The Luxembourgian government have put out a pretty good interim report. For a landlocked country, they do seem to take their flag state responsibility seriously:
It seems that a lot hinged on the fact that a relatively minor leak in the Z-drive compartment would leave the ship dead in the water, where a minor leak was known to exist.
Gotta wonder if this weakness was identified prior to sailing as part of some contingency plan? Maybe not, if this is anything to go by:
Not everyone seemed to agree, though:
Either way, a sheet of 3mm neoprene, a couple of hours’ work and a bag of helicoils could have prevented this tragedy. However,
Also, the weakness was doubtlessly identified, as per entries in the maintenance task scheduler along with this picture:
Given these facts, and the Master’s extensive experience on the vessel, he must have been at least partially aware that the ship was in a vulnerable condition. Especially what with this:
The Master also had access to at least 4 weather warnings on Inmarsat-C, spanning several days ahead of the accident. Are we to believe that an experienced Master with no prior passage experience would just head out into the void without reading the weather reports? Doesn’t seem plausible to me, and he was certainly aware of the hurricane:
Still, he drove the weakened ship right into the eye wall of a hurricane. At this stage, was he factoring in the fact that having the work deck awash would relatively quickly leave the ship dead in the water? His assessments appear increasingly optimistic as the gap between the ship and the hurricane keeps closing:
From there on out, the sequence of events are pretty much what you’d expect, a harrowing tale of a losing fight against an increasing number of flooding points, with portable pumps and frickin’ buckets. There is chaos, pandemonium, and moments of personal heroism, culminating in a disorderly evacuation and SAR ops.
Say, have we ever heard of this happening before? I kinda hate how everything circles back to El Faro, but it’s such a relevant example, and this just keeps happening over and over again. So sad 