The Hunt for the Derbyshire

[Don Olney]

Tonight on the Hitler Channel (http://www.historychannel.org):

"Deep Sea Detectives

Tuesday, August 5 @ 8pm ET/PT

The Hunt for the Derbyshire

In September 1980, a typhoon south of Japan plagued the Pacific Ocean. Caught in the thick of it, the British freighter Derbyshire struggled to escape. Without even an SOS, she vanished with 44 lives aboard. After 14 years, marine experts using SONAR technology finally found her scattered on the bottom of the sea. Did the storm or a structural flaw in the ship's design kill the crew? Using underwater footage, animations of the sinking, and interviews with victims' relatives, we search for the truth. TV PG"

[Andrew Craig-Bennett]

Well, just to bring the story up to date...

The Derbyshire sank so long ago (but well within my career) that she took with her an all British crew of 40 and four of their wives who were travelling aboard.

Today such a ship would be convenience flag, with a crew of perhaps 18 Southeast Asians.

No-one has ever suggested that her owners, Bibby Line, were other than first class shipowners. Under British law, because the ship was not "unseaworthy" the dependents could not claim compensation.

There was an hypothesis that the shipyard was at fault because of a welding discontinuity at one bulkhead.

The search of the wreckage, funded by the International Trasnport Federation, an interpational federation of trades unions concerned with dock labor and seafaring, disproved this; the ship was intact at that point but the bow had broken off; it is now thought that she sank by the head, possibly the mechanism was that a booby hatch on the forecastle head was forced open by the sea, flooding that space, which reduced her freeboard and allowed her hatch covers to be stove in by the seas. The cargo was iron ore.

The enquiry did trigger a wholesale review of bulk carrier design by the class societies and the IMO.