In 1980, the U.S. Coast Guard suffered its own worst sea tragedy. On January 28, at 6 P.M., the 180-foot Coast Guard buoy tender Blackthorn set out in Tampa Bay, Florida, for a return voyage to her home port of Galveston, Texas, following a routine month-long overhaul in a Tampa shipyard. The night was clear and moonlit. Traffic in the bay was not particularly heavy. And yet, as the buoy tender passed under the Sunshine Skyway, an extraordinarily long bridge which spanned the bay, no one on the Coast Guard ship’s bridge, including her captain, Lieutenant Commander George Sepel, apparently saw the navigational lights of the 605-ton tanker Capricorn, steaming down the deep water channel leading into the bay. The Blackthorn was attempting to cut across the channel into open water. The tanker, expecting the Blackthorn to turn into the channel, maintained the course and speed for which she had the right of way. The Blackthorn smashed into the big tanker at an angle, portside to portside, with such force that the 180-foot buoy tender flipped over and sank to the bottom of the bay within a minute or two. Twenty-seven Coast Guardsmen were fished out of the black water; twenty-three men went down with the ship.
In another remarkable first, in heavy seas in the dead of night off the southern tip of Japan, the most technologically advanced and sophisticated of ships, the U.S. nuclear submarine George Washington, traveling beneath the surface, rammed into a small Japanese freighter, the Nissho Maru, and sent her to the bottom of the Japan Sea. The captain and the first mate were lost at sea. No one aboard the Nissho Maru had the slightest warning of the approach of a submarine. The collision became an international incident when it was reported that the George Washington “hit and ran.” The U. S. Navy did not acknowledge its submarine’s involvement in the sinking for a full thirty-six hours after the collision. It also touched off an international politically embarrassing question as to what a nuclear-armed American submarine was doing in Japanese waters.
As for the collision itself, human error was to blame once again. Few details were made public, but as reconstructed by knowledgeable maritime experts, a great many different innocent factors combined to bring about the disaster. Each factor alone was understandable; combined they led to catastrophe. The George Washington apparently was traveling beneath the surface at great speed, probably twenty knots or more, because a nuclear submarine is a very uncomfortable, rolling ship when cruising on the surface. At that speed, a sub’s periscope vibrates so much that it is useless for sighting other ships. At high speed, the sub’s sonar is unreliable because of the noise of the sub’s own propellers. So, as a matter of practicality, the usual technique for cruising a nuclear submarine at full speed underwater is to surface every thirty minutes or so, take a quick radar check to determine that the way is clear, and then to dive and cruise on underwater for another half-hour—blindly.
From the extent of the damage reported, it is clear that the George Washington was proceeding at considerable speed. When the top of her conning tower hit the Japanese freighter, she probably lost the use of most of her navigational aides: her periscope, radar, loran, upper steering station, searchlights and her radio antenna. Surfacing after the collision, she might well have been a half or a full mile away from the sinking freighter. There would be no way the sub’s crew, using only hand flashlights, could see any of the Japanese seamen in the water, or their ship, on a dark, foggy night at sea. Only the following morning could the captain of the George Washington have had the sub’s radio antenna repaired so that he could report in.
Thus, as reconstructed, there was little under the circumstances that the George Washington’s crew could have done that they did not do. They did not purposely leave other seamen to drown after the accident. Nevertheless, it is clear in admiralty law that a submarine, any submarine, is the “burden” vessel in any collision. After all, surface vessels in peace time can hardly be expected to steer clear of submerged submarines they cannot see. The U.S. Navy accepted full responsibility for the collision. The officer of the watch aboard the George Washington was given a severe reprimand; the captain was relieved of his command.
There is, in short, no cure for human error at sea. Accidents occur again and again in all modes of transportation and in all walks of life. Almost all of them are the results of human error. It is man who is imperfectible. Ship collisions are seen as particularly extraordinary because they are just that—unexpected and extraordinary. With the thousands of ships at sea every day, it is remarkable that ships at sea are as safe as they are.
There is little likelihood of there ever being another collision at sea like that of the Andrea Doria and the Stockholm. The day of the transatlantic luxury ocean liner is past. In the years that the Doria and the Stockholm sailed in and out of New York, there were sixty-one passenger ships plying the North Atlantic, carrying some fifty thousand passengers at any one time. Now, only the Queen Elizabeth 2 of the Cunard Line makes regular crossings—and then only during the summer months. Once, it had been a way of life to travel to Europe or to New York on a Cunard, French, Scandinavian, Italian, or American liner—a bit of elegance, a special adventure, a voyage to be remembered and cherished. Today’s generation knows nothing of that bygone age; few if any have ever seen those behemoth floating palaces, much less travel aboard one of them. They are gone—not because of any collisions at sea or similar disasters. They are gone because they had become too expensive to operate (largely due to the increased cost of fuel), because they were too slow, because people no longer have the leisure time to spend five or six days crossing the Atlantic. Jet engine and supersonic aircraft now cover the distance in a matter of hours rather than days. The luxury ocean liner has been relegated to the role of a floating hotel, with her gourmet dining rooms, fashionable cocktail bars, nightclubs, and dancing salons—going nowhere in particular in what is euphemistically called a cruise. These sailings are strictly designed for rest, relaxation, and romance.
In such an economic climate the transatlantic liners could not survive. They became deficit ridden and soon were sold off, briefly as cruise ships and then for scrap metal. The Italian Line discontinued sending any of its ships to the United States. The Cristoforo Colombo, sister ship of the Andrea Doria, has been sold for scrap. The Ile de France has been junked in Japan. The Brostrom Concern sold the Stockholm to East German interests, and they, in turn, after cruising the small liner between Colombia and Venezuela for some years, sold her to a Japanese company, which reduced the ship to scrap iron and steel. In 1975, after a long and bitter dispute with Swedish unions over transferring its passenger ships to the Panamanian flag for economic reasons, the Brostrom Concern simply dissolved the entire Swedish-American Line, sold off the Kungsholm and the Gripsholm, and went out of the passenger line business.
America’s ocean liners fared no better. The United States, which had been the pride of this country’s transatlantic passenger fleet since 1952, was decommissioned in 1969 and laid in mothballs in Norfolk, Virginia, for twelve years. Then in 1981, she was converted to a cruise ship for service between the West Coast and Hawaii. The Independence, of the American Export Line, was bought by C. Y. Tung, the Chinese shipping magnate, and refitted as a cruise ship between San Francisco and Honolulu.
With so many of the other ships of that era gone, it is the Andrea Doria that has remained alive in the memory and imagination of those who cherish ships. The Andrea Doria-Stockholm collision was such an unexpected and spectacular event that people old enough at the time remember well where they were and what they were doing when they first heard the news. For those whose lives are associated with the sea, especially the men in the diving and salvage business, the Andrea Doria remains tantalizingly close—just fifty-odd miles off shore and reachable in thirty-three fathoms of water.
For twenty-five years, deep-sea salvage experts and aficionados have pondered the problem of how to raise the 29,000-ton Italian liner from the depths. A little more than twenty-four hours after the sinking, Peter Gimbel, the twenty-eight-year-old son of the head of the Gimbel Department St
ore chain, was the first man to dive down to the Andrea Doria. An amateur scuba diver at the time, with six years’ diving experience behind him, Gimbel swam down to the sunken ship, accompanied by another amateur diver, Joseph Fox, and photographed the ship lying on her starboard side upon the coarse yellow sand of the ocean’s bottom.
The Doria looked like a carefully embalmed corpse, stretched out upon her right side, her slender bow up off the ocean floor, her forty-foot-wide wound hidden beneath her, as though she were just resting there, unhurt, in pristine condition, her paint and decks still gleaming, her overall appearance still luxurious, still beautiful.
How to raise her? That was the question.
Obviously, she was too big, too heavy, to be hauled up to the surface like some playboy’s sunken yacht. What kind of cables or chains could lift a 29,000-ton ocean liner? What kind of winches could handle that weight? What size ship or ships could you have on the surface from which to operate the winches and cables? The standard method for salvaging large ships is to send divers down to her, to seal off her openings, or most of them, and then force the sea water out of her sealed compartments by pumping in compressed air until she floats back to the surface. That is the textbook theory. As a practical matter, no ship of the size and weight of the Andrea Doria, or even half her size, has ever been salvaged from that depth.
But that has been the real challenge for salvage experts around the world: Salvage the Andrea Doria and you can demonstrate with worldwide publicity your ability to refloat hundreds of valuable ships with all of their sunken treasures from the briny deep. Anyone who could devise a practical method of raising a major vessel from a depth of one hundred feet or more would capture a very lucrative market of deep sea salvage. The Bon Homme Richard, a flagship of John Paul Jones, sunk during the Revolutionary War, has been located in 180 feet of water in the North Sea, off the coast of England, waiting to be raised. The Civil War’s famous old ironclad, U.S.S. Monitor, has been found and filmed on the bottom of the Atlantic off Cape Hatteras, North Carolina, in 220 feet of water, but no one has figured out how to raise her. Then there are the ships sunk during World War II, reputedly carrying vast war treasures to the bottom of the sea. One of them is the Japanese Awa Maru, which went down in 185 feet of water in the Formosa Strait with a cargo of diamonds and gold plundered from occupied territories, said to be worth more than $500 million.
The salvage value of the Andrea Doria has ranged over a wide spectrum of figures, including such wild schemes as converting the huge steel hull into millions of highly polished steel cuff links to be sold as souvenirs to an eager public. Actually, the Italian government and the insurance underwriters who paid for the insured portion of the ship have looked into every feasible way to recoup their losses. Once the court case was settled, they invited confidential bids for the salvage value of the Italian liner, and they also gathered estimates on the feasibility and the costs of attempting to raise the ship. The results were so disappointing that they were never announced. The Italian government and the insurers abandoned any hope of raising and selling off the one-time flagship of the Italian Line. The cost of attempting to raise the ship was prohibitive. The bids on buying the ship, if she were raised, were too low to warrant even an attempt at salvage.
This did not stop others from making and announcing plans to raise the Andrea Doria. They cropped up in the news from all over the world and from all walks of life. Fill the ship with Ping Pong balls and she’ll float to the top. That was one of the very first plans. A former navy captain in Detroit announced a scheme to float the Andrea Doria by pumping 2,500 tons of liquid plastic into the ship through its portholes. The plastic, lighter than water, would instantly solidify and the Andrea Doria would float gently to the top. Then all he would have to do was to close off the hole in the side of the ship, cut away the plastic, and the Doria would be as good as new. This method has been used to salvage downed Navy aircraft, but is considered impractical for refloating ships which are so much larger and heavier.
A Canadian salvage group announced that it had a secret chemical that it would add to the oxygen given to divers which would enable them to work under the great depths of water for longer than normal—an hour or more—but no one said what the divers would do underwater to raise the Doria. A team of four Italian divers, headed by a television producer, announced plans in 1968 to raise the Doria and actually made two dives to the ship before they gave up and were heard from no more. An entrepreneur in Coney Island, New York, built a homemade forty-foot submarine, with which he said he would work on refloating the Andrea Doria, but the little submarine itself almost sank upon launching in 1970. Because it is so dangerous and so expensive to have deep-sea divers working at such depths, there have been various schemes to work on the Andrea Doria from the confines of a miniature submarine equipped with robot arms or tentacles. But no one, as yet, has been able to devise such a submarine.
The most grandiose scheme for raising the Doria was promulgated by a New Jersey salvage company, financed by a wholesale liquor dealer. His idea was to raise the Doria by slipping four-inch-thick steel cables beneath her hull and attaching the cables to two giant Great Lakes iron ore ships. The ore ships would be flooded with sea water until they were partially submerged; the cables would be tightened; the sea water pumped out of the ore ships so that they would rise to the surface, pulling up the Doria from the bottom. Once free, the Doria would be towed beneath the water some eighteen miles to the South Davis shoal, where divers could more easily repair the stricken liner. No one, however, explained how those steel cables would be slipped under the huge ship or the odds against successfully lifting and towing a 29,000-ton ship submerged through the treacherous crosscurrents and rough seas off Nantucket. The attempt was never made.
To raise the Andrea Doria is not technically impossible. It is only that no one as yet has figured out a way to do it that would have a reasonable chance of success and at reasonable expense. Any single one of the problems relating to a salvage operation—the heavy seas, the exasperating currents beneath the water, the heavy fog, the uncertain weather, the pressure at that depth of water, plus the size of the ship, the forty-foot hole in its side, and the many openings in the interior of the ship itself—poses a considerable obstacle, but combined they virtually insure defeat. It would require many divers to seal off the seventeen interior stairways, the open portholes, and finally that forty-foot wound. And there is just not enough room down there for that many men working at one time. They would get in each other’s way. These are only the most obvious obstacles facing anyone attempting to salvage the ship. There are, according to the experts, many other technological barriers. And then there is the stumbling block of money.…
All of the plans, practical and otherwise, have failed thus far because of the prohibitive cost of even making an attempt.
The best estimates from experienced salvage firms for refloating the Andrea Doria—with no guarantee of success—range from $3 million to $6 million; to repair and refit her “in class” so that she could sail again would cost another $6 million to $12 million. What would the Andrea Doria really be worth if all that were done? No more than $9 million. So, at the very best, one could hope only to break even. That was why the Italian government and the ship’s insurance underwriters decided to leave the luxury liner where she lay. More than $11 million was spent to salvage the French liner Normandie after she was devastated by fire and sank at her pier in New York in 1942. And the Normandie went down in only forty feet of perfectly calm water. A goodly number of people have invested their money over the years in various attempts to salvage the Doria, intrigued with the exaggerated stories of treasures, prizes, and fame, and they, in a manner of speaking, have come up with nothing.
The one man who has been consulted on the subject more than anyone else has been Captain Bruno J. Augenti, a salvage expert for more than forty years who was a key technical consultant during the U.S. court hearings on the collision. Augenti has done all he
could ever since to dissuade men from undertaking any attempt to salvage the Andrea Doria. He has turned away several would-be salvagers with a stern warning: “If you solicit funds to salvage the Andrea Doria, I will report you to the District Attorney for attempted fraud.” Augenti, a former submarine officer in the Italian Navy insists: “The value of the Andrea Doria will not justify the expense of the salvage.” Twenty-five years after the sinking, this feisty sea captain, who loved the Andrea Doria, has not changed his mind: “As far as I am concerned, I do not know of any new technology to do the task.”
Short of bringing the Andrea Doria back up, the next best thing was to go down to her and retrieve her treasures. Divers have gone down to the Doria alone and in pairs and in groups of four, some with elaborate support systems, others on a strictly adventurous scuba dive to the most glamorous wreck within reach. Over the years, more legends have come up from the depths than riches. There was said to be more than $1 million in cash in the safe and a cache of personal jewelry in safe deposit boxes in the First Class Purser’s Office on the Foyer Deck. There was more cash and jewelry in the Cabin Class Purser’s Office further aft on that deck. There was a bag of industrial diamonds somewhere on the ship. There were stories of diamonds and gold in various passenger cabins. There was a solid silver plaque, estimated at a quarter of a million dollars, in the First Class Foyer, and other silver plaques still adorning the walls in various other public rooms. There were oil paintings and sculptures still worth a fortune. And souvenirs. A place setting from an Andrea Doria dining room was said to be worth at least $5,000 on the collector’s market. And the china. And the wine cellar. And … Estimates of the potential retrievable treasures ran from $2 million to $4 million. And, it was all down there—for the taking.
Collision Course Page 27