A Sinking Story

 So this is a little history story....which was pretty solid on facts, until recently, and now....maybe the facts aren't facts.

There was this ship built at a German shipyard in 1980....as a ferry.  The original name was Viking Salley.  For ten years, it remained with the original company, then went through several different operations/names.  Things like this occur all the time.  

In 1993, it was renamed 'Estonia', and was a regular ferry between Estonia and Stockholm, Sweden.

On 28 September 1994, it left port in Estonia around 6:30 PM.  Around six hours would pass, and then it'd starting sinking....real fast.  Out of 989 people onboard....852 did not survive.  A lot of the deaths were simply because of the temperature in the waters, and the rapid sinking.  

An investigation was held (by Swedish authorities).  The blame? It goes to two chief factors....the load onboard (trucks and cars) was not evenly balanced, and the entry door on the vessel was not completely closed....allowing water in. 

Then the Swedes did something interesting....they declared it a vessel to not be explored or reviewed.  Then they arranged a contract with a company to dump rocks over the vessel.  

Yeah, it is a bit odd.  This might be occasionally done in harbors or lakes, but not in the middle of the sea. 

The contracted company?  They went and did the rock dumping and then kinda said it was insufficient. Whoever did the estimate for the government....drastically under-estimated the amount of rocks required.   The company said this to Sweden, but no one wanted to fund a second or third dumping of rocks....so this whole thing just wrapped up.  It's not covered.  

Now, there is this one curious thing that was said by a diver who arrived on the scene around the day or two after the episode.  He said, without any doubt....there's this 4-meter hole on the side of the vessel.  He doesn't say if it's bent inward or outward....just that there is a hole where it should not be.

So in the past couple of months (2020, roughly 25 years after the event), an Estonia film crew went down.  They've got video.  There is this four-meter hole there. 

In the past week, the Estonian PM met with the Swedish and Finnish PM.  The Swedes say the ship discussion didn't come up.  The Estonian and Finns say absolutely nothing.

The question here is....is this hole inward, or outward? 

If it's outward, then an explosion took place on the Estonia of a major  type.  

If it's inward, then a torpedo of some type hit the Estonia.

Who would want to sink the vessel?  Unknown.  

The problem I have with the original story of the door on the vessel not closed....some crew-members would have noticed this an hour into the trip, with water flowing in.  No emergency is called for six hours.  So I'm kinda disbelieving the door being open story.

If the Swedes knew of the hole, and they basically wrote a whole fake report over the sinking....pretending the open door explanation is the end-all solution?  Well....I'd have to bring in the entire government (party in charge) at the time, and basically fire each single guy.

But it all begs questions.....why blowing up the ship or hitting it with a torpedo?  

Just something to make you wonder.

Added note:  I chatted with a Brit who is familiar with the region, and his suggest is that a fishing trawler hit the ferry in the darkness, and simply moved on in the night (remember, this was after midnight).  It's an interesting scenario, but trawler would have suffered damage and had to pull into some port later....to explain the damage done.