DATELINE :- 14th September 2000
ESTONIA EXAMINATION
Gregg Bemis investigates ferry sinking
Divers have been examining the wreck of the car and passenger ferry Estonia, which capsized and sank in the Baltic in 1994 with the loss of 853 lives.
Working at 70m, the team is looking for evidence to support the theory that the Scandinavian ferry might have been holed by a collision with a submerged object, rather than suffering a dislodged bow visor and forward ramp area, as cited in the official accident report.
The project has been undertaken by California-based Deep Ocean Engineering. Its director is Gregg Bemis, owner of the wreck of the Lusitania off Kinsale in Ireland. Bemis has said that the dives are his own venture rather than a response to any requests by campaigners for a review of the accident.
His dives do, however, fly in the face of a ban on diving the wreck, placed on grounds that it is a maritime grave by Sweden, Finland and Estonia, the countries which lost most civilians in the tragedy.
Other signatories to the agreement are Denmark, Britain and Latvia. Bemis sails under the flag of the USA, which is not a signatory, but the team would theoretically risk arrest if they landed in one of the signatory countries having dived the Estonia.
According to Fairplay International Shipping Weekly, a Swedish government minister has asked Stockholm's US embassy to dissuade Bemis from carrying out his project. The embassy replied that it could not force Bemis to withdraw and, faced with the impending dives, a Finnish member of the wreck's investigation commission admitted that videotape of the Estonia, taken by British commercial divers soon after the sinking, appeared to show a hole in a forward section of the hull.
However, the commission states that the hole is not big enough to have caused the vessel to sink, and still concludes that storm damage to its visor and subsequent damage to the car deck ramp led to the large intake of water that caused it to capsize.
As Diver went to press at the end of August, Bemis's team of nine divers, backed up by an ROV, were due to commence eight to ten days' work on the wreck, filming and photographing their finds.