Investigators seek to discover cause of naval disaster.

Sorting out a sea disaster

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down Of the big lake they call Gitche Gumee The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead When the skies of November turn gloomy With a load of iron ore, twenty-six thousand tons more Than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty That good ship and crew was a bone to be chewed When the gales of November came early . . . .

—Gordon Lightfoot, “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”

THIS TIME it wasn’t a great lake but a great ocean where the maritime disaster took place. Both sad tales involved an American ship with Fitzgerald in her name and death in the hand that destiny had dealt her. So it was only to be expected that investigations should now loom as far as the eye can see. The deadly collision at sea was between the USS Fitzgerald and a container ship flying the Philippine flag, the ACX Crystal. And it was no contest.

The 29,060-ton Crystal—some four times the size of the American destroyer— hit the right side of the Fitzgerald, leaving seven American sailors dead and the Fitzgerald a floating wreck. For she was struck, among other places, beneath her water line and the ocean’s waters rushed in. That was the word from the U.S. Navy, which reported that three of the destroyer’s compartments were flooded, including the bunks of 116 of the ship’s crew of 300.

How does a guided-missile destroyer get overtaken by a lumbering container ship, and, to top it off, get caught unaware? Yes, it was in the middle of the night and most of the naval crew was asleep. But at no time on such a boat is everybody asleep. There are all kinds, and all ranks, of folks watching radar and the horizon and all the gadgets aboard the modern Navy ship. By the time the container ship got within a couple of football fields, all sorts of warnings should have gone off.

Our own rear admiral from Arkansas, Brian Fort, is to lead one of the investigations, an assignment he’s superbly qualified for. Gentle Reader can expect these inquiries to stay in the news for some time before they enter history as surely as the saga of the Edmund Fitzgerald did. His investigation is to be conducted under the rules set up by the Manual of the Judge Advocate General, and one can be confident he’ll follow the rules strictly.

He’s that kind of sailor, just as he’s been that kind of officer and gentleman. Meanwhile, questions abound. Among them: Why were those sailors aboard the Fitzgerald given no warning—much like the iceberg that sank the RMS Titanic in their legendary but all too real encounter? Why were the radar operators aboard, both on the bridge and in the ship’s nerve center below it, caught in the dark? Why wasn’t the ship’s captain, Bryce Benson, awakened and summoned to the bridge as the impending collision unfolded? Instead he had to be pried loose from the wreckage. And what about the curious course of the container ship? Was its crew asleep too? It should have stopped dead in the water to assess the damage and try to save survivors, but instead it lackadaisically went on its predetermined way to Tokyo—before somebody aboard apparently woke up and the ship returned to the scene of the accident, having made a U-turn. All this took up valuable time that might have been much better spent aiding the injured or, better yet, avoiding the collision in the first place.

It’s as if the crew of the ACX Crystal had put their ship on autopilot and left the sailing to a soulless, computerized voice for the crucial time before the collision. A look at the log and a review of all electronic records, like the black box aboard the ACX Crystal, might help explain the seemingly inexplicable, like how in world this awful mess could have been allowed to happen. To quote the commander of a destroyer in the Atlantic back in the early 2000s, Bryan McGrath: “This is the kind of thing the Navy is brutally honest about. To the extent that the Fitzgerald did anything wrong, we’ll find out all about it, and there will be consequences.”

There had better be if the U.S. Navy doesn’t want a repeat of this snafu that grew into a fubar. Or in layman’s language, a royal mess that became a homicidal one as seven sailors were sacrificed for apparently no good reason. At last report, these two ships were berthed only a short distance apart south of Tokyo, the 9,000-ton Fitzgerald (which cost $1.5 billion) at Yokosuka—its home port—and the ACX Crystal at Yokohama, both bearing mute testimony to the fate risked by those who still dare go down to the sea in ships. The bodies of the dead had to be brought up from compartments of the destroyer that had been sealed off to keep what was left of the ship from going down to the bottom—a painful decision in itself. “As for how much warning they had, I don’t know,” says Vice Admiral Joseph Aucoin, who commands the U.S. 7th Fleet. “That’s going to have to be found out during the investigation.” Let’s trust it will be, for not only the interests of all concerned should be represented as this post-mortem continues, but the memory of those who can no longer speak for themselves.