In my teenage years I was enthralled and fascinated by disappearances in the region known as the Bermuda Triangle, UFO phenomena, Big Foot, The Loch Ness Monster and other stranger things. To my knowledge such things retain their status as mysteries although many fortunes and reputations have been made and lost by those researching and reporting on them.
One event that fascinated me in 1980 was the disappearance of the huge ocean going merchant vessel, Derbyshire. The event warranted an entry in my diary in red biro.
At 294 m or nearly 1000 feet long (twice that of the Titanic) and able to carry a full load of 160,000 tonnes it holds the unenviable status as being the largest British Registered Ship lost at sea.
Built at the Swan Hunter Yard in Liverpool and brought into service in 1976 Derbyshire was a bulk carrier able to be loaded with and carry in its large cargo holds a heavy deadweight of iron ore.
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| Unladen and in original name prior to Derbyshire |
In July 1980 the ship left Canada, fully laden and with 42 crew and two wives , en route for the industrial city of Kawasaki in Japan.
The planned route indicated that there would be a convergence with the predicted path of a tropical typhoon, Orchid and avoidance measures were taken to reduce exposure to such an unpredictable weather system.
There were reports of not so much adverse climatic conditions but violent and powerful successive waves.
On 9th September a catastrophic series of events led to the disappearance of Derbyshire with no Mayday signal sent.
In the initial search no trace was found and it was not until six weeks later that lifeboat wreckage was spotted by another vessel in the busy shipping lanes.
The disappearance led to considerable speculation over the reason for the loss of the ship.
There were claims about the design of the superstructure, its ability to cope with extreme wave trains and also crew negligence. Politics were also in play in that the Swan Hunter Yard had been privatised just before the time of the Derbyshire build and the British Government had given indemnities on each and every vessel as a sweetener to the deal with the private sector. This resulted in a reluctance for the loss to be attributed to anything suggesting deficiences in design or construction.
The Derbyshire Families Association took their own course of action and fourteen years later commissioned an expedition backed by the regional TV company Tyne Tees and others to find the wreckage and try to analyse the findings in a bid to find out what actually happened.
The 1994 investigation located the wreckage over a 1.3km spread and at a depth of 4000 metres.
Over forty days a photographic record was made of the debris.
The scenario appeared clear and unambiguous. The force of waves crashing over the bows during Typhoon Orchid had sheared off the covers from the bosun's store. Over some 30 hours of riding through the storm seawater had entered the forward section causing the bow to settle deeper and deeper into the swell.
In due course the bow became fully exposed to the storm force waves and the forward hatch over the iron ore cargo buckled and gave way shortly followed by the loss of the second and third hatch covers. The ship was overwhelmed and as it sank the hull twisted and imploded creating the wide debris spread.
The lack of a Mayday signal was explained by the fact that the main catastrophic events took place over only two minutes.
The Official Enquiry dragged on with continued doubt being directed upon the actions by and competence of crew.
A second underwater investigation was crucial in producing better quality and more revealing photographic evidence that highlighted poor design features as the cause and not human error. The hatch covers on Derbyshire were ruled as being under designed but still legal. There had been no forecastle (pronounced folks sell) on the bows to protect the area immediately behind from the impact of extreme waves.
There had been precedent of the failure and subsequent loss of similar large ships but very little cross referencing over specifix causes. Between 1969 and 1989 some 44 bulk carriers had sunk with high accumulative loss of life but lessons to enable design modifications to be made had been slow until the Derbyshire tragedy.
I have often thought about adding a note to my 1980 teenage diary entry for what I had called, at that time, the Derbyshire mystery. As I said, a mystery only remains a mystery until a factual or reasonably logical explanation is found.
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