to carry unpackaged bulk cargoes to industrial ports around the world. Although they ranged in size, many of the bulkers were absolutely massive ships built on a scale not seen before. The largest of them, called Capesizers because they were too big to fit through the Suez or Panama canals and thus had to sail the long way round past the southern capes of Africa and South America, were the workhorses upon which the global trade in bulk commodities was completely reliant. The economics of the shipping industry at the time dictated that the more flexible a ship could be in terms of the variety of cargoes it could carry, the greater the rate it could command, thus yielding increased profits for its owners.
The most flexible of this largest class of bulkers were combination carriers; specifically those that could carry ore, bulk commodities like grain, and oil (OBOs). Because of the different types of cargoes they were expected to transport, OBOs were built to a complicated design that meant they were subject to a higher order of forces, including sheer forces in the side shell structure; large hull girder bending moments; extremely high bending and shear loads in transverse bulkheads; and torsion of the upper wing tank structure that could lead to buckling of web frames and the distortion of hatch openings. In an age before computer analysis was routinely available to assist naval architects, they would have been unable to accurately predict the huge forces generated in such large structures, especially under dynamic sea conditions. A dangerous situation had developed, therefore, whereby the economics that drove the profitability of these enormous ships outpaced the ability of naval architects to ensure they were safe.
Derbyshire herself was the last and largest of the Bridge class of six OBOs built between 1970 and 1976 at the Haverton Hill (Teesside) shipyard of Swan Hunter. Originally named the Liverpool Bridge (renamed Derbyshire in 1978), she was built for the highly regarded Bibby Line – one of the oldest established family-owned companies in the UK – and registered at Lloyd’s of London. Because of her size and her enviable pedigree as a 100 per cent British ship, there would have been no lack of seamen queuing up to sail on her. Her raw dimensions show that she was 294.2 metres long, 44.3 metres wide and 91,655 gross tons, with a deadweight capacity of 169,044 tons, meaning she could carry a maximum of 166,000 tons of cargo in her nine cavernous cargo holds. As impressive as these figures are, however, they cannot convey the immense scale of the ship, which was as long as a sixty-storey building was high. Nevertheless, all six of the Bridge-class ships suffered defects in a specific location that became the main focus of the families’ questions when trying to determine what caused Derbyshire to sink.
The key defect was serious cracks in the deck plates above a transverse watertight bulkhead at frame 65, just forward of the bridge and accommodation superstructure. Although the cracks were found on the outside of the hull, where they could be repaired if discovered in time, their common location in each of the six ships implied a more worrying internal structural fault. Following the loss of Derbyshire, the second of the Bridge-class ships, the Tyne Bridge, suffered severe cracking that occurred so quickly that the crew had to be lifted off by helicopter. When the Tyne Bridge eventually made it to port, the severity of the deck plate cracks at frame 65 was evident; there was a nineteen-foot-long crack on the starboard side and an eleven-foot crack on the port side.
The Tyne Bridge incident finally prompted the Lloyd’s Register to inspect a pair of the sister ships, the Cast Kittiwake and the Sir Alexander Glen, in the summer of 1982, which revealed that the likely problem involved two longitudinal bulkheads (girders) that ran nearly the length of the ship and were the main strength members for the hull. Contrary to the original design drawn up by the naval architects, the two bulkheads were butt-welded at frame 65 rather than continuing through this important transverse bulkhead, which marked the separation point between the superstructure and the line of cargo holds. Furthermore, they were misaligned on either side of frame 65 by 25–45 mm when to preserve continuity and maximum hull strength they needed to be aligned perfectly.
The discovery of this defect and the history of cracking in the other ships in the same place led some of the families to suspect that this was the root cause of Derbyshire’s loss. The ship was known to have had similar cracking problems at frame 65 and in conjunction with the enormous stresses her hull would have been experiencing during typhoon Orchid the belief that Derbyshire had suffered a catastrophic structural failure was born. Questions about the grade of steel used in building Derbyshire’s hull were also raised, suggesting that the deck plates could have been prone to brittle failure. The scenario arising from these theories was that when hove to against the thirty-foot waves of typhoon Orchid, the hull of Derbyshire cracked at frame 65 in a matter of seconds, causing the ship to snap in two and the superstructure – where everyone on board had been riding out the storm — to instantly capsize and sink.
To the families, this theory of total structural failure made a great deal of sense. It was an explanation they could accept when no others were forthcoming, and it provided comfort in that it confirmed the crew were not at fault for the loss of the ship. They were simply innocent victims of errors made by others years before they ever stepped on board. It also explained why no Mayday or distress call was made and why no survivors were found. With everyone trapped inside the superstructure when the ship suddenly snapped, they had no chance of escaping or of being saved. The only consolation for the families was that the end for those on board would have been mercifully quick.
A preliminary inquiry conducted by the UK Department of Trade in November 1980 was ‘able to establish no evidence of any form of structural weakness in this type of vessel’ and ‘remain at a loss to know what caused the loss of the Derbyshire’. Without any material evidence to consider, the inspector in charge of the inquiry could only offer opinions as to the possible causes of the loss. Furthermore, he saw no reason to widen the scope of the inquiry to include other ships. The government minister responsible for merchant shipping, Lord Trefgarne, decided not to hold a formal inquiry as he felt ‘the court could not reasonably be expected to establish the cause of the casualty and a formal investigation would serve no useful purpose and could not be justified’. He added, however, that he would ‘be prepared to re-consider this decision should any new and material evidence come to light’.
The families were upset and disillusioned by Lord Trefgarne’s decision. They could not understand how the loss of forty-four lives, along with the largest British-registered merchant ship ever to have been lost at sea (a sad distinction Derbyshire still holds today), did not merit a formal inquiry, especially as it was normal practice to hold one in the case of a very serious incident or one involving heavy loss of life. Certainly the sinking of Derbyshire justified an investigation on both these counts. The decision compounded the families’ personal tragedy and left them feeling that the lives of their loved ones were expendable and unimportant because they were mere seafarers. Had forty-four innocent passengers been killed in a commercial airliner that crashed into the sea, surely the authorities would have investigated the disaster as thoroughly as possible. So why were they apparently satisfied to simply close the book on Derbyshire’s loss? It was the first of many setbacks the families would endure in their quest to get to the bottom of the mystery.
Although the government stopped short of conducting a formal inquiry, they didn’t completely forget about Derbyshire as the families had initially feared. Quietly, the Department for Transport commissioned a series of technical studies from two independent teams to investigate the disaster, in particular whether it was caused by a catastrophic structural failure. The two teams, the British Research Ship Association (BRSA) and the academics Bishop, Price and Temarel, came up wi
th essentially the same result despite approaching the problem in fundamentally different ways. Their common conclusion was that the likely point for a disastrous structural failure of the hull would have occurred at the forward extremity of the superstructure or in the region of frame 65. At the time they reported their initial findings, Bishop, Price and Temarel had no knowledge of the serious deck cracking suffered by the Tyne Bridge, or even of the existence of the other sister ships and the cracking they had experienced in this area, thus making their conclusions even more compelling.
Peter Ridyard, a highly experienced ship’s surveyor and the father of David Ridyard, who was the fourth engineer on Derbyshire, had also begun his own investigations, and these too focused on the cracking in the sister ships at frame 65. He had seen for himself the damage in the Cast Kittiwake. He was also given reports by colleagues that documented the damage suffered by the Tyne Bridge and the Sir Alexander Glen. And it was Ridyard who made the key discovery that these ships weren’t built to the original design with the longitudinal bulkheads continuing through the frame 65 transverse bulkhead. So no one was as keen as he was to read the Department’s final report when it was eventually published five years later, in March 1986. However, when he did, he was stunned by its conclusions.
Pointing to the fact that it had no direct evidence regarding Derbyshire herself, the thirty-four-page final report was just as inconclusive as the Department of Trade’s preliminary inquiry in 1980. Despite five years of internal investigation and several external studies by experts, it seemed that nothing new had been learned. The independent predictions made by BRSA and Bishop, Price and Temarel, identifying frame 65 as the likely location where major hull girder damage would have occurred, failed to get a single mention in the report’s conclusions. All that was said about the theory of massive structural failure was that circumstantial evidence might be thought to support it ‘but in the Department’s view is not in itself conclusive’. And finally, ‘In the last analysis the cause of the loss of Derbyshire is, and will almost certainly remain, a matter of speculation.’