Britain’s worst peacetime maritime disaster since the Titanic

Thirty years ago today (06 March 2017) the car ferry Herald Free Enterprise sank with the loss of 193 lives.

 It remains the single biggest loss of life in the history of the British maritime industry in peacetime since the sinking of the Titanic 75 years before.

Yet it was a tragedy that could have been avoided. It was not because of rough weather, the sea that was calm at the time. It was due to sloppy management and a woeful disregard for the basic standards of seamanship.

I had sailed on the Herald of Free Enterprise and had met her captain. For six years Townsend Thoresen – the ship’s owner – was my life. I had been a press officer and then head of promotions for the company (now P&O Ferries).The firm had been my first PR job. I had joined at the formation of the company’s PR department when it was the Hertford Public Relations agency in London’s Fleet Street.

The accident happened eight years after I had left the company to join the global PR agency Burson-Marsteller. At the time of the tragedy, I had just been promoted to the board of the agency to oversee travel, tourism and transport accounts. P&O was not a client, but the memory of the accident is still raw.

I was at home, had gone to bed, but could not sleep and switched on the TV to watch the news. Every channel was filled with scenes of the Herald of Free Enterprise lying on her side in the darkness. Images were being broadcast live from Zeebrugge. I sat there in a cold sweat aghast at what I was seeing.

The fact that a car ferry could sink in the English Channel had never been contemplated when I worked for the company. After all, we had prided ourselves on the fact that we had some of the most qualified crews and most modern ships operating on the English Channel. I had sailed countless times on the company’s ships across the channel. Travelling by sea working for a ferry company was as common as stepping onto a bus or train.

Only years after having met the architect of the ship did I realise that a car ferry could sink in less than 20 mins if sufficient water poured onto her car decks and destabilised the vessel.

The accident was blamed on the assistant boswain because he was apparently asleep in his cabin and the lack of warning lights on the bridge – the command centre – of a ship.

However, the real fault lay much further up the chain of command – with the captain himself and the design of ferries. Unlike other passenger ships, which are subdivided into watertight compartments, the vehicle decks, of what are known as RORO vessels, are normally open so water can travel uninterrupted the length of the ship.

Even in 1987 Zeebrugge was a busy freight and passenger port. An expressway to Bruges connected the port to the European motorway system and thus to the heart of industrialised cities in Europe. The late afternoon sailing from Zeebrugge on a Friday was always particularly busy. Turning around a ship that can carry up to 350 cars and over 1300 passengers from arrival to departure in less than 90 mins was demanding work. Unaccompanied freight traffic had to be unloaded along with cars, ‘foot’ passengers needed to disembark and the ship cleaned before a new batch of traffic boards the ship for the return journey home. The pressure on the captain to keep on schedule on the four and a half hour Zeebrugge to Dover run was relentless.

The bow (front) and stern (rear) doors of the ship were kept open to clear the carbon monoxide from the ship’s commercial vehicle deck and hanging car decks. The ship docked bow onto the linkspan at Zeebrugge – the vehicle ramp that connects the ship to the quay. It is reported that the captain assumed that the doors had been closed before he sailed. He could not see them from the bridge because of the ship's design and there were no warning lights either.

It was normal to go astern (backwards) from the berth in Zeebrugge and for the ship then to turn 180 degrees within the harbour to point forwards to sail out of the harbour breakwater. The Herald of Free Enterprise was a triple screw vessel - she had three propellers. She was built for speed, and could accelerate fast. So with the bow door still open thousands of gallons of water poured onto the main vehicle deck. Within four minutes of sailing, she had keeled over and sank.

In my days with the company, it was the duty of the first officer – the loading officer – to be at the bow door to ensure that everything was secure before sailing before climbing the eight or more decks to the bridge to report to the captain that the ship was safely secured for sailing. It was a failure of practice and a failure of communications between crew and deck officers that caused the ship to sink so dramatically, not primarily the ships’ design – she was just seven years old at the time of the disaster, pretty new for a car ferry.

Fortunately, since the sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise standards at sea, at least in the British merchant marine, have improved immeasurably.  

However, I still deeply regret the fact that I never reported the fact that the company’s ships sometimes sailed with their vehicle deck doors still open as they left their berths.

As communicators we are trained to watch, to view and to listen and to question. PR practitioners should – as part of their roles - be the moral and ethical watchdogs for their organisations. Nevertheless, time and time again we see practices happen that should not happen or when procedures are not followed. We mms executives we should act upon things that we think are not quite right and report them to the appropriate management rather than wait for a tragedy to take place, a public enquiry to follow and then the appropriate changes to be made.

We are usually in a very good position to do that because often, especially at corporate level, we report to people who have influence and who hold the purse strings i.e. the board of directors who have the power to get things sorted. At the very least it is incumbent on us to ensure that the right people get to know what is happening in our organisations. We are after all communicators.