Watertight integrity Ro-ro passenger ferry Herald of Free Enterprise, 1987

A ferry sailed with the bow doors open. Nobody on the bridge knew.

On 6 March 1987 the ferry Herald of Free Enterprise left Zeebrugge with her bow doors open, took water onto the vehicle deck and capsized within minutes just outside the harbour. 193 passengers and crew died.

Words in this case

watertight integrity: The state of a ship with all shell doors, hatches and valves closed so that water cannot get in.
free surface: Water moving across a deck or tank, which reduces stability far more than its weight suggests.
trim by the head: The ship sits deeper at the bow than at the stern.
indicator light: A lamp on the bridge that shows whether a door or valve is open or closed.
roll-on roll-off (ro-ro): A ship where the cargo drives on and off over ramps.

More words like these in the glossary and in listening practice.

What happened

The Herald was a roll-on roll-off ferry on the Dover to Zeebrugge route. In Zeebrugge the berth did not fit the ship well, so the crew trimmed her by the head, bow down, to load the upper vehicle deck. That put the open bow doors closer to the water.

The assistant bosun, whose job it was to close the bow doors, was asleep in his cabin when the ship left the berth. The chief officer, who was supposed to check that the doors were closed, had gone to the bridge because the ship was in a hurry. There was no indicator light on the bridge to show the doors were open. The master assumed that if nothing was reported, everything was in order.

As the ship gathered speed the bow wave rose over the open doors and water poured onto the vehicle deck, a wide open space with nothing to stop it moving. Within about ninety seconds the ship listed, capsized and came to rest on a sandbank, half out of the water. Had the water been deeper, almost everybody would have died.

193 people died, most of them inside the ship in cold water in the dark. The public inquiry found that the ship was "infected with the disease of sloppiness" from top to bottom: the crew, the officers and the company ashore.

Why it happened

The doors were not closed, and nobody checked. The system relied on the absence of a report, "no news is good news", instead of a positive report that the doors were shut.
No indicators on the bridge: the master could not see the state of the doors from where he stood.
Free surface: a few centimetres of water across a whole vehicle deck destroys the stability of a ferry in seconds.
Trim by the head and speed put the open doors into the bow wave.
The company had been asked for door indicator lights before and had treated the request as a joke.

What to remember on board

Before sailing, every shell door is reported closed and locked, by name, to the bridge, and the indicator lights are checked.
Water on a vehicle deck is a stability emergency, not a housekeeping problem.
If your job is to close something, nobody else is going to do it for you. If you are not there, say so.
A company that laughs at a safety request is telling you something about the day it will go wrong.

What changed afterwards

Door position indicators and television surveillance of ro-ro doors became mandatory under SOLAS, and the inquiry was one of the reasons the ISM Code was written: safety has to be managed ashore as well as on board.

Three questions

The kind of questions a knowledge test asks about this case. Keys 1 to 4 answer, Enter goes on.

Source: Report of Court No. 8074, mv Herald of Free Enterprise, Department of Transport (UK), 1987 (the Sheen Report).

On this site: Ro-ro and passenger ships: the English of the ship · Life-saving appliances.

Plain-English summary of an official investigation report. Facts and findings are the investigators'; the wording is ours. Nothing here is legal advice or a substitute for the report itself.