Above the Water Line
HIT-AND-MISS SAFETY
Two events linked with the tragedy which befell the Mercury’s Memory took place on February 1, a session of a state commission of inquiry in Sevastopol investigating the cause of the ship’s wreck, and a press conference in Simferopol of Oleksandr Stepanenko, Danylo Sorbei, and Oleksandr Volfson, who are founders of the Sata Company that owned the ill-fated vessel. In presenting their own version concerning the accident, the owners actually admitted as true the findings of the commission saying that the ship was overloaded. As Danylo Sorbei put it, “One can speak about the ship being overloaded.” With a 270 ton cargo capacity, the ship set sail from Istanbul carrying 274 tons on deck and fifty in the hold. In addition, the vessel had a slight list to port when it was leaving the harbor, and the captain ordered taking on some ballast for alignment. According to Chairman of the commission and of the State Coordinating Center for Maritime Emergencies on the Waters Mykola Kostrov, the ship left Istanbul “with a waterline 80 cm. above what it should have been, almost like a submarine.” The ship owners, on the other hand, deny that overloading was the main cause of the tragedy. “The ship could carry much more freight,” they maintained. The sinking of the Mercury’s Memory might have been the result of either its captain’s “shortcomings” or “some unknown force majeur circumstances,” the ship owners claimed, but failing to explain further.
Similarly, the ship owners dismissed the allegations made by Ukrainian Transport Minister Leonid Kostiuchenko when the official said that the Sata Co. “would not admit” any accident involving the
Mercury’s Memory or “loss of the ship for two days.” As the ship’s owners confirmed, they received “a radio message on the ship’s coming in at 1:30 p.m. on January 26, specifying the ship’s projected time of arrival in Yevpatoriya at 8:00 a.m. on January 27. The last message from the vessel was received at 5:36 p.m. on January 26 when the radio operator got in touch with his wife, telling her about the time of the ship’s arrival.
Typically, the ship would be welcomed by some of Sata Co. Owners, Danylo Sorbei said. That time, it was his turn. By 8:00 a.m. January 27 he drove to the port in Yevpatoriya only to see that the ship had not yet arrived. After an hour’s wait he decided to get in touch with the ship over the radio but the Mercury’s Memory did not respond to any call signals. Assuming the ship to be still far at sea and out of radio range, Danylo Sorbei sent messages to the trade and fishing ports in outlying Sevastopol, requesting a radio link with the ship. This failing, the owners sent a message at 6:00 p.m. January 27 to the Odesa-based State Coordinating Center for Emergencies on the Waters reporting an emergency and requesting information on any distress signals. The SCCEW reply was that no SOS signals had been picked up, despite word that such a signal had been received in Constantsa (Romania), but it could not be identified.
At 10:00 on the morning of January 28, the owners claim, they reported the emergency to the Ministry for Emergencies branches in Crimea and Sevastopol. An hour later Sata Co. contacted various agencies informing about a possible emergency at sea and requesting them to relay the message to all the vessels in the Black Sea area to keep their eyes open and engage in search and rescue operations if need be. At the same time, Ministry officials declined to start the search for the Mercury’s Memory before the ship owners submitted their guarantees of payment stamped with the company’s seal. Unfortunately, the Sata Co. owners did not carry their company seal when talking to officials in Sevastopol and eventually filing the guarantees took so much precious time, which might have cost someone onboard the ship his life.
According to the ship’s owners, a radio buoy had been certified and ready for operation. However, the buoy’s distress signal did not have the required identification. Another question is why the signal was picked up only after two days, instead of two hours. A similar buoy tested by the inquiry commission in the Sevastopol Bay sent SOS signals which were first picked up in France and then in six other places.
WHO’S TO BLAME MORE
The accident prompts very disheartening conclusions. First, it is obvious that the owners and the ship captain regularly and knowingly bent the rules by overloading the ship or changing its prescribed route. Neither the owners nor its captain were psychologically and operationally prepared to face the emergency resulting from such violations. They had never before faced such misfortune, but this time tragedy struck, proving the hit- and miss safety standards accepted in the Sata Co. wrong. The harsh truth is that the owners themselves have paid a dear price for the accident, with several representatives of Sata Co. and Alan Tour losing relatives and friends who onboard the Mercury’s Memory. These companies have already paid for medical treatment of the survivors, with Sata pledging to pay UAH 30,000 in compensation to the relatives of lost passengers and the crew. Alan Tour has opened charity bank accounts and is likely to pay compensation to passengers but this will hardly help the deceased.
Second, it is becoming increasingly clear from the still obscure tragic scenario that the search for the missing ship had been badly organized, at least, until the Heroyi Sevastopolia and later the Viktor Lebediev, which ACCIDENTALLY happened to be in the disaster area, recovered passengers, sailors, and the dead from inflatable rafts. Not a single plane, helicopter, or ship had been dispatched by the authorities for the likely disaster area when the news of the wreck struck. BY DOING SO, that is, merely by just talking over the radio about rescue operations, the ill-fated ship and Ukrainians could not have been saved, and thus such actions WERE ABSOLUTELY INADEQUATE and ineffectual. Actual rescue operations involving rescue planes and vessels began only after the survivors of the accident had been delivered to Sevastopol and when everything was clear. Alas, all further efforts proved too late.
Third, there was no rescue operation per se. It is obvious that not one person was saved due to PURPOSEFUL rescue efforts. Those who remained alive were saved by the ships which happened to be in the area BY PURE LUCK. So far, twelve persons (by other reports eleven) have been reported missing. The exact number of people onboard the Mercury’s Memory has still not been established, with conflicting reports setting it at 51, 52, or even 54.
Despite the pessimism expressed by the doctors, the state commission took a laudable decision to continue the search. This belated move would have been much more effective, had a TIMELY decision TO START the search been taken by the authorities. All those who were to be supposedly involved in rescue operations by virtue of their rank were IN PRINCIPLE unready to deal with the emergency at sea and put to sea ON SEVERAL MINUTES’ NOTICE to search for people in distress. The mandatory standby readiness dragged on for days which also might have resulted in a loss of life.
Four, as the accident has revealed, the existing search and rescue system (if it can be called that!) is unstable, unreliable, and not operational. This is partly due to the lack in Sevastopol of its own Coordinating Center for the Emergencies on the Waters, an effective rapid response rescue system, and a reliable notification system. No matter how shameful it is to admit, the Mercury’s Memory accident exposed the glaring apathy and irresponsibility of officials such that red tape formalities took the place of determined rescue efforts. Thus, it could be predicted with a high degree of certainty that the opinions, finding s z, testimony and information of the ship’s owners, the captain, crew, inquiry commission members, and prosecutors will eventually CONFLICT. Moreover, they will be diametrically opposed and fraught with conflict, with the final truth emerging only in court with the trial of Captain Leonid Ponomarenko.
NO INFORMATION, NO PROBLEM?
Those living in civilized countries have got used to the concept whereby society is not merely entitled but has a COMMITMENT to be aware of everything going on in and around it. Hence, it would be considered savage to attack or abuse journalists and cameramen, try to cover their lenses or treat mass media people in rudely, forgetting that they are actually doing their work on the scene of an accident, looking for information. Every one knows they are ON THEIR JOBS serving a public interest.
Those officials who have no information would typically say, “No information” or “No comment,” something we Ukrainians are simply not aware of. The unhappy accident with Mercury’s Memory has revealed another serious drawback of our society — its opacity, its secretiveness, a glaring disregard of the officials for the public and for the right TO KNOW what is happening in society. Officials gave real answers and were more or less friendly to The Day’s correspondent only in the Odesa Coordinating Center (press service head Borys Danylchenko), the Sevastopol office of the Ministry for Emergencies (Oleksandr Ismayilov) and in the Crimean Prosecutor’s Office (Anatoly Tytarchuk).
I>The Day’s team was witness to a ridiculous scene when a ranking Kyiv general dressed down his subordinate Crimean general over the phone for not reporting timely on the accident involving the Mercury’s Memory. The general said he had learned of the sunken ship only from media reports, and this did not give him his usual jump on journalists when reporting the emergency to the president. In his turn, the subordinate general called his colonels and captains on the carpet, not for being late in informing their superior, but — believe it or not — for releasing information to the media.
Following such a lecture, the captains and colonels simply remained silent when meeting reporters.
Moreover, the tragedy has vividly demonstrated that our officials, even if requested to comment on something within the scope of their immediate office, are blatantly rude when answering questions by journalists.
Consider such a typical dialog. A reporter had asked an official whose responsibilities include giving clear answers, “Sir, could you comment on any likely causes of this accident?”
Naturally, the correspondent expected that the official, supposedly an expert in his area, would come up with several scenarios, or would honestly admit, “Sorry, I don’t know,” or “I don’t have enough information,” or “I’m not in a position to comment. The actual answer was, “The hell I will! Go ask the prosecutor. Oh, give me a break with your questions!”
In the first days after the accident, Sata and Alan-Tour representatives literally kept their mouths shut, afraid to say a word. Moreover, they were rude to journalists, pushing them out of their offices and accusing them of spreading libel and lies.
But you cannot expect truthful coverage with everybody too scared to say anything, even a scrap of information they know with certainty, which is no state secret at all and for releasing which they will never be punished. Undeniably, journalists are primarily responsible for turning out factual and true information. But Ukrainian society is not ripe to live up to the maxim that IT IS SOCIETY that should release the information to journalists, with part of the blame for this sad situation to be shouldered by society itself.
The conclusion here is quite obvious — cooperation with mass media is always PART of any rescue operation.
