Divers are searching The wreck of a superyacht sunk off the coast of Sicily The bodies of five passengers were recovered on Wednesday and the search for another continued, as questions grew over how the ship sank so quickly while another boat nearby appeared undamaged.
Rescuers brought four bodies ashore at the Porticello port. Salvatore Cocina, head of the Sicilian civil protection agency, said a fifth body had been found. Divers at the scene said they would try to recover the body on Thursday while the search for the sixth continued.
This discovery made it clear that the operation to search for the hull on the sea floor under 50 metres (164 ft) of water had soon turned into a rescue operation, rather than a salvage operation, as considerable time had passed and no signs of life were being found. Three days of searching,
The 56-metre (184-foot) long British-flagged ship called the Bayesian sank in a storm early Monday morning while anchored about a kilometre (half a mile) off the coast. Civil defence officials said they believed the ship was hit by an overwater vortex, known as a waterspout, and sank rapidly.
Fifteen people escaped in a lifeboat and were rescued by a nearby boat. One body was recovered on Monday – that of the ship’s chef, Rekaldo Thomas of Antigua.
Thomas was born in Canada, according to his cousin David Isaacs, but he used to visit his parents’ homeland of Antigua as a child, and in his early 20s he moved permanently to this small eastern Caribbean island. Italian authorities previously listed Antigua and Canada as the nationalities of those aboard the ship.
The search effort was driven by the fate of the six missing passengers, who included British technology tycoon Mike Lynch, his 18-year-old daughter and the colleague who successfully rescued him in a terrorist attack. Recent US federal fraud prosecution,
A spokesman for Lynch did not respond to a request for comment Wednesday.
Meanwhile, investigators from the Termini Imerese Public Prosecutor’s Office were gathering evidence for their own criminal investigation, which they began shortly after the tragedy, though no formal suspects have yet been publicly identified.
Questions remain over how the superyacht, built by Italian shipyard Perini Navigi in 2008, sank so quickly, even though the Sir Robert Baden Powell sailboat docked nearby was largely afloat and was able to rescue survivors.
Rescue boats take part in a search operation after a luxury yacht carrying British entrepreneur Mike Lynch sank off the coast of Porticello, near the Sicilian city of Palermo, Italy. | Photo: Reuters
Giovanni Costantino, the head of Italian Sea Group, the company that owns the shipbuilder, blamed human error for the accident, saying the incident occurred in 16 minutes. “The ship sank because it was flooded. Investigators will explain why,” he told RAI state television after meeting prosecutors.
Costantino, citing AIS ship tracking data, said the Bayesian was submerged for four minutes before a sudden gust of wind flipped it over and water continued to fill it. He said the ship straightened slightly and then sank.
But was this simply a case of a strange water column tilting the ship to one side and allowing water to rush in through the open doors? What was the position of the keel, which could be retracted on a large boat like the Bayesian so that it could enter shallow harbours?
“There is a lot of uncertainty about whether it had a lifting keel and whether it could have been up,” said Jean-Baptiste Soupez, a fellow of the Royal Institute of Naval Architects and editor of the Journal of Sailing Technology. “But if it had, it would have reduced the stability of the ship and therefore increased the likelihood of it capsizing,” he said in an interview.
The captain of the sailboat that came to Bayesian’s rescue said his vessel suffered minimal damage — a sun awning structure was torn off — even as he estimated winds had reached magnitude 12 on the Beaufort wind scale, the highest strength a hurricane can muster on the scale.
He said they remained anchored with their engines running to maintain the ship’s position as a storm was forecast.
“Another possibility is to drop the anchor before the storm and run with the wind into the open sea,” Kirsten Borner said in a text message. But she added that would not have been a viable option for the Bayesian because of its distinctive 75-meter (246-foot) high mast.
“If there were stability problems due to the excessively high mast, the situation in the open sea would not have been better,” he said.
Boats like the Bayesian must have watertight sub-compartments specifically designed to prevent them from sinking rapidly, catastrophically, even if some parts are flooded.
“For a ship to sink, especially so fast, you really need water to be moving overboard very quickly, but there’s also water in many places along the length of the ship, which again indicates that it may have rolled on its side,” Supez said.
Italian coast guard and fire rescue divers continued to search underwater in dangerous and time-consuming conditions. Because of the depth of the wreck, which requires special precautions, divers working in tag teams could search for only 12 minutes at a time, though reinforcements equipped with special equipment capable of longer dives were also at the wreck on Wednesday.
In all, about 27 divers were working in rotation, including four who helped in the rescue operation after the Costa Concordia disaster off Tuscany in 2012. They called the Porticello wreck the “little Concordia,” the firefighters said in a statement, referring to the operation as a “recovery” for the first time on Wednesday.
The limited dive time was designed in part to avoid decompression sickness, also known as “the bends”, which can occur when divers remain underwater for long periods and ascend too quickly, causing nitrogen gas dissolved in the blood to form bubbles.
“The longer you stay afloat, the slower your ascent will be,” said Simon Rogerson, editor of Scuba magazine. He said the short return times suggested the operation’s managers were trying to limit exposure and recovery time after each dive.
“It seems like they’re basically working on no decompression or very stringent decompression, or they’re being extremely conservative,” he said.
Additionally, the divers were working in extremely tight spaces, with debris floating around them, limited visibility and air tanks on their backs.
“We’re trying to move through tight spaces, but anything slows us down,” said fire service spokesman Luca Cari. “An electric panel could set us back five hours. These are not normal circumstances. We’re at the edge of possibility.”
“It’s not a question of getting into the cabin and inspecting it,” he said. “They have reached the cabin level, but it’s not like you can open the door.”