#rip m/s estonia

[kmp78]

Honorary Estonia Chronicles

Today, September 28th, marks the 24th anniversary of one of the most horrific and traumatic disasters we residents of the Baltic Sea area have ever experienced:

The sinking of passenger ship M/S Estonia. 🛳️

From a human standpoint, the disaster was tremendous even if you did not know any of the victims. But I must add that to us Finns as well as Estonians/Swedes/basically anyone and everyone who sails the Baltic Sea daily in ships identical to M/S Estonia, the tragedy was truly shocking and humbling.

The reason I´m doing this post is partly because today is the anniversary of the disaster, but also because I visited the memorial when I was in Tallinn and thought it would be worth it to introduce this tragic event to those who were not around when it happened - because if it happened then, it could easily happen now.

To fully understand the impact the disaster had on Estonia (the country) in particular, it's worth remembering that Estonia had lost their independence in 1944 when it was occupied by the Soviet Union and only re-gained it back in 1991, so in 1994 when M/S Estonia sank, the country was still struggling trying to define its identity and get back on its feet after 50 years of Soviet rule.

Another worthy point is that Estonia is a very small country with a population of only 1.3 million. To put it in perspective: the city of Munich in Germany houses 1.4 million people aka the entire country of Estonia could fit inside Munich! This of course means that the M/S Estonia disaster affected pretty much each and every Estonian personally.

I know many people, myself included, have seen the movie Titanic and probably thought to themselves “That could never happen in modern times”, but alas...😔

The story goes as follows:

Passenger ship M/S Estonia was the "crown jewel" of the Estonian shipping company Estline - and essentially perhaps even Estonia the country as a whole - and had the capacity to transport up to 2000 people at a time between Tallinn and Stockholm which is an overnight voyage.

On the evening of September 27th 1994, M/S Estonia set sail on her regular route from the port of Tallinn on its way towards Stockholm, with 989 people on board.

The night in question was a stormy one, but definitely not hurricane-level. For all intents and purposes just your average late September evening.

The voyage across the Baltic Sea started off as planned. 

Passengers relaxed and nibbled on the bountiful buffet servings, maybe did some taxfree shopping, or enjoyed a sparkly drink and a spin on the dance floor in one of the ship´s bars.... 💃🍸 🎇

Nothing out of the ordinary as far as cruises go... Fun times, relaxation, enjoyment. Just living life and enjoying being alive.

If only they had known what was about to happen...

As night started to fall and the ship left the safety of the Estonian coastal area, the Baltic winds started to sway the ship more and more, and waves reached several meters. Some passengers started suffering from seasickness, but still this was nothing unusual for a rough night at sea in late September. 💨

As the clock started nearing midnight, many of the passengers started heading down to their cabins for some shuteye, even tho the storm was still tossing the ship quite severely and sleeping was probably going to be a bit difficult.

Shortly before 1 am one of the crew members touring the ship on his scheduled route heard a MASSIVE bang coming from the bow of the ship - and at the same time the ship itself met with a MASSIVE wave and tilted steeply. Way, way more than is usual for ships this size on open seas.

The officer naturally reported to his superiors about this anomaly, but the chiefs on the deck did not have clear visual on the bow and thus could not get a clear picture on what the hell that had been.

The noises coming from the bow were in fact so loud and so unusual that some passengers also left their cabins and headed upstairs to investigate the situation - a decision that proved to be quite critical.

Before we continue... 

What exactly had happened?! 🤔

Even years later, the source of that loud bang and the subsequent events have been debated big time, with several explanations and conspiracy theories ranging from explosions in one of the trucks being transported as cargo to the crew simply having forgotten to close the front gate of the ship.

The (real) main reason however is that the front visor had ripped open during that storm that forcefully pounded on the ship all evening long, and finally in the middle of the night tore off completely, meaning that the ship´s front was left completely exposed and water was free to gush in from the ice cold sea.

Tragically this happened in the wide open sea in the middle of the night instead of closer to shore where rescue operations would have been much easier to conduct...

Soon after the officers started getting more and more reports of water flowing on the ship´s floors, and this naturally started tilting the ship even more, slowly but surely. 

The crew tried furiously to steer the ship away from the wind and waves and pumping water from the engine rooms, but it was no use...

In a battle between humans and Mother Nature, there can only be one winner.

Rapidly an all-out panic started spreading among passengers who naturally by now had realized that something was horribly wrong - but tragically the strong tilt and raging ocean were proving to be too much for many passengers who had left exiting their cabins too late. Those who had left earlier had a much better chance of reaching the lifeboats, whereas those who had waited in their cabins too long were now trapped inside forever, simply waiting for the inevitable...

I don´t know about you guys, but for me that would have to rank as one of the most horrific ways to die! And not just drowning, but KNOWING you are eventually going to drown and there is no hope because you are trapped in a cabin and the freezing water level just keeps rising and rising...

That´s the stuff of horror movies. 😱

Sadly what most probably also contributed to the panic and distress inside the ship was the fact that the crew was seemingly caught completely off-guard and not able to take control of rescue operations. For example, there was only one, very faint, alarm being aired through the ship´s loudspeakers - but who even heard it amidst all that mayhem? Not many, as reported by survivors.

Some survivors later described that the scene inside the ship was a true definition of “every man for himself”, and how the smallest of decisions such as “Do I turn right or left at the end of this corridor?” was literally a life or death decision.

There were plenty of lifeboats for all on board so technically there was no need for loss of life unlike on the Titanic - but like I said, the situation on board was so dire and so chaotic, and only accentuated by the ever-rising water levels inside the ship which made it damn near impossible to move around, that many of the lifeboats and life-jackets sadly went unused.

And even more sad is the fact that due to the passengers being forced out into the freezing cold ocean in the middle of the night and in the middle of a storm, many who had managed to make it out of the ship later went on to die of hypothermia on the lifeboats or drowned in the raging sea while waiting for the rescue operation to commence.

The ship managed to send out an SOS and fellow cruise liners on the Baltic sea did rev their engines to get there in time - but the wrath of the ocean was too strong and time simply ran out.

In the wee hours of the morning, September 28th 1994, M/S Estonia finally fell on its side and sank to the bottom of the ocean, less than an hour after the front visor ripped off.

852 lives were lost on that night. 😢

Only 137 people survived, making Estonia´s sinking even more deadly than that of the mighty Titanic in 1912. 

A staggering 86% of M/S Estonia´s passengers never returned home again.

From personal experience I can say that waking up that morning to hear the news of something this horrific happening basically right on my “front lawn”...

Surely something like this only happens in movies?! A whole giant passenger ship sinking completely out of the blue like that...

No words... 💔

And speaking of Titanic: as is well known, Titanic´s wreckage has long been investigated by scientists and even extreme thrill-seeking tourists, and many artifacts have been salvaged from the bottom of the sea.

None of that is possible with M/S Estonia.

In this case, the governments decided that in order to prevent the wreckage from becoming a target destination for looters or tourists looking for macabre experiences under water, not only has the ship´s exact resting place at the bottom of the ocean been kept a secret... 

(basically she lays somewhere around the X mark)

... but also the hull was covered in concrete and thus getting into M/S Estonia the same way as into the Titanic via robots or divers has been rendered impossible.

This move of course caused massive controversy because as much as the concrete coating keeps looters out and protects the sanctity of the wreckage being the final resting place for hundreds of people, but at the same time it also prevented any efforts to perhaps salvage some victims for proper burials - and also meant that the the conspiracy theories still live on as to why this ship and almost 900 people had to sink 80 meters under water...

All the surviving loved ones of the victims now have are memorials for the tragedy - one of which you can naturally find in Tallinn overlooking the dock where the ship set off on her fateful last journey.

The memorial represents a “broken line” symbolized by the gap between two stone pillars reaching across a Tallinn park.

Next to the memorial stands a humble white cross reminding future generations of the tragic ending of M/S Estonia.

RIP M/S Estonia

[opedguy]

Trump Faces Mission Impossible at G20

LOS ANGELES (OnlineColumnist.com), July 5, 2017.--Landing in Warsaw before the July 7-8 G20 Summit in Hamburg, Germany, 71-year-old President Donald Trump arrived in Poland with open arms, unlike some of his European Union counterparts.  EU officials didn’t like Trump’s backing for the U.K.’s June 23, 2016 Brexit vote, where British citizens opted out of the European Union.  German Chancellor Angela Merkel, whose re-election to a third six-year term as Chancellor is all but certain for Sept. 24, bristles at Trump’s attitude toward the EU.  Trump complains about Germany’s $65 billion trade surplus, selling more than double products to the U.S. than any other exporting country, including Japan and South Korea.  Merkel has said she won’t relent on Germany’s trade surplus with the U.S. or the EU-backed 2016 Paris Climate Agreement that Trump bailed out on June 1.  Trump finds himself in far friendlier territory in Warsaw.

            Trump criticized Merkel for her pro-immigrant policies, taking nearly 1 million Mideast and North African refugees in 2016. When terrorists struck Berlin Dec. 19, 2016, Trump ripped into Merkel’s stand, illustrating what’s wrong with her pro-immigrant policies.  Trump was especially critical of Merkel for backing the Saudi-funded proxy war in against Syrian President Bashar al-Assad.  Merkel backed a policy over the last seven years resulting in the deaths of over 300,000 Syrians, driving 12 million more into exile in neighboring countries and Europe. Trump disagreed strongly with former President Barack Obama’s policy of supporting various rebel groups to topple al-Assad.  Trump received considerable flack for agreeing with Russian President Vladimir Putin that it’s preferable for al-Assad to remain in power to prevent another Iraq-like power vacuum.

            Meeting with Polish President Andrzej Duda, Trump finds a comrade-in-arms, firmly opposed to Merkel’s immigration policies. One of the safest countries in the EU, Duda wants to keep it that way, refusing to accept Merkel’s pressure to accept Mideast or North African refugees.  When Trump met with NATO leaders in Brussels May 21, he complained about the inequitable participation in defense spending, asking NATO members to increase defense budgets.  Poland has no problem paying their fair share for NATO defense, sitting on the Russian border.  Poland was horrified when Russian President Vladimir Putin marched the Russian Army into Crimea March 1, 2014, seizing Ukrainian territory, giving military support to pro-Russian separatists in the Donbass region of Southeastern Ukraine. Worried that Putin could roll into Poland, Duda asked for U.S. troops and missile defense.

            Poland views Trump much like President Ronald Reagan, considered a hero for standing up to the Soviet Union.  Poland recalls well the days when Russian puppet Gen. Wojciech Jaruzekski ruled Poland, mowing down Solidarity protesters in the Gdansk shipyard in 1970.  Poland lived under the Russian threat for years until the Soviet Union disbanded in Dec. 22, 1991.  Putin’s seizure of Crimea opened up renewed fears in Poland and the Baltic states of Lithuania, Latvia and Estonia, all three former Soviet satellites.  “He [Trump] will lay out a vision not only for America’s future relationship with Europe, but the future of our trans-Atlantic alliance, and what that means for American security and American prosperity,” said National Security Advisor H.R. McMaster.  Enjoying a $65 billion trade surplus with U.S., Merkel shows no signs of leveling the playing field.

            When Trump joins the G20 in Hamburg, all eyes will be on Trump’s first meeting with Putin.  Trump’s been accused of collaborating with Putin by Democrats and the U.S. press, without any proof, making resetting U.S.-Rusian relations next to impossible.  With North Korea launching an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile [ICBM], the U.S. can no longer afford to have anti-Russian members of Congress interfere with U.S.-Russian relations.  Trump must finally fulfill his campaign promise to improve U.S.-Russian relations to help the U.S. deal with emerging threats from North Korea. Looking to China hasn’t helped contain a growing North Korean nuclear and ballistic missile threat.  Improving relations with Russia, it’s possible for Putin to apply pressure on Pyongyang to stop nuclear threats against the U.S. Resetting U.S.-Russian relations would improve U.S. national security.

            Threatening nuclear war against the U.S., Trump no longer has the same luxury as former Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama, who kicked the North Korea can down the road.  With North Korea’s 33-year-old dictator Kim Jong-un feverishly pursuing nukes and ballistic missiles, time is running out on a diplomatic solution. Pentagon officials know the long-term risks of Kim getting his hands on a nuclear-tipped ICBM, hitting U.S. bases in Alaska or the homeland.  Starting in Poland, Trump will get all the support he needs to stress the NATO alliance, and, at the same time, work with Putin on resetting U.S.-Russian relations. However Russia meddled in the 2016 election, it’s small potatoes compared to North Korea’s clear-and-present-danger.  If improving relations with Putin can mitigate that threat, then making some minor concessions to Russia should be well worth it.

About the Author

John M. Curtis writes politically neutral commentary analyzing spin in national and global news. He’s editor of OnlineColumnist.com and author of Dodging The Bullet and Operation Charisma.