The Shipwreck Hunter

by David L. Mearns

  The families, now loosely organized as the Derbyshire Families Association (DFA), based in Liverpool, where eighteen of the crew had made their homes, felt they were back at square one. Any hopes they had had of the government providing definitive answers to their questions were dashed. However, their anger at the report had a galvanizing effect on them and drove them to pile even more pressure on the government and the shipping industry, which they believed were complicit in turning a blind eye to the death of Derbyshire’s crew. Ridyard in particular was upset by the final report’s conclusions because they read nothing like the conclusions of the draft report he was handed in July 1985. This earlier version had gone much further in documenting the known defects of the Bridge class of ships, and the author was clearly unafraid to suggest the logical cause for Derbyshire’s loss:

  If Derbyshire was constructed in much the same way as the sister ships, and there is little reason to suppose that she was not, then in the severe tropical storm which occurred major cracking possibly developed as it did in the Tyne Bridge. In the case of the Derbyshire it is most likely that had cracking taken place it is probable that it took place so rapidly and extensively that total structural failure resulted. This was followed by the capsizal of the inhabited portion of the ship abaft frame 65. This probably accounts for the complete absence of any distress traffic.

  As Ridyard and the DFA contemplated their next move, the news broke that another of the Bridge class of ships was in serious trouble off the coast of southern Ireland.

  The thirteen-year-old Kowloon Bridge was carrying 160,000 tons of iron ore from Sept Iles, Canada, when she ran into trouble crossing the Atlantic in November 1986. Rough weather during the passage had given her a severe battering, including impact damage from waves breaking over her stern and a crack that was slowly expanding between the No. 9 cargo hatch and the pump room in the vicinity of frame 65. Knowing how Derbyshire was lost, and not wanting to suffer the same fate, the captain brought the ship into Bantry Bay on 18 November, informing the vessel’s owners that she was unseaworthy. With the stricken ship in a safe anchorage, the crew began making preparations to temporarily repair her as per the Lloyd’s surveyor’s instructions. Unfortunately, the weather took a serious turn for the worse, and before they could complete the repairs it was blowing a Force 10–12 from the south-west straight up the entrance of the bay.

  On the morning of 22 November, Kowloon Bridge’s starboard anchor cable parted, forcing the captain to flee the bay and whatever relative shelter it had been providing. The ship was out in the open ocean again, finding it very difficult to steer in the huge seas that had built up. Things suddenly went from bad to worse when the bows fell into the trough of a wave, eliciting a loud bang from the forward end of the vessel. Unable to see the bow through the driving snow and rain, the crew could nevertheless tell that the ship was dangerously down by the head. Shortly afterwards, all steering was lost. It was now close to midnight and the situation had become life-threatening, with the Kowloon Bridge virtually uncontrollable on a rocky lee shoreline in near-hurricane conditions. Fearing the worst, the captain decided his only option was to abandon ship, and sent out a Mayday distress call requesting helicopter assistance. Luckily, a pair of RAF search-and-recovery helicopters out of Cork were fuelled and ready to go and were able to get everyone safely off in record time. But for the ship herself, there was no such luck.

  Initially the abandoned and derelict Kowloon Bridge was about ten miles off the coast and out of harm’s way but with her engine still running. Much to the concern of the coastal residents, however, the storm turned the ship around and put her on a collision course with land. Anyone who was following her through binoculars at the time will testify to the surreal sight of this unstoppable monster, lights blazing but without a soul on board, seemingly intent on slamming headlong onto the shore. That inevitability was only avoided when the engine stopped on the evening of 23 November, leaving the drifting hulk to the mercy of the wind and tide, the combination of which eventually brought her to ground on Stag Rocks, off Toe Head. Not long afterwards, the hull broke in two places, triggering the release of 2,000 tons of fuel oil that polluted miles of pristine coastline and shut down a centuries-old herring fishery. After two salvage tugs failed to pull the stern section off the rocks, it was left to the winter gales and pounding surf to reduce the Kowloon Bridge to a total loss. Months later, she finally slipped off the rocks into deeper waters, where she still lies today, of value only to the sea life that has colonized her hull and the scuba divers who visit regularly.

  The sight of the Kowloon Bridge lying wrecked on Stag Rocks, her hull badly dislocated and streaming a constant flow of oil, became a front-page story that spread well beyond the narrow interests of the shipping industry. Obvious comparisons were drawn between her plight and that of Derbyshire. When divers began to inspect the remains of the Kowloon Bridge, however, the comparisons took on a completely different dimension. The aft break in the hull was found to extend all the way round frame 65. Added to the mounting evidence of a serious defect with the Bridge class of ships, this new information was impossible for the authorities to ignore. A formal investigation into the loss of Derbyshire was finally called to start in late 1987.

  To say the investigation was a bitter disappointment to the DFA would be a serious understatement. The families who sat through even a fraction of the forty-six days of the hearings walked away bewildered by the technical complexity of the information discussed and upset that all the relevant evidence wasn’t considered. For example, Peter Ridyard was prevented from offering his verbal testimony, as the commissioner doubted he would be of much help. Nor was Professor Bishop called to give evidence on the expert study his team had conducted for the Department for Transport, even though the inquiry was being held under their aegis. Strangely, the Kowloon Bridge wasn’t mentioned in the final report, despite the fact that it was her loss that had triggered the inquiry in the first place. Ignoring the frame 65 issue with the Kowloon Bridge would have been difficult for anyone sitting in the courtroom on day forty, as divers supportive of the DFA had retrieved a huge section of it from the seabed and unloaded it onto the steps leading into the building. Its presence seemed to unnerve the commissioner, who declined the opportunity to go outside and inspect the steel structure that was central to one of the three theories he was investigating.

  When the court’s final report was published in January 1989, it only served to confirm what the DFA already feared: that another inconclusive decision would signal the end of any further attempts to determine the true cause of Derbyshire’s loss.

  For the reasons stated in this report the court finds that the Derbyshire was probably overwhelmed by the forces of nature in Typhoon Orchid, possibly after getting beam on to wind and sea, in darkness on the night of 9th/10th September with the loss of 44 lives. The evidence available does not support any firmer conclusions.

  By the start of the 1990s, it was readily apparent that the problem with bulk carriers being lost at sea was not confined to just the Bridge class of ships. In fact the rate of losses, including sunk or damaged ships, had been alarmingly high for more than a decade, and had experienced an upsurge in recent years. Whichever way you look at the figures, they are sickening. Between 1975 and 1990, 279 bulk carriers were lost, including combination carriers like Derbyshire, totalling nearly six million gross tons: an average of 17 bulk carriers per year. Estimates of the lives lost over this same period exceed 750.

  This dirty little secret of the shipping industry finally broke in 1991, when the trade papers and magazines began to openly question the rate of bulk carrier casualties and their probable causes. The age of the vessels was seen as a primary factor, but poor management and maintenance and problems associated with loading and unloading were also cited. But where did the Derbyshire fit into this disturbing picture? She was only four years old when she was lost, and there was no question she was being well looked after by one of the UK’s premier owner
/operators. Moreover, she was entirely crewed by British seafarers, and thus far more effort had been expended to understand what had caused her to sink. As frustrated as the DFA were with the string of inconclusive investigations, no other bulk carrier casualty in the world had been investigated to the same extent, if at all. The shocking norm in other parts of the world, especially for ships registered under flags of convenience – where the owner registers the vessel in a different country to avoid strict regulations – is that merchant shipping losses are hardly investigated at all, and the loss of seafarers from poor countries like the Philippines, India and Indonesia, to name but a few, is seen by some as an acceptable cost of an inherently dangerous profession.

  Against this backdrop of increased public awareness about bulk carrier losses, the DFA’s campaign to have the government establish a new public inquiry started to gain wider support from politicians and the media. Along the way, various transport-related trade unions also offered support to the cause. In March 1993, there was sufficient confidence amongst the interested parties for an advertisement to be placed on the front page of the trade paper Lloyd’s List seeking tenders from ‘companies capable of deploying manned or remotely controlled camera vehicles at a depth of 3,250 metres’ to investigate Derbyshire’s wreckage.

  Within hours of the advertisement landing on my desk at Eastport International I had responded with details of our two ROVs that could reach this depth, and our track record on previous shipwreck investigations. I had no idea who I was writing to – only a fax number and an operation code name were provided – and it wasn’t until three weeks later, at a meeting in a central London hotel, that I learned who exactly was driving this project. The list of attendees I was sent prior to the meeting seemed impressive: it contained the names of three trade union general secretaries; four members of Parliament; four legal representatives; two members of the clergy; an operations director named Shaun Kent; a metallurgist named John Jubb, and Paul Lambert of the DFA. I was naturally sceptical that everyone on the list was going to attend, but even if only half showed up, it had all the makings of being a fascinating meeting.

  When Don Dean and I entered the conference room, it was immediately obvious that many of the high-profile names on the list were no-shows. Shaun Kent, a scrap metal merchant who had somehow acquired the rights to the hull and cargo of the Kowloon Bridge for the grand sum of £1, was acting as the lead representative and made the introductions. The sole DFA member was Paul Lambert. His younger brother Peter was just nineteen when Derbyshire sank, and Paul had dedicated much of his own life to finding the true cause of the loss. Like Shaun Kent, John Jubb was volunteering his time, as he had done when he testified at the 1987 public inquiry as an expert on welded structures. John had been extremely upset by the decision of the inquiry to rule the loss a result of the forces of nature and was determined to see this wrong righted. Also present were Eddie Loyden, a Liverpool MP who was working to build support within the House of Commons to press the government on reopening the inquiry; Belinda Bucknall QC, an Admiralty barrister who had represented the families at the 1987 inquiry, and who came to provide advice on the legal aspects of searching for the wreck; and the Reverends Peter McGrath and Canon Ken Peters, were there to support Paul and the families as they had done since virtually the day Derbyshire went missing.

  Don and I were expecting a meeting focused on the technical and business aspects of finding and filming Derbyshire’s wreck, but given the people who were there, it seemed more like a community support group for the DFA. There was obviously a good case to be made that finding the wreck could finally provide the evidence needed to have the formal investigation reopened. What wasn’t clear, however, was who in the room had the means to fund a search, which was going to be expensive given the extreme depth and remote location. When this question was raised towards the end of the meeting, all heads turned to a young man sitting at the back of the room who until that moment had remained silent.

  Mark Dickinson was the personal assistant to David Cockroft, the acting general secretary of the International Transport Workers Federation (ITF), and was merely standing in at the meeting for his boss. He had no authority or mandate to commit ITF funds for a search, and had attended simply to listen to our presentation and the DFA’s objectives and report back. So when everyone in the room looked towards him at the mention of money, he understandably began to squirm in his seat. No precise figures had been discussed yet, but everyone was aware we were talking about a significant sum in the order of several hundred thousand pounds. Nevertheless, it still seemed that some people in the room expected Mark to nod his head and approve the full cost of the search right then and there. As a seafarer and a Liverpudlian himself, there was no doubt that he personally empathized with Paul Lambert, but this wasn’t his call to make. It was a major decision for the ITF that needed careful consideration.

  In the end, it took eleven months for the executive board of the ITF to approve funding for the search and to award the contract to Eastport, which in the intervening period had been bought out by our closest competitor, Oceaneering International. The process of winning the competitive contract had been arduous, and included conducting a feasibility study to prove, amongst other things, that there was a reasonable chance of finding the wreck and bringing back the new evidence required. The ITF also hoped that the project would ‘arouse world-wide public interest in maritime safety, in particular the plight of seafarers of all nationalities working on board bulk carriers and other large ships’. These objectives dovetailed well with the union’s Flag of Convenience campaign, aimed at ensuring that its members around the world were paid proper wages and enjoyed decent working conditions. To achieve their publicity aims, the ITF agreed for an ITN journalist to be on board the survey vessel and file reports on the search as it unfolded.

  It had taken fourteen painful and frustrating years for the Derbyshire families to get to this point, but now they were just a few short months away from having their questions answered.

  Of the numerous challenges posed by this project, the biggest had to be the relatively short period of search time the ITF’s limited budget could afford. Excluding the time it would take to transit back and forth to the search area from the mobilization port of Yokohama, we’d have just eight days to find the wreckage, with no contingency for bad weather, equipment failures or any other losses of time. It was a huge gamble for everyone involved to accept the contract on this basis, as it left absolutely no margin for error or problems. Even if the search was conducted flawlessly, we could easily run out of time before finding the wreck and would be saddled with that failure and the inevitable damage it would cause to our reputation. Despite our successes in finding the Lucona and the Demetra Beauty, we knew we would only be considered as good as our last search. Although the ITF had already increased their budget from £320,000 to £360,000, that was as much as the executive board was willing to risk on a project with an uncertain chance of success. In the final analysis, however, we all felt it was a risk worth taking.

  The other challenge, exacerbated by the limited budget, was the almost total lack of clues about where Derbyshire had sunk. The ship had sent no distress or Mayday calls, nor had any survivors or wreckage been picked up to allow an estimate of the sinking position, as was the case with the Lucona. It was also impossible to predict Derbyshire’s likely track beyond her last known position, as we didn’t know the time the vessel sank or how far and in what direction it had travelled in the face of the extreme and changing conditions of Typhoon Orchid. There was, however, one set of possible clues, if only they could be trusted.

  After Derbyshire was overdue arriving into port and Bibby couldn’t raise the ship by radio, a request was made to the Japanese Maritime Safety Agency (JMSA) to mount a search. Because of a rule that a ship had to be overdue by at least twenty-four hours before a search could proceed, the JMSA didn’t begin looking for Derbyshire until 15 September, a full six days after her last radio c
ontact. The search-and-rescue (SAR) helicopter and aeroplane (no. 791) assigned to conduct the search that day found no signs of Derbyshire or any wreckage at the last known position (LKP) they were given: 25°18’ north, 133°12’ east. However, they did find oil, described as bubbling to the surface and causing a slick 1 km wide and 2 km long, at two different positions a good distance north-north-east of the LKP. Surprisingly, the two reported oil positions were quite far apart from each other: certainly too far apart to be coming from the same source. The oil sighted by aircraft no. 791 in position 25°50’ north, 133°30’ east was twenty-four nautical miles north-northeast of the helicopter’s sighting at 25°30’ north, 133° 18’ east. Later on, this distance between the two positions took on a much greater significance.

  The next day, 16 September, the patrol vessel Ohsumi also found oil bubbling up to the surface at a more precise position (25°48’48’ north, 133°37T8’ east), considerably closer to the sighting made by aircraft 791. The search then had to be abandoned for a few days until Typhoon Sperry passed over the area, but was resumed on 19 September when another SAR aircraft (no. 811) found yet more dark brown oil bubbling up in a position (25°50’ north, 133°33.5’ east) more or less midway between the sightings made by airplane 791 and Ohsumi.