MS Estonia mystery deepens after new evidence discovered
A Swedish dive team claims to have found a previously unreported hole in the hull of the wreck of MS Estonia – a discovery that raises new questions about the veracity of the original official accident investigation report.
In September 1994, the cruise ferry MS Estonia sank in the middle of the night while on a routine crossing from Tallinn to Stockholm, claiming 852 lives. It remains the worst maritime disaster in Europe since World War II.
The official accident investigation report – led jointly by authorities in Estonia, Sweden and Finland – concluded that the vessel sank because locks on its 50-tonne bow visor failed, causing it to be torn off in rough seas and allowing seawater to rush into the car decks. The report was also critical of the crew’s actions, delays in the sounding of alarms, and poor guidance from the bridge.
However, for the past 26 years, survivors and relatives of the dead have remained strongly dissatisfied with those findings, and speculation about what might have really happened on that fateful night remains rife.
"We scanned the starboard side, about a third of the way along, everything suddenly went dark. It was a massive hole, 4m high and 1.2m wide."
Henrik Evertsson, documentary maker
Conditions at the time of the incident were certainly rough – Force 8 winds and 6m waves – but nothing considered unusual for the Baltic in the autumn. All other scheduled ferries in the area were plying their routes at the time.
According to Henrik Evertsson, a Swedish documentary filmmaker who recently led a dive to the wreck of the Estonia, the testimonies of surviving witnesses were effectively ignored in the findings of the final official report.
“The survivors were clear the sinking started with a bang – a bang they felt as well as heard – before the ship went down,” he said, adding that many also saw seawater rushing in from below the car deck rather than from above it.
Prohibited access
After the incident, the Swedish government promised to raise the wreck from its site, 76m below the surface, before changing its mind shortly afterwards and deciding, instead, to entomb the vessel in a 30cm-thick layer of concrete – a plan eventually dropped after a huge public outcry.
Then, in 1995, the governments of Sweden, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Poland, Denmark, Russia and the United Kingdom signed a joint-treaty declaring the site a marine grave, which prohibited any further exploration of the wreckage, with potential violators risking a two-year prison term.
Cracked steel
“The authorities have always claimed Estonia’s hull was intact, and that their investigations observed no external damage,” explained Evertsson. “So, after interviewing the survivors, we decided to go and have a look for ourselves.”
Evertsson’s team explored the wreck using an underwater drone equipped with a camera to carry out a detailed documentation of the hull’s condition.
“We scanned the hull methodically, never entering the vessel to avoid disturbing any remains. On the port side we saw nothing unusual, but as we scanned the starboard side, about a third of the way along, everything suddenly went dark. It was a massive hole, 4m high and 1.2m wide, with one piece of cracked steel pushed inwards into the ship and another bending out.”
Marine experts, invited to take part in a new Discovery Channel documentary series about the dive, conclude that the Estonia may have sunk after being struck below the waterline by a slow moving but extremely heavy object.
A memorial to the disaster in Tagaranna, Estonia (Credit: Shutterstock)
Film crew faces criminal charges
Meanwhile, Evertsson is now facing a criminal prosecution in a Gothenburg district court for violating a protected site under the Estonia Act – a charge he strenuously denies.
“We did not disturb the grave,” he insists, “but we did discover important new information that should clearly be out in the public domain.”
Previous dive
In 2000, the American multi-millionaire salvage expert Gregg Bemis, who died this year, financed a dive to the Estonia. He also claimed to have found evidence that the hull had been breached. In 2005, an investigative report in the New Statesman magazine claimed engineers from Meyer Werft – the German yard that built Estonia – working with Bemis, “raised the possibility of an explosion”.
Zeebrugge tragedy
It wasn’t, of course, the only major disaster of its kind in Northern Europe in that era. Seven years before the Estonia was lost, another ro-ro ferry, MS Herald of Free Enterprise, sank as it departed the Belgian port of Zeebrugge with its bow doors still open. Seawater flooded the decks and the vessel quickly capsized, killing 193 people.
The official inquiry blamed the inaction of the assistant boatswain, who was asleep when he should have been closing the bow door, and a culture of poor communication within the ferry company.
Discover more
Estonia – The Find That Changes Everything, a five-part Discovery Channel documentary series, is currently available in Scandinavia only.
However, you can watch a global preview of the series on YouTube.
Dennis O’Neill is a maritime journalist.