Norman Atlantic (ship, 2009)

**Norman Atlantic**
	The Scintu, 2013 in the port of Olbia
Ship data
flag	Italy
other ship names	Scintu (2011-2014) ; Akeman Street (2009-2011)
Ship type	RoPax ship
class	NAOS P270
Callsign	IBUM
home port	Bari
Owner	Visemar di Navigazione, Porto Viro
Shipping company	ANEK Lines
Shipyard	Cantieri Navali Visentini, Porto Viro
Build number	222
Order	December 14, 2006
Keel laying	December 19, 2006
Whereabouts	Burned out on December 28, 2014, scrapped in Aliaga in 2019
Ship dimensions and crew
length	186.50 m ( Lüa ) 177.40 m ( Lpp )
width	25.60 m
Side height	9.15 m
Draft	Max. 6.50 m
measurement	26,904 GT
Machine system
machine	diesel-mechanical ; 2 × diesel engines ( MAN 9L48 / 60B), each 10,800 kW
Machine ; performance	21,600 kW (29,368 hp)
propeller	2 × controllable pitch propellers
Transport capacities
Load capacity	7,800 dw
running track meters	2,290 m
Permitted number of passengers	852
Pax cabins	109
Berths for passengers	432
Vehicle capacity	202 cars
Others
Classifications	Registro Italiano Navale
Registration ; numbers	IMO 9435466

The Norman Atlantic is an Italian ro-pax ship , which on December 28, 2014 en route from Igoumenitsa to Ancona wrecked . Among the 499 people on the ship (passengers and 56 crew members) there were at least 14 fatalities.

technology

The Norman Atlantic belongs to a relatively large group of similar RoPax ships that were built by the Visentini shipyard in a modular system based on a basic design by the NAOS project planning company. The hull of these ships has a specially developed shape that enables high speeds with low fuel consumption. The main deck of the truck, which is covered but open to the sides and rear, goes through the entire superstructure of this type of ship. The drive takes place by two on deck 3 arranged MAN - diesel engines , via a deflection gear to the lower-lying screw shafts act. This enables a favorable floor plan in the cargo holds. In the P270 class, two closed cargo holds and an open deck for trucks as well as two lower compartments for cars were implemented. A total of 2290 lane meters for trucks and parking spaces for up to 202 cars are available. The Norman Atlantic is loaded and unloaded via two stern ramps up to 5 meters wide, which in some cases allows simultaneous loading and unloading. The closed decks are equipped with the usual fire protection devices. The life-saving appliances consist of two closed lifeboats with a capacity of 150 people each and eight life rafts , which are accessible from the main deck, and two Fast Rescue Craft (which are intended for man-overboard maneuvers) on the bridge deck.

history

Construction and operation

The Norman Atlantic was built in Porto Viro / Italy as the third ship of the NAOS P270 ferry series ( sister ships are Étretat and Scottish Viking ). The keel was laid on December 19, 2006 and the ship was completed on September 21, 2009.

The ship was due to be delivered to Epic Shipping ( London ) on November 2nd, 2009 . However, this did not materialize, instead the ship was delivered as Akeman Street on November 13, 2009 to Visemar RoRo, a company belonging to the Visentini group of companies at the shipyard. Subsequently, it was first in Trieste launched . On February 24, 2010, the ship was moved to Termini Imerese and chartered to T-Link on February 26 of that year. T-Link used the ship until April 30, 2011 on the Termini Imerese - Voltri route . In June 2011 the ship was chartered to the Saremar and renamed Scintu . From January 2013, Grande Navi Veloci chartered the ship for operation between Genoa and Palermo . From April Moby Lines chartered the ship and used it between Livorno and Olbia . The ship has been sailing between St. Nazaire and Gijón for LD Lines since November 2013 . In January the name was changed to Norman Atlantic . Until September 2014, LD Lines operated the ship between Rosslare and Gijón or St. Nazaire. From September 2014 Caronte & Tourist chartered the ship and used it to operate the route between Messina and Salerno . After that, ANEK Lines chartered the ship in December 2014 as a bridge until the deployment of its own Hellenic Spirit on the route Patras - Igoumenitsa - Ancona .

The classification society Registro Italiano Navale last issued a safety certification on September 1, 2014. On December 19, the Patras Port Authority carried out an inspection and found deficiencies, which were set two months to correct. The list included incomplete emergency documentation, emergency lighting and malfunctions on fire doors and bulkheads. According to the owner, the defects were rectified immediately.

Average 2014

AIS position on December 28, 2014

Route of the Norman Atlantic

Weather situation on December 28, 2014

The ship was damaged on December 28, 2014. The ferry was traveling from Patras via Igoumenitsa to Ancona with 443 passengers (including stowaways) and 56 crew members. Most of the passengers were truck drivers. There were also families with children on board. There were 222 vehicles on board, including several tank trucks loaded with olive oil . There were apparently also refugees on the car decks who were traveling as stowaways. At around 3 a.m., a fire broke out on one of the decks. The Norman Atlantic sent a GMDSS emergency signal 33 nautical miles off the Greek Othoni .

The evacuation of the ship, coordinated by the Maritime Rescue Coordination Center (MRCC) Rome of the Italian Coast Guard, turned out to be difficult because of the swell with wind force 10, wave heights 7 to 8 and smoke. Five helicopters and a Lockheed C-130 transport aircraft were sent to rescue the passengers, said Greek Minister for Public Order and Civil Protection Nikos Dendias . The ferry Cruise Europa , the container ship Spirit of Piraeus and other ships in the vicinity took part in the rescue operation. In addition, a Greek fire boat ran out. The Greek , Italian and Albanian coast guards as well as the Greek and Italian military were involved in the rescue operation ; Among other things, the amphibious landing ship San Giorgio (L9892) of the Italian Navy was used as an operational platform for helicopters, which was carried out by AW-101 naval helicopters of the 1º Gruppo Elicotteri from Sarzana-Luni . Several Super Puma helicopters from the Greek Air Force and the Guardia Costiera were also involved.

Around 8 a.m. on the day of the accident, about 55 people were brought onto the Spirit of Piraeus . Another 150 were in lifeboats , the Greek media reported. On deck, people were affected by hypothermia from rain and hail. They suffered from the smoke. Overheated decks that melted the soles of shoes were also reported. A man who had spent four hours in the water was taken to Italy with an injured helper. He died.

By the morning of the following day, over 24 hours later, 221 of the original 499 people on board the ship had been rescued. It was unclear what had happened to some of the lifeboats and the people in them. The fire on the ferry was extinguished by the crew, with the exception of a few smaller sources of fire, which were still active several days after the accident. Doctors had been brought onto the ship to look after the remaining passengers. The ship was being towed by tugs ; however the tow broke several times. Two Albanian seamen were killed on one of the tugs in an accident during the tow attempts. The ship was evacuated at 1:27 p.m. CET and 407 passengers had been brought to safety.

A total of 427 people were saved. The captain Argilio Giacomazzi was the last to leave the ferry after handing it over to the Italian Navy . The number of regular passengers and crew members was initially unclear; ANEK Lines announced on the evening of December 29, 2014 that three people on the passenger list had ultimately not boarded while the wife of a crew member was on board without being on the original passenger list; furthermore, a crew member had not returned from shore leave before sailing. According to the passenger lists, this reduced the number of people on board from 478 to 475. However, among those rescued were also several refugees as stowaways , so that the total number of passengers was at least 499. It is believed that other stowaways died in the hold.

Passengers reported that the crew had hardly helped with the rescue and accused them of being the first to board the only lifeboat. The shipping company and the captain contradicted this representation.

Victim

At least eleven people were killed in the accident, including two from Germany. There are also two Albanian seamen who were killed in an accident while attempting to tow. According to the Bari public prosecutor's office, 19 people were still missing, plus any stowaways.

Investigation of the cause of the accident

On December 29, the responsible public prosecutor in Bari confiscated the ship (sailing under the Italian flag) and opened criminal proceedings against the ship's owner Visemar RoRo and the captain for negligent bodily harm , negligent homicide and shipwreck (the latter is a separate criminal offense in Italy). Criminal proceedings have also been initiated in Greece: the preliminary investigation by the Piraeus Public Prosecutor's Office relates to suspicions of disruption to shipping, which could endanger people, and to arson . After it became known that Germans were also among the victims, the Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation started investigations.

On the evening of January 2, 2015, a smaller black box from the ship was recovered by the Italian authorities, and a larger one on the evening of January 4, 2015, but it was damaged by the fire. More than a week after the fire broke out, the examinations of the hull were hampered by sources of fire that were difficult to extinguish inside the ship. It was not until January 10 that the fire was finally reported as having been extinguished, so that the interior of the ship can now be examined. However, no other victims were found until January 20; the fire is said to have concentrated on upper decks 3 and 4. At the end of January, the public prosecutor stated that the fire extinguishing systems on the ship were possibly only partially functional, as the intake openings on the ship's hull were severely clogged with encrusted mussels. On February 11, it became known that both of the ship's VDR systems (“black box”) were severely damaged in the fire and have not yet been read.

The burnt-out Norman Atlantic in the port of Bari in May 2016

On February 14, after lengthy preparations, the wreck was towed to Bari, where further investigations into the cause of the accident took place. Several on-site visits were carried out in June and July, but final determinations have not yet been made. According to reports in the Italian and Greek press, the sprinkler system on the affected vehicle deck should not have worked; After activation, the crew reported to the bridge that smoke was coming from the so-called “drencher” instead of water. This is proven by evaluations of the recording devices that have meanwhile been read out. In October 2015, parts of the audio recorder recordings that had meanwhile been evaluated appeared. Unloading work on upper decks 3 and 4 was completed in early 2016; most of the vehicles could not be identified due to their condition. The lower decks should be unloaded from the end of March 2016.

In a lecture, the Italian investigative authority Digifema for ship and rail accidents mentioned that the officer responsible for the sprinkler systems apparently opened the sprinkler valves for the wrong vehicle deck, at least the valves for deck 3 and not for deck 4 were found open after the accident. The authority also criticizes the open construction of the series, which promotes fires on the open vehicle deck. The composition of the team, made up of members of two companies, is also criticized (the charter company provided ship management, machine personnel and the maritime deck crew; the charterer himself was responsible for commercial marketing including the lashing and electrical connection of the trucks). Changes to the requirements for life-saving appliances are also proposed to take more into account adverse weather conditions.

Germany discontinued its accident investigation cooperation with Italy in December 2015 after the Federal Bureau of Maritime Casualty Investigation was prevented from carrying out a proper investigation by Italian public prosecutors, since in Italy the investigations of the public prosecutor's office had priority over the domestic and foreign marine casualty investigation bodies.

An investigation report was presented in February 2017. Accordingly, the fire is due to human error. The careless loading of the ferry, the connection of the refrigerated trucks to the ship's power supply by untrained personnel and a hesitant reaction to the first signs of smoke were criticized. The ship's crew reacted “chaotically” and not according to simple rescue instructions when the fire broke out.

The first hearing on the results of the prosecution's investigation took place at the end of March 2017. According to the representatives of the injured party, it became known, among other things, that 60 vehicles with refrigerators were on board, although there were only 40 power supplies for such vehicles. It is therefore very likely that some auxiliary engines were illegally in operation during the journey. A few days before the accident, the crew complained about this fact in an email correspondence between the captain, shipowner and charterer. Furthermore, evacuation routes with vehicles were apparently blocked, which made it difficult to localize the source of the fire quickly.

Salvage of the ship

The shipping company has commissioned the Dutch company SMIT to salvage the damaged ship. On the evening of December 29th, the first specialists were brought onto the damaged ferry. After being forced to stay off the Albanian coast due to poor weather conditions, the ship was towed to the Italian port of Brindisi , where it arrived on January 2, 2015 to be examined by Italian investigators. Later the ship was towed to Bari . In June 2018, the ship was moved to another berth in the port. After the investigations are completed in 2019, it will be scrapped in Aliağa . On July 12th of that year, the wreck left Bari towed by the Ionion Pelagos . On July 18, 2019, she arrived in Aliaga for demolition.

Web links

Commons : IMO 9435466 - Collection of Pictures, Videos and Audio Files

Wikinews: Burning ferry in the Adriatic - at least one dead - message

Footnotes

↑ ^a ^b ^c M / F Norman Atlantic. In: The ferry site. Retrieved January 1, 2015 .

↑ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h ⁱ RINA: Technical and administrative data of the "Norman Atlantic". Retrieved December 28, 2014 .

↑ ^a ^b ^c NAOS ship and boad design: P270

↑ ^a ^b [1] esys.org of July 15, 2019, accessed on July 16, 2019

↑ Cruise & Ferry Info 10/1997 p. 70ff: The Mersey Viking, Online z. B. here (The Mersey Viking was the first ship of the NAOS Ro-Pax design)

↑ Cruise & Ferry Info 01/2000, p. 44: Another Visentini for the Mediterranean , Online z. B. here

↑ P270 Norman Voyager. NAOS ship and boat design, accessed January 1, 2015 .

^ M / S Akeman Street. Retrieved December 28, 2014 .

↑ The History of the Disaster Shuttle. Retrieved December 28, 2014 .

↑ Number of those rescued still unclear , ORF.at, December 28, 2014.

↑ Excerpt from the Equasis database , according to repubblica.it.

↑ La Norman Atlantic non aveva problemi particolari secondo l'armatore, , Internazionale, December 28, 2014.

^ Rescued teenagers: "It was like being on the Titanic" , news ticker for the Adriatic disaster, Focus-Online.

↑ Donatella Francesconi: “Ne abbiamo salvati tanti, mamma…”, è di Viareggio uno degli elicotteristi del Norman , il Tirreno, December 30, 2014.

^ Hans-Jürgen Schlamp: Burning ferry off Greece: Nightmare in the Adriatic , Spiegel-Online, December 29, 2014.

^ ^A ^b ^c Rogo Norman, 11 vittime: almeno due sono italiani. Morti due soccorritori durante le operazioni di traino , Repubblica.

↑ Italian public prosecutor's office initiates investigations , news ticker for the Adriatic accident, Focus-Online.

^ Jan-Christoph Kitzler: Ferry accident in the Adriatic ( Memento from December 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) , tagesschau.de.

↑ ANEK press release of December 29, 2014, 9:15 p.m. ( Memento of the original of December 30, 2014 in the Internet Archive ) Info: The @1@ 2 archive link was automatically inserted and not yet checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice. (PDF file; 50 kB).

↑ Victims burned to death in their sleep - passengers raise serious allegations against crew , Nordwest-Zeitung, December 31, 2014, p. 7.

↑ Un passeggero inglese accusa: “L'equipaggio non era sulla nave con noi” , la Repubblica, December 31, 2014.

↑ ^a ^b Peiner Allgemeine from January 4, 2015: Peinerin (15) died on a burning Adria ferry

^ Eighteen still missing from Norman Atlantic , Gazzeta del Mezzogiorno, January 15, 2015.

↑ Norman Atlantic likely death toll rises to at least January 27 , 2015, archived from the original on January 18, 2015 ; accessed on April 15, 2016 .

↑ Traghetto: famiglia, migrante disperso , Ansa.it, January 23, 2015.

↑ ^a ^b Norman Atlantic sotto sequestro - Indagati il comandante e l'armatore , Corriere Della Sera, December 29, 2014.

↑ Athens / Macedonian Press Agency, December 30, 2014 (Greek)

↑ The Maritime Offices. (No longer available online.) Federal Waterways and Shipping Administration, archived from the original on March 4, 2016 ; accessed on January 6, 2015 . Info: The archive link was inserted automatically and has not yet been checked. Please check the original and archive link according to the instructions and then remove this notice.