10 Most Deadly Maritime Misasters

[GordMay]

The most deadly maritime disasters since the Titanic, excluding those occurring during the two world wars:

April 15, 1912: 1,513 drown when the liner Titanic, reputed to be unsinkable, hits an iceberg in the north Atlantic.

May 24, 1914: 1,370 dead in a collision between the liner Empress of Ireland and the Norwegian freighter Storstad.

March 18, 1921: 1,000 dead as the steamer Hong Kong sinks in the South China Sea.

November 1948: Around 6,000 dead in the explosion and sinking of a Chinese munitions ship off Manchuria.

December 3, 1948: 1,100 dead when the Chinese liner Kianguya explodes in the China sea.

September 26, 1954: 1,172 dead in the sinking of two ferries off Japan.

December 20, 1987: More than 3,000 dead in a collision between the passenger vessel Dona Paz and an oil tanker off the Philippines.

February 16, 1993: More than 800 drowned and hundreds missing in the sinking of a ferry in Haiti.

September 28, 1994: 852 drowned in the sinking of the ferry Estonia in the Baltic Sea.

September 26, 2002: The Senegalese ferry Joola sinks off the West African coast, killing 1,863 people.

[Canibul]

what a nice topic. I am a little sensitive to this stuff. I have had to deal with a total of 44 dead bodies in my former career, and I really didnt much like it. The worst for me were two USCG mishaps in Florida, one a helicopter that went down off of Tampa/St. Pete in which I went out with a sidescan sonar and was there recovering the first of the bodies. The other one that really sticks in my memory was when I was down at the site of the Capricorn/Blackthorn disaster, mapping the location of the USCG ship, the anchor, the drag marks, etc. while the divers were bringing up all those dead young men. There were a couple other bad ones, but in any case....
I dont eat crab in any form. Never.

[GordMay]

January 28, 1980 ~ USCG “Blackthorn” carrying a crew of 50, capsized after colliding with the tanker “Capricorn”

At about 8:20 P.M. about two miles south of the Sunshine Skyway Bridge, St. Petersburg, Florida, the 180-foot buoy tender USCG “BLACKTHORN” collided with the 605-foot tanker “CAPRICORN”. At that point, Capricorn's 7-ton anchor become embedded in Blackthorn, and when the 990-foot anchor chain pulled taut, Capricorn pulled Blackthorn below the water, and caused it to capsize. Blackthorn sank within 10 minutes in 40 ft. of water, killing 23 US Coastguardsmen.

More: http://www.sptimes.com/News/012800/W..._that_ro.shtml
And: http://www.d8publicaffairs.com/go/doc/425/61426/
And: http://etd.lib.fsu.edu/theses/availa...a_jkn_text.pdf

[Canibul]

Gord, I was on-site the next day, while they were still recovering bodies. The sidescan sonar systems we used in 1980 produced a record that looked like a sepia colored aerial photograph of the sea-bottom with the water removed. Its a down-looking perspective. My job was to map the positions of the ships, the anchor chain, the channel boundaries, and locate anything I could find on the bottom of the channel. I remember being told there was a lot of unusual deck cargo, and motorcycles were mentioned. My company was contracted to the USCG Marine Investigations Branch. They had requested me specifically because I had done previous sonar work on the "Naugatuck" in Michigan, and on a previous search for a Sikorsky that went down near Tampa/St. Pete. All killed in that one, too.
The sonar records as I remember them were very clear and showed everything the USCG requested of me. This was some of the first evidence independent of verbal testimony that conclusively showed the Blackthorn was on the wrong side of the channel. Pure and simple.
The government people kept all of my records, and my handwritten report, and I had to stand by to serve as an expert witness should any questions about the data or my report come up. I didnt have to testify.

Thanks for that official write-up. I never saw that particular one, but I would say the NTSB got it completely right in this case.

That was January of 1980. I had been with that company 10 years, spending most of it foreign. I quit that job in June, and started a new one on Cape Cod in undersea acoustics in July of that same year. whew.

[markpj23]

And as a final note, the ex-USCG Blackthorn now lies NNW of Clearwater Inlet in about 70ft of water - part of the FL artificial reef program.

[Tspringer]

Worst maritime disaster in US History:


"Seven miles out of Memphis, at 2:00 a.m. on April 27, 1865, the steamer Sultana chugged northward loaded with over twenty-three hundred people, most of them Union soldiers returning home from southern prison camps. Without warning, an explosion ripped through the boilers, scalding steam burst out, and a shower of flaming coal shot upward into the night, raining down on the crowded boat, which in moments was engulfed in flames. Over seventeen hundred people died, making the destruction of the Sultana a maritime disaster worse than the sinking of the Titanic."


At the time this happened, it was back page news. Nobody paid any attention and history has largely forgotten it. Despite the fact that more Union soldiers were killed in this accident than at the Battle of Shiloh, the news media of the time wrote little to nothing about this and it truely passed into history barely a footnote. Why? Look at the date.




Terry

[Alan Wheeler]

OK, so for those of us that have no clue on American history, what is special about the Date?

[Knottygirlz]

Originally Posted by knottybuoyz

Hey Wheels

I'm no historian .......<snip>.....
I imagine that the press, northern states anyways, wouldn't have even considered the loss of union soldiers to be newsworthy.

Rick

Ummm, dear, the Union Soldiers were from the north. The Confederate soldiers were from the south......If you had watched "Gone With The Wind" with me you would have known!

Lori, Rick and Shadow

[Alan Wheeler]

oooops Rick. I read a subtle hint within there mate.

[GordMay]

The "Sultana" disaster occurred prior to the "Titanic" sinking, hence didn't make this list.

More interesting disaster information:

See also: “The worst Natural Disasters ever” ~ by Piero Scaruffi
http://www.scaruffi.com/politics/disaster.html

And: “ Most Destructive Known Earthquakes on Record in the World” ~ US Geological Service
http://earthquake.usgs.gov/regional/...estructive.php

[Canibul]

Gord, got anything on the steamship "Mittie Stevens"? I worked with the Texas A&M team who located it. Donated time and equipment on weekends, being the nice guy that I am...

[Tspringer]

Yup... Lincoln assassination so dominated the news of the time the Sultana disaster was back page.



Terry

[GordMay]

SS “Mittie Stephens”
On February 12, 1869, the palatial sidewheeler, the Mittie Stephens, burned and sank near the landing. Out of 107 passengers and crew (not knowing that they were in wading distance from the shore) sixty-one men, women, and children perished. The ship was also carrying a large amount of gold to pay the federal troops occupying Jefferson.
Did you (Canibul) salvage any of the Au?

[Canibul]

nope. the locals got most of the good stuff off the boat, it was only in a few ft. of water at the edge of Caddo Lake. I ran a sub-bottom profiler to penetrate the mud and locate big chunks of stuff. Mapped what I could, there were a lot of "hits" or targets. Texas A&M Marine Archaeologists went back and investigated them one by one til they found the mechanisms of the boat. Most of the good stuff is in a museum in Jefferson, Texas.

[Radd]

Anybody need a helicopter pilot? I need a Canibul