posted 04-07-2000 02:14 PM
Yesterday I saw a TV-document about the Scandinavian Star. I thought that I should ask you about the owners' responsibility of keeping a ship in a suitable condition to work in the seas. Like we know,the owner of Sc. Star was the Miamese SeaEscape, which owner was also a Miamese man, Niels-Erik Lund, who had grounded SeaEscape. He was born in Denmark.The main point of the ship's bad condition was because she was a part of a big tax dodging when the ship's operator, Danish man Henrik Johansen cheated hundreds of millions of Danish crowns from Denmark. H. Johansen didn't take care of the ship's condition at all: the material which the walls of the corridors were covered with was totally unsuitable: when the pyroman started the fire onboard in two places in the ship in the year 1990,the material started burning, and it formed toxic gas that with the carbon monoxide killed 158 people. The lifeboats were in a terrible condition.
And then there was the crew, that haven't had any fire rehearse at all. The crew had been hired to the ship only ten days earlier before the ship left to her horrible voyage. The crew was
Portuguese, and they weren't able to speak English at all. The passengers onboard surely couldn't speak any Portuguese and when the crew didn't know the ship at all, the passengers were there kind of "alone", with just 8 crew members and the captain who could speak English, Danish and Norwegian. So in fact nobody could help the
passengers, when the fire was started.
In the night when the accident happened, there was only one night guard awake and it was way too less. And in the same day (7.4.-90) when the ship left, she was under some electric construction, that continued also when the ship began her trip. Also the cabins were still fixed and from the roof there hung wiring.
Let's start from the beginning of this story:
Henrik Johansen tried to get a 40-million crowns of tax relief, when he sold the line between Oslo (in Norway) and Fredrikshaven (in Denmark) in February 1990. He had operated the line for six years. When he sold it, he got 250-million crowns of selling-profit. He had to invest it, so that the tax department could not lay taxes from the profit. To be able to get the tax-relief, he had to invest the money at the latest in the 1. day of April. She started to look for a new ship. He got a call from SeaEscape's owner Niels-Erik Lund, who then transmitted the Scandinavian Star to Johansen. The two men made a contract, that made possible to Johansen to not pay the taxes from the selling-profit. So the ship had to be made sea-worthy at latest in the 1. day of April, and that was why those 158 people died. The ship had made six trips on the route Oslo-Fredrikshaven, before her 7th trip, when the accident happened. And from the day she was transferred from USA to Denmark, she was continuously under construction.
And the last thing that I started really thinking about was the captain: After he had left from the ship, there was still over 200 people onboard in the fire. Isn't it an old maritime-"tradition", that the captain is THE LAST PERSON to leave the ship in a danger situation and take care of the thing, that ALL passengers have been evacuated from the ship? I think that it's the captain's responsibility to do this!
So now I'd like to know that what do you all think of this whole catastrophe, and the responsibility of the ship-owner and operator.
Here's a link to a page about Scandinavian Star incident : http://www.fire.org.uk/marine/papers/scanstar.htm
Regards:
Alec J. Lindström, Helsinki, Finland.
P.S. Maybe you already noticed it, but in Friday 7.4.2000 it became 10 years of this horrible accident. The ship is nowadays named Regal Voyager, and the owner is Niels-Erik Lund... So nobody was blamed from the accident, and nobody was sentenced...
[This message has been edited by AJL (edited 04-08-2000).]
posted 04-07-2000 02:14 PM
