Collision
ships did
not heed
warnings
AN ELDERLY man was in intensive care last night after being catapulted
from a ferry on to a container ship during the North Sea collision in
which three people died, two of them Britons.
Retired RAF gliding instructor Mr Douglas King, 65, was flung from the
ferry lounge on to the deck of the Nordic Stream.
Mr King was travelling with his wife Patricia, 61, and 31-year-old son
Peter.
Peter spent four hours frantically searching the Harwich-bound ferry
Hamburg for his father before he heard a passenger had been found on
board the freighter.
Last night he described the drama as a major inquiry began to discover
why the accident happened in good visibility despite warnings by radar
controllers that the ships were on a collision course.
The Nordic Stream from Panama stuck the rear of the Harwich-bound
ferry Hamburg in heavy seas, nine miles off Heligoland, near Hamburg,
late on Wednesday night.
It tore a 20-yard gash in the ferry's hull but it remained afloat and
limped to Bremerhaven under its own power.
The Britons who died were Mick Harlow, 38, a British Rail senior
engineer from Shelton Lock, Derby, who was returning from a job on the
German railway system, and luxury car dealer Stephen Khan Jaffa, 28, of
Loughton, Essex.
The other victim was believed to be German. Fifteen people were also
injured, six of them seriously.
There were 60 Britons among the 278 passengers on the regular
Hamburg-Harwich crossing.
As an inquiry into the accident got under way, senior German officials
said a radar controller sent out three radio warnings to the ships,
starting about 10 minutes before the collision.
Mr Heiko Lauterbach, marine police spokesman at Bremen, said both
bridges were manned but neither ship responded.
He said video tapes of the radar positions and tapes of the radio
warnings would be presented to the official inquiry.
''There were gale force nine winds and about seven-feet high waves,
but visibility was good at about six miles, Mr Lauterbach said.
Ferry owners Scandinavian Seaways said the lounge was almost empty and
the remaining damage was to a car deck.
But passengers from the collision arriving at Heathrow yesterday spoke
of chaos and panic as the ship was struck.
''We were in the lounge having a drink. The next thing we knew we were
flying through the air and tables and chairs and glass were flying
about,'' said Mr Bill Peart, 37, from Walsall, Staffs.
''There was a lot of panic. People were picking themselves up off the
floor and dashing to the nearest exit and trampling over everbody,'' he
said.
Mr King was in his cabin when the ships collided and immediately raced
on to the deck.
''They let me into the lounge and I saw how the container had ploughed
right into the side of the ferry, leaving an enormous V-shaped hole
where a section had been stoved in.
Mr King found his mother injured on an upper deck and she was later
airlifted to hospital.
It was not until the early hours that Mr King was told his father had
been found on board the Nordic Stream.
The couple, who are from Newark-on-Trent, Nottinghamshire, were last
night in intensive care at Cuxhaven City Hospital.
Mr King said both parents have fractured ribs and his mother suffered
fractures to her pelvis, a broken leg, and torn ligaments.
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