Ferry Owners Take Blame for Disaster, Admit Errors

LONDON —  The owners of the North Sea ferry that capsized last month off Belgium with the loss of about 200 people said Tuesday that they accept full responsibility for the disaster.

Speaking on the second full day of a formal inquiry into the incident, Anthony Clarke, senior attorney for the ship’s owner and operator, Townsend Thoresen Ltd., admitted that the cause was “avoidable human error both afloat and ashore.”

“Townsend Thoresen takes full responsibility for this casualty,” Clarke said. “As far as the future is concerned, it is . . . the determination of the Townsend Thoresen Car Ferries that nothing like this should ever happen again.”

On Monday, the court of inquiry heard that the ferry, the Herald of Free Enterprise, sank March 6 as it left Zeebrugge harbor, bound for England, because it had got under way with its large bow doors open and that the crew member responsible for checking the doors was resting in his cabin.

The sea poured in through the open doors, causing the vessel to roll on its side and sink within a few minutes in the harbor’s shallow water. Only acts of heroism prevented the loss of more of the estimated 540 passengers and crew, most of them British.

It was the worst peacetime marine disaster involving this seafaring nation since the Titanic claimed more than 1,400 lives when it went to the bottom of the Atlantic after striking an iceberg in April of 1912.

Evidence presented Monday focused blame more on Townsend Thoresen’s operating procedures than on the negligence of any crewman or group of crewmen. The chief attorney for the British Department of Transport suggested that what he called “the disease of sloppy system and sloppy practice infected not just those on the ship but infected well into the body corporate of Townsend Thoresen.”

Over a period of time, the inquiry was told, the crewmen who were supposed to close the bow doors increasingly failed to do so. Further, company procedure did not require that the ship’s bridge be advised on getting under way that the bow doors had been closed.

“We find it particularly incredible that the master had no positive means of knowing for sure whether the doors were open or shut on departure,” an attorney for one of the crew said.

It was also disclosed Monday that management had failed to act on a memo written by the ship’s captain about the tendency of the bow to dip dangerously into the water.

Charles Haddon-Cave, the lawyer representing the surviving passengers and relatives of those who died, referred bitterly to the array of faults that emerged from Monday’s testimony.

“Had the passengers who sailed on that last fateful voyage known these things, I suspect that most would have refused to set foot on the Herald of Free Enterprise that evening,” he said.