The Engine Room had the ballast pumps working on the bilges soon after the collision. Captain Nordenson, informed of the situation forward, ordered the Engine Room to set the main pumps working on emptying the forward hold. The ship’s entire water supply was cut off by the engine-room controls to stop the flooding from the torn sprinkler system in the bow.
Chief Assargren went forward from the Engine Room to the area of No. 3 hold, which had been converted to the ship’s stabilizer room, where the giant Denny-Brown stabilizing fins were located. The room was dry. The chief then turned the pumps on for No. 2 hold, but only air was pumped. The captain was pleased at the report that No. 2 hold, located behind the second watertight bulkhead, was dry and tight. But all the pumping in No. 1 hold was to no avail.
Captain Nordenson checked the trim indicator on the bridge and found the ship was down another seven inches by the bow. The second report, from Enestrom, was that water in No. 1 hold had risen to thirteen feet. Meanwhile, the second bulkhead had been inspected. It was tight and holding up well, Kallback reported.
But Captain Nordenson was worried about the pressure on the bulkhead, which, in effect, was serving as the new bow of the ship. The farther the front end of the ship dipped into the water—and it was now four feet two inches below the normal waterline—the more pressure the sea exerted on the bulkhead.
Captain Nordenson sent word back to the radio shack behind the chartroom to try to find out the identity of the other ship. No one on the Stockholm at that time knew either the identity of the ship or the amount of damage she had sustained in the collision.
The Stockholm’s third radio operator, Sven Erik Johansson, had been alone in the radio room, telegraphing his fourth message of the voyage to Gothenburg, when the collision impact hurled both him and his chair through the air. The thirty-four-year-old radioman, formerly with the Swedish air force, landed with a resounding thud on the floor. Lying on his back, he noticed the wall clock said 11:10 before he got to his feet. With the singlemindedness of a Swedish sailor, he tried to contact Gothenburg again to explain the interruption. SORRY, WE HAVE COLLIDED, he started to message, but then his feet slipped from under him and he fell again to the floor strewn with books and papers from the radio room shelves.
When Captain Nordenson sent word to the radio room that he wanted to know the identity of the other ship, all three radiomen of the Stockholm were in the radio room. Chief Radio Operator Bengt Mellgren, who had taken command of the radio shack, scribbled a message which he handed to Second Radio Operator Ake Reinholdsson at the Morse key. The message, sent out on the airwaves of 500 kilocycles, was the first notification to the world of the collision off Nantucket.
Reinholdsson first sent a series of three repetitions of X X X, clearing the distress channel for an urgent message, followed by the radio call sign of the Stockholm, SEJT, and then the message:
WE HAVE COLLIDED WITH ANOTHER SHIP. PLEASE—SHIP IN COLLISION—INDICATE
The radio operator had not finished spelling out the last word when the message was interrupted by an SOS from the other ship.
Chapter Five
“SHALL I RING THE ALARM?”
The sea poured into the Andrea Doria. Thousands of tons of water flowed through the hole in the right side of the ship. No one ever put a tape measure to the damage but the best evidence indicated that the hole was about 40 feet across at the top and, because of the shape of the Stockholm bow, progressively narrower on the lower decks. Seven of the eleven decks of the Italian liner had been ripped open, from the Upper Deck of the ship down to the double-bottom tanks of fuel and oil. The penetration was estimated to be close to 30 feet within the ship on the Upper Deck, less farther down—probably only 18 feet at the water level at C Deck and about seven feet at the bottom deck below the level of the sea. From all appearances, calculated afterwards, only one of the ship’s eleven watertight compartments was open to the sea.
Yet the Andrea Doria shuddered under the tremendous blow of the collision and suddenly, within a minute, leaned sickeningly over on her right side. Captain Calamai staggered hurriedly to the edge of the bridge wing in time to see the Stockholm disappear beyond the stern of his ship. He had felt one or two, perhaps three, distinctive bumps as the white ship had slid along the side of his ship. He leaned over the bridge railing to inspect the damage but all he could make out in the night fog was the huge black hole darker than the black hull of his beautiful ship. It began slightly aft and four decks below the bridge wing and extended down and beneath the sea. Furniture, luggage and all sorts of unidentifiable objects poured out of the gaping hole and floated aft as the ship zigzagged out of control.
Realizing that the Doria was still at full speed ahead, Captain Calamai rushed to the engine telegraph inside the wheelhouse. He saw Franchini transfixed at the wheelhouse entrance and shouted, “The watertight doors—see that they’re closed!” The captain ran to the engine telegraph and jerked both handle controls to FULL STOP. He stood there trembling. A nightmare had come to pass.
Franchini ran across the dark wheelhouse and as he passed Giannini he shouted to the younger officer to check the time. The fancy wood panel of levers which electrically controlled the twelve watertight doors of the ship was located on the rear wall near the left side of the room. Reaching there, Franchini saw that each of the twelve small levers was in the closed position. The twelve red button lights glowed red, indicating the watertight doors were closed.
Giannini grabbed a flashlight from the ledge beneath the center window and played the beam upon the bridge clock. It showed 11:10 P.M.
Within that first minute or two after the collision, the men suddenly realized that the Doria had not righted herself from the starboard list. The tilt of the deck was severe and it was difficult to maintain one’s balance.
“What’s the list?” cried out the captain and Giannini turned his flashlight on the trim indicator on the forward wall of the wheelhouse. The indicator needle fluttered at 18 degrees. This seemed incredible to the young officer for he knew that the modern Doria, built to the standards of the International Conference for Safety of Life at Sea of 1948, was not supposed to list more than 7 degrees initially and 15 degrees at the very worst. But he reported the trim indicator reading to the captain. No sooner did he call out the 18-degree list than the needle crept to 19 degrees and 20 degrees.
To Captain Calamai, the report of the severe list came like a second stroke to a man who had just suffered his first, unexpected heart attack. It meant that his ship was sinking immediately after the collision. He rushed to the telephone for a report from the Engine Room below.
The Engine Room consisted of three cavernous chambers in the center section of the 697-foot ship. The first room forward was the Generator Room, 47 feet long and 75 feet wide, containing five huge diesel generators, lined side by side across the breadth of the room, which provided for the main electrical needs of the ship. Behind that was the Boiler Room containing two boilers to supply hot water for passenger services and four huge boilers to supply high-compression steam to drive the ship’s turbine motors. The third chamber was the Main Engine Room containing the twin turbine engines and most of the controls for the ship’s pumps and machinery. Twenty-two officers and men were on watch in the three rooms at the time of the collision because of the fog precautions taken on the Doria.
The impact of the collision ruptured the starboard turbine motors, which began to spurt oil. First Assistant Engineer Giuseppe Mondini, in charge of the engine-room watch, shut down the starboard engine even before Captain Calamai’s order came down on the engine telegraph. When the telegraph signaled FULL STOP, he switched off the port engine. He sent men forward to the Boiler Room and the Generator Room, and aft to the rear of the ship where the rudder machinery was located, to check for damage. In the bowels of the ship, it was impossible to know what had happened. The men had felt a violent double thump but they could not be certain whether it came from fore or aft.
The Andrea
Doria was designed and constructed as a two-compartment ship in conformity to at least the minimum standards of stability established by the 1948 International Conference. Her 697-foot length was divided into eleven watertight chambers in such a way that if any two of the chambers became fully or partially flooded in an emergency, the other chambers would contain enough air and buoyancy to keep the ship afloat. Since it is difficult to conceive of any more than two chambers of those eleven chambers being ripped open to the sea at the same time, the Andrea Doria was theoretically “unsinkable.”
The watertight chambers were formed by the watertight bulkheads which extended across the width of the ship and from the bottom up to the level of A-Deck. The bulkheads were of solid steel tested to withstand the maximum pressure of water from a flooded compartment. The only openings in these bulkheads were the watertight doors, which when closed were as watertight as the bulkheads themselves. Thus water entering any one or even two compartments would be contained, and since the ship was designed to list no more than 15 degrees at the worst, she should remain afloat under the worst conditions imaginable.
The Andrea Doria was built with a safety margin of 5 degrees because she would have to list some 20 degrees before water filling any one compartment would overflow the top of the watertight bulkhead at the A-Deck level.
Yet, in fewer than five minutes after the collision, the Andrea Doria was listing more than 20 degrees and to the men on the ship who understood stability matters it meant that water would overflow one compartment into the next compartment progressively until the ship sank—if she did not capsize first.
In the time it took the ship’s chief engineer, Alcisio Chiappori, to run ten decks down from his cabin to the Engine Room, the list had increased to 22 degrees. The fifty-three-year-old engineer with one look at the trim indicator realized that unless he could correct the list, the ship was lost.
The engineers who had gone forward from the Main Engine Room discovered the source of water pouring into the ship. The Stockholm bow had ripped open the compartment immediately forward of the Generator Room. It was the deep-tank compartment, 55 feet long, which contained ten huge tanks with a capacity for 1,000 tons of fuel oil. The tanks were arranged with three outboard and two inboard tanks on each side of the compartment, with an access tunnel, about seven feet high and four feet wide, running from the Generator Room to a small pump and control room, a sort of cul-de-sac, at the forward end. The tunnel had four laterals branching off toward the hull at the forward and rear ends of the compartment. The tunnel and its laterals permitted access through manholes to the fuel tanks below the compartment, which were called “double bottoms.” The Doria, like all modern ships, had a complete double bottom made up of a series of fuel- and water-storage tanks the entire length of the ship. The double bottom, besides being an excellent storage space, served the double purpose of adding ballast weight to the lowest part of the ship and protecting the vessel from being punctured by underwater objects. For added protection, the Andrea Doria also had a series of wing tanks for carrying fuel and water along the sides of the three engine rooms. Extending up to the top of the engine rooms, the tanks served as a double hull protecting the three largest compartments from being punctured by possible minor collisions or scrapes.
If the Stockholm had hit at any one of the three engine-room compartments, or even at a bulkhead connecting two compartments, the Andrea Doria could have withstood the damage. The sea would have flowed across the open compartments the width of the ship and there would have been hardly any list. The Doria would have settled lower in the sea but on an even keel and could have been towed safely to shore.
But in smashing open the deep-tank compartment, the Stockholm had struck a vulnerable spot. Her bow pierced the five fuel tanks on the starboard side of the compartment and left intact the portside tanks. The ten fuel tanks near the end of the voyage had been empty. Thus some 500 tons or 240,000 gallons of sea water gushed into the starboard tanks, providing that much dead weight on one side of the ship, while the air-filled port tanks rose out of the sea like a balloon. The more the ship listed to starboard, the more hundreds and thousands of tons of water poured into the 40-foot hole in the side of the Doria, and the more water that flowed into the starboard side, the more the ship listed. It seemed only a matter of time before the ship would roll over on her starboard side and go down.
The engineers discovered there was no way they could stop the flooding of the Generator Room because, incredible as it may seem, there was no watertight door protecting the Generator Room from the access tunnel in the deep-tank compartment forward. The sea entering the tank compartment surged through the tunnel and into the unguarded Generator Room. Without a watertight door between the two compartments, it was as if there was no watertight bulkhead between them at all.
Sea water, mixed with the black oil of the ruptured double-bottom tanks and the residue of the deep tanks, flowed into the Generator Room. The water found its natural way to the starboard side of the room, adding to the list of the ship. Slowly it rose up the inclined deck toward the center of the room, threatening to short-circuit successively the five dynamos that produced 3,750 kilowatts of electricity for the ship.
There was nothing Chief Engineer Chiappori could do to save the Generator Room. He had put to work all the suction pumps of the ship, but they were unable to stem the rising water. As the water level approached the electrical parts of the No. 5 generator, which was closest to the starboard wall, he had that generator switched off. It was merely a matter of time before all the generators would be useless, but he posted an electrician at the generator control board with orders to shut off each generator only at the last possible minute when the rising water threatened to touch an electrical part. The point was to prolong the operation of the electrical plant because as the electricity supply decreased, fewer pumps could be used to cope with the flooding water.
To his distress, Chiappori, who was a vacation replacement for the regular chief engineer, learned that there was no practical way he could flood the port tanks of the fuel-tank compartment. That had been his best and most obvious hope of righting the list of the ship. But the pumps and controls for flooding these tanks were located in the cul-de-sac room at the forward end of the flooded tunnel. It did not seem possible to him or the other engineers who felt they were risking their lives even by remaining in the Engine Room to attempt to forge one’s way through the 55-foot flooded tunnel to the pump room.
The engineering officers and men worked furiously against time and the inrushing sea. The air-conditioning had been shut down to conserve electricity and the three engine rooms had become unbearably hot and steamy. The list of the ship made it almost impossible to maintain one’s footing on the wet and slippery grating of the deck. The men stripped down to their trousers and curled their toes for a griplike tread on the cross-sectioned grating that served as a floor.
The Boiler Room and the Main Engine Room had been dry for some time after the collision, but slowly the water and oil which had drained from the upper decks into the bilges began to overflow through the floor gratings into the Boiler Room and Engine Room. Even with every available pump on the ship in operation, it was, the engineers knew, a losing battle.
The situation had been reported to the bridge by telephone. The bridge telephoned back with a question: Could the ship’s engines be used? Chief Engineer Chiappori interrupted his work on the pump controls to check. He reported back that while the starboard engine was out, the port engine was available.
On the bridge, the men expected the ship to capsize before long. The list hovered at about 22 degrees and many ships had gone into the death throes at a lesser degree of list. The wheelhouse was in a furor as Captain Calamai reeled off orders for the men and officers streaming up to the bridge. Fearing his ship would soon go down, the captain ordered virtually everyone on the bridge to turn to and launch the lifeboats. He directed them first to the portside lifeboats on the high side of the ship. He orde
red Second Officer Badano to summon the lifeboat crews to their stations. The stocky second officer flipped on the loudspeaker channels to the crew’s quarters and twice announced: “Il personale destino alle imbarcazioni si portino ai propri posti!”
All the ship’s outboard lights were switched on, including the two powerful searchlights atop the ship’s mast. The whistle signal was reset to sound continuous double blasts, the signal for a ship out of control.
Staff Captain Magagnini, who had rushed to the bridge from his cabin in his pajamas and slippers, led the way to the port side lifeboats. The ship’s two first officers, Luigi Oneto and Carlo Kirn, followed. Before long the high side of the ship was swarming with boat crews. Eight lifeboats hung there in a row at the level of the Lido Deck, one below the bridge, stretching out almost the full length of the superstructure. The boat crews with the officers working alongside them feverishly ripped the tarpaulin covers from the boats, hammered away the chucks that secured the keels, and released the winch brakes. The davits were supposed to slide down to launching position over the side of the ship and the boats were supposed to fall of their own weight. But, much as Captain Calamai had feared, this did not happen.
The men and officers pushed, shoved and heaved against the inert metal lifeboats but neither they nor the davits moved. Since the modern Andrea Doria, like other ships, had been designed to list no more than 15 degrees, the modern davits had been designed as launchable up to 15 degrees. But now that the Doria was heeling some 22 degrees, the davit arms holding the boats were facing skyward instead of toward the sea. To free the boats they had to be pushed uphill and that was impossible.
Collision Course Page 8