Tōya Maru
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
The Tōya Maru ( Japanese 洞 爺 丸 ) was a railway ferry of the Japanese State Railways , which connected the island of Hokkaidō to the island of Honshū via the Tsugaru Strait . On September 26, 1954, she sank in Typhoon No. 15 (abroad " Taifun Marie "). According to the Japanese State Railways, the death toll was 1153.
history
The ship made the route between the ports of Aomori and Hakodate in 4.5 hours. In 1950, the Tōya Maru was one of the first Japanese seagoing ships to be equipped with radar equipment and was the flagship on Tsugarus Strait.
Around noon on September 26, 1954, " Marie ", the fifteenth typhoon of the season, moved along Honshu and towards the Sea of Japan . The typhoon was moving northwest at a speed of over 100 km / h and its arrival on Tsugaru Strait was expected at 5 p.m.
At 11 o'clock the Tōya Maru reached Hakodate on her first crossing from Aomori that day. Their departure was planned at 2:40 pm in order to get back to Aomori in good time before the approaching typhoon "Marie". Since the passengers of the Dai 11 Seikan Maru , another ferry on this route, whose condition seemed too bad for such a bad weather crossing, were brought on the Tōya Maru , the departure was delayed more and more, whereupon the captain around 3:10 p.m. decided to cancel the departure of the Tōya Maru .
After bad weather with heavy rains all day, the weather cleared in the afternoon around 5 p.m. and the captain assumed that the typhoon would have passed as predicted in the weather forecast. However, he did not know that the weather services had meanwhile predicted that the typhoon would remain in the area of the Tsugarus Strait, nor that "Marie" had gained strength over the Japan Sea and was now to be regarded as an extra-tropical cyclone.
At 18:39, the Tōya Maru left Hakodate with 1309 passengers on board. But shortly after departure the wind picked up again massively, and at 19:01 o'clock the anchor was dropped in front of the port of Hakodate to wait for the weather to improve. The ship began to drift at anchor due to the storm. Water penetrating into the engine room, caused by insufficiently constructed seals in the vehicle deck, got into the system of the steam engine drive, stopped the engine and made the Tōya Maru incapable of maneuvering in this way . The captain then decided to beach the ship in Nanae Bay near the outskirts of Hakodate. At 10:26 p.m. the Toya Maru ran aground and an SOS call was sent out. The prevailing surf caused the Tōya Maru to capsize at 10:43 p.m. and sink a few hundred meters from the coast. According to a September 1955 publication by the Japanese State Railways, 1,153 people died. The same typhoon sank four more ferries, killing 1,430 people in total.
In early 1956 the wreck was lifted and then scrapped in Japan .
consequences
Although there is still a lot of ferry traffic on Tsugaru Street today, the sinking of the Tōya Maru can be seen as a decisive factor in the construction of the Seikan Tunnel .
Individual evidence
Remarks
- ↑ According to another source to the northeast.
- ↑ According to another source, 1,159 people (1,041 passengers, 73 crew members and 41 other people) died and 159 people survived.
Web links
- 1,153 killed when the Toya Maru sinks in Atropedia