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The problem is that if sabotage had occurred in the way you promote -- by means of explosives that you claim Braidwood found -- those effects would be plainly evident to any researcher regardless of his mandate and would have to be mentioned. Just because the brief for some analysis doesn't explicitly mention looking for signs of sabotage, that doesn't mean the report is only going to note some fatigue cracking and speculate on a failure sequence and just leave out the part where the relevant structures were cut using explosives, or fail to note the specific pitting and welding that says metal was cut nearby using a sudden high-temperature event. The lack of mention for evidence that would arise in your scenario is still dispositive.
***grabs mandolin and Leprechaun's hat, and does funny little dance***
(Ironically, I find the mythical Gaelic tales of Leprechauns to be considerably more plausible than every single one of Vixen's positions in this thread...)
No, that's not how voir dire works. You're the one trying to set up Anders Björkman as such an expert in marine engineering as to be a sole-source witness to the strength of certain claims. You've demonstrated (and at times admitted) that you lack the wherewithal yourself to determine whether the specialized claims he has made are valid. Instead you rely on your "critical faculties" and cite his general stature in the field as evidence that the specific claims he makes in this one case must be respected. Except that he has no general stature. As others have pointed out, he overstated his qualifications in marine design. He lied about steps he had taken to test the flooding model. And this is not an anomaly; he has lied repeatedly, confidently, and purposely about other engineering feats that various pundits have tried to call into doubt on flimsy pretexts. This is why he "works" in the field only as a single-person business run out of his house. No firm will hire him. You laid your foundation for Björkman's claims on the very things that your critics have amply cross-examined and found to be unworthy. Trying to shift foundations and reverse the burden of proof simply isn't going to work. You bear the burden to show he is the expert you need him to be.
And to add on to that: There are two things on ABs site - quoted text/references to other reports, and his interpretations/conclusions.
There is no point in using AB as a source for the first type. By definition that is not a primary source. Instead quote from and link to the actual reports.
The second type of text on his page is his own. That is well covered by JayUtah above.
Ah but you have a commitment to accuracy which means you have a high chance of spotting the autocorrect error at the time (and correcting it), or of spotting the autocorrect error when you glance at the post once it's in place in the thread, and going back in to correct it in the edit.
Some others in this vicinity (with a large amount of supporting evidence), not so much.......
But it got in through a ruptured sea pipe not a 'hole'.
Engine Rooms and machinery spaces are the largest open spaces inside a hull.
If they flood it is double serious as they are not just large reserves of buoyancy, but also the place where the pumps and power are situated.
After power was lost and it listed water started to get in through other openings such as ventilators, air ducts, hatches and windows.
Estonia didn't turn turtle because it too was 'bottom heavy' with water that got in to the engine room and machinery spaces through the missing bow, ventilators, air ducts, hatches and windows.
On both ships they were doomed as soon as power was lost.
Here's the article in full, since it's behind a paywall:
Andi Meister, the first chairman of the international commission of inquiry, writes in the book "Unfinished Logbook" that the divers did not study the cabins of the ship's top officers and other key people at the front of the upper decks. No attempt was made to enter the cabin of the captain, chief engineer officer or shipowner on the eighth deck, although the windows of their cabin were accessible. Did not look in the window or try to determine if
3. Mysterious suitcases and packages
In addition to the package that Heikki is told to carry on the ship, there is another confusing item associated with Estonia: a suitcase.
On the evening of Estonia's sinking on the ship, Aleksandr Voronin, an East Estonian businessman described as mysterious by Eesti Päevaleht, also traveled to Sweden . The man was on his way to Denmark for a business meeting with his suitcases, but had, according to his words, chosen Estonia as a travel game because he feared that the storm predicted for the evening would cause flight cancellations.
Although Voronin himself was saved, the suitcase remained on the sinking ship. Later, the Estonian Õhtuleht wrote that the divers sent to investigate the Estonian wreck had been tasked with finding a Voronin suitcase “at any cost”. According to the magazine, the bag was found in the cabin of Captain Avo Pihti, who was a passenger on the ship on the night of Estonia's sinking .
Interesting that the greatly obese Voronin and his family were saved yet the master mariners in adjacent luxury cabins who were initially also listed as survivors suddenly became the unsaved after all.
Of course a university is independent of an engineering firm. That doesn't mean the arrangements between them for this particular problem aren't well understood.
...found the various components to have been worn, stress-fractured and corroded long before the accident.
Which is also consistent with the metallurgy findings commissioned by Braidwood, although he opted for a different theory to explain them.
It's conclusion is that its Finite Element (FEM) calculations of the side locks and bottom lock shows that the failure was in the sequence of first the starboard lock, then the port side and the bottom (Atlantic) lock last of all.
Oh, goody! Finite-element analysis is my bread and butter. The graphs you attach are too fuzzy to read. But the immediate takeaway is that all the curves are lines. That means only a first-order analysis. These days that's what you do to fine-tune the model before you do the real analysis. It's kind of a rough draft of the actual production run. To conclude a failure sequence from such crude data is really very iffy. I'm sure the university did the best they could with the equipment and time at their disposal. But it's by no means the slam-dunk you think it is.
"IMV it probably was sabotage, from my near-total ignorance of the salient facts so far, my fundamental inability to understand or apply the relevant scientific principles so far, my blind adherence to crackpot conspiracy theories so far, and my total commitment to insisting I am right and just so far"
And that's different from the Estonia....how exactly?
You don't know what you're talking about.
Oh and it's amusing that you're now deigning to put conditions on your "all ships that capsize quickly turn over altogether" bollocks. Be careful you don't take those goalposts all the way off the pitch, out of the stadium, and off down the high street....
One that kept it out of the worst of the weather for as long as was needed for the weather to ease. Weather Routing might just involve moving to a relatively sheltered area and heaving-to until it is safer to continue. It will also certainly mean slowing the ship.
Indeed, an argument that Björkman says this about that is very far from claiming that the original source drew that conclusion, or that his conclusion is the right way to think about it.
Straw-man solicitations for rebuttals are so very desperate. Vixen wants trite rebuttals of the form, "He should have used Formula B instead of Formula A," or "He used this number when the real one is this other one." She expects that if a purported expert errs, it has to be in a way a lay person can easily be shown. And this is how pseudo-experts get away all the time with essentially lying to the public: they present the products of reasoning, but not the reasoning itself. The debunker then has to try to educate the lay listener by filling in the many gaps, oversimplifications, and improper assumptions the expert has alluded to, but not stated. This takes quite a bit more space and energy than the original error. The pseudo-expert plays on the lay listener's misconceptions and lay assumptions and reinforces them.
Circular logic. Had explosives been applied to the for'ard bulkead then the thing would have fallen off anyway.
The Estonia bow visor did not fail in the way the JAIC said according to Hamburg University. They cannot both be right. One of these two parties is making a specious claim.
I think he's done an acceptable job of summarizing your argument. "As far as you are able to determine" the cause was sabotage. But you aren't really sufficiently equipped to go very far in making those kinds of determinations. Instead you're pretending that others have essentially drawn the same conclusion (or at least failed to preclude it), and it just takes a little bit of connecting dots on your side to arrive at the "obvious" conclusion.
The problem is that if sabotage had occurred in the way you promote -- by means of explosives that you claim Braidwood found -- those effects would be plainly evident to any researcher regardless of his mandate and would have to be mentioned. Just because the brief for some analysis doesn't explicitly mention looking for signs of sabotage, that doesn't mean the report is only going to note some fatigue cracking and speculate on a failure sequence and just leave out the part where the relevant structures were cut using explosives, or fail to note the specific pitting and welding that says metal was cut nearby using a sudden high-temperature event. The lack of mention for evidence that would arise in your scenario is still dispositive.
They present their findings in a scientific report. See here for an article in Der Spiegel:
A year ago, the experts from Meyer Werft took a very close look at all the underwater videos of the wreck. On behalf of the government commission, experts filmed the ship on three expeditions. Robots went down twice, and once more divers from the Norwegian specialist company Rockwater. The commission has released over 40 hours of material.
On one of the tapes, Hummel suddenly discovered a detail that he had previously missed: an orange package about the size of a cigar box.
Hummel stopped short. This wasn't part of the ship, clearly a foreign body to him. The expert now slowly looked at the recordings from the other side of the bow again. Difficult, because the quality of the tapes is often lousy, for long stretches nothing but patterns, gray on gray.
He got no further like this, everything remained far too vague for him. Hummel had all tapes analyzed by a British video expert, his son-in-law Jonathan Bisson. He immediately established that the official material had been manipulated and was by no means complete. Bisson sorted what the commission had approved and broken it down into still images, 25 pieces per second of film (see page 66).
The German commission sent tapes and still videos to Brian Braidwood. Hardly anyone in the world knows more about explosive attacks on ships than the former Lieutenant-Commander of the British Navy.
He served in the Navy for 34 years, 25 of which as an explosives expert, in various command posts. As chief of the mine diving command in the Far East, he was responsible for all explosives operations east of Suez. Braidwood blew up reefs, cleared bombs and later trained seafarers and divers in counter-terrorism as head of a special naval school. For the last 13 years in uniform he developed new defense techniques against bomb attacks for the Navy and dealt with almost all weapons with which ships can be blown up.
Today, the retired officer is called in as a civilian expert in the event of accidents, for example from insurance companies. When French agents sank the Greenpeace ship "Rainbow Warrior" off New Zealand in 1985, the government in Wellington asked Braidwood for help.
A BOMB ATTENT?
After Bisson's preparatory work, Braidwood analyzed the still images and underwater videos of the ominous package on the »Estonia«. It hung right next to the bow ramp, not far from the hydraulic locks on the visor. The poor quality of the still images made difficulties for the expert, and the camera’s unfavorable perspective also made work difficult.
Even so, Braidwood concluded that there was a high probability that the package was a non-detonated device. The object, "no longer than 200 millimeters and no shorter than 100 millimeters," looks like a hand-packed cargo of plastic explosives - as strong as one to two kilograms of the classic explosives TNT. Enough to tear up the ten millimeter thick hull.
Martin Volk, former bomb defuser for the Berlin State Criminal Police Office, comes to the same conclusion. "It's probably plastic explosives," he says when asked by Hummel. The material is "highly explosive". In the former Eastern Bloc, mafia gangs can easily get hold of this material - as well as simple time detonators and magnetic plates as a holder.
Most of all, Volk is wondering why the question has not long since been investigated: "From a small piece of metal in the immediate vicinity of the alleged explosion it could easily be determined whether explosives were used." , of course, the government commission was unable to detect any signs of explosions.
On the other hand, Braidwood found a lot more: three holes - all in the vicinity of the movable bow ramp and its vulnerable mechanics (see graphic on page 70).
Even Braidwood almost missed the first hole on the underwater videos. The diver had the camera attached to his helmet and quickly panned over the spot. But played in slow motion, it was clearly visible - a fairly round hole, about 30 centimeters in diameter and about the same height above the floor of the car deck in the steel wall. Braidwood believes the bomb may have been on something there.
"The hole is surrounded by prongs of torn metal that have been bent in all directions away from the center of the hole," said the bomb expert. His conclusion: "Taken together, these points suggest that a small explosion occurred on the side of the bulkhead, with the center of the explosion in the middle of the hole." Damage of this type is typical for bombs with an explosive power of around one or two Kilograms of TNT.
The explosive charge would likely have torn a larger hole if it hadn't already spilled water on the car deck, Braidwood said. That dampened the explosion: "Like all liquids, water is incompressible."
As Braidwood watched more videos, he discovered two even more devastating holes - again close to the bow ramp and visor, but this time on the opposite right-hand side, to starboard.
The first of these two holes is about three feet below deck 3. The sharp steel spikes are "of the bent shape that appears when there is damage from an explosion." The massive steel edges are "bent in a way that can hardly come from any mechanical impact." Braidwood also believes he can see traces of smoke.
The specialist formulated his conclusion about this hole harshly: »The damage to the starboard locks of the visor was caused by an explosion. The load was between one and two kilograms equivalent of TNT. The explosive charge was placed on the front bulkhead, directly above the lever for the manual sidelock. The bomb could easily have been placed by someone following the route taken by a crew member responsible for the side locking. ”The explosive device bent away the heavy steel hook for manually securing the visor like thin sheet metal.
Expert Hummel therefore considers this Braidwood finding to be the most serious: The explosion pushed the bow visor forward and thus "broke the already damaged starboard hinge on the deck." The bow visor was barely held in place and thus sealed the fate of the »Estonia« (see graphic on page 69).
The second of the holes on the starboard side is arguably the largest. In order to analyze it, Braidwood had to assemble several images. "The composite image," he noted, gives "dramatic clarity an impression of the damage." Here, too, an explosive device had detonated, as indicated by the peculiarly bent metal edges around the hole.
According to Braidwood's measurements, the hole is eight feet long, from top to bottom. The explosion blew up entire pieces of metal from the bulkhead and tore the hydraulics apart. The steel girders of the twelve-tonne bow ramp are bent like the sheet metal of a discarded Coke can.
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