BB FANS

there were actually 1400 on board and they think they havebeen in the water for approx 17 hours so survival is looking bleak

Just been watching this on CNN

apparently the ship was never fit to sail. they have found 100 survivors.

Its insured by Lloyds and no way would they insure a boat that wasnt up to spec.

Anyway the ship sunk so suddenly they didnt even get an SOS off.
I really think it must have collided with something or rolled over due to freak wave or something.

From various reports it looks like the boat was a bit of a sardine can.
This report came from a French expert

"The Al Salam Boccaccio 98, a 11,800-tonne vessel built in Italy in 1970 and bought by the Egyptian Al Salam Maritime Transport Company in 1998, had been expanded to boost passenger capacity.

“Among the ships operating crossings in the Red Sea . . . some are remarkable because of the height of their structures. They are old Italian ferries to which four extra decks have been added, raising the capacity from 500 to around 1,400,” M Perchoc said. These extra levels, he added, could affect the ship’s stability. "

"The vessel simply vanished from the radar, unable even to send out an SOS. It was UK Mission Control Centre at RAF Kinloss that raised the alarm at 23.58GMT when a young corporal in the darkened search-and-rescue base near Inverness saw an electronic blip on his screen, followed by a ringing sound".

SAFAGA, Egypt (Reuters) - Hopes of finding nearly 900 missing people after the sinking of an Egyptian ferry faded on Saturday as the search for them entered a second day.

Rescuers have already found at least 185 bodies and pulled 314 survivors from the sea where the 35-year-old ferry Al Salam 98 sank on its journey to Safaga from Duba in north-west Saudi Arabia, one official said.

The ferry was carrying 1,272 passengers, mainly Egyptians, and 100 crew when it lost contact with the shore at about 10 p.m. (2000 GMT) on Thursday.
General Mahfouz Taha, head of the Red Sea Ports Authority, said rescue efforts would continue, but a source close to the operations said hopes were fading.

"There aren't expected to be many survivors, because it's been so long since the ship went down," the source said.

Hundreds of weeping and angry relatives of passengers gathered in front of the gates of the port where the ferry should have arrived at 2 a.m. (midnight GMT) on Friday.

One man wept on another's shoulder and people around him tried to comfort him. "God willing, he'll come. God willing, he'll come," one of them said.

Doctors in hospitals in Safaga, 600 km (375 miles) south-east of Cairo, and nearby Hurghada said they had been told to expect survivors to be brought to them but none have arrived yet.

Officials said survivors had been kept on rescue ships and some would be transferred overnight to hospitals in the area.

"They are not telling us anything," Gadir Mohammed shouted outside the port's gates. "Where are the corpses? Where are they taking the survivors?"

Officials and experts initially said poor weather was likely to be behind the sinking of the 11,800 gross ton vessel in the Red Sea but Egypt's presidential spokesman suggested there could have been problems with the ship.

"The speed with which the ship sank and the lack of sufficient lifeboats indicate there was some deficiency," Suleiman Awad told Egyptian television.

A shipping company official said the Saudi authorities had confirmed that everything was in order when the ship sailed.

LOADING MECHANISM

An official at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owned the Panamanian-registered ferry, said it remained unclear what had happened to the ship, which was built in Italy in 1970 and moved to the Egyptian company in 1998.

None of the officials said there was any indication that the sinking was the result of an attack on the ferry.

One expert said the ship had a loading mechanism for vehicles that could have let in water.

"If these doors are open for any reason, then you've had it. The more we consider the various elements, weather does seem to have been a factor," said Richard Clayton, news editor at the shipping weekly Fairplay.

"All you need is bashing by the sea and suddenly you get an ingress of water," added Clayton.

Most of the passengers were Egyptians working in Saudi Arabia, officials said, but at this time of year many Egyptians are still on their way home from the annual pilgrimage to Mecca.

Egypt's MENA news agency said the passenger list included 1,158 Egyptians, 99 Saudis, six Syrians, four Palestinians, a Canadian, a Yemeni, an Omani, a Sudanese and one person from the United Arab Emirates.

MENA said a ship travelling the same route in the opposite direction received a distress message in which the Al Salam captain said his ship was in danger of sinking.

But coastal stations received no distress signal from the crew, said a shipping company official. The weather had been very poor overnight on the Saudi side, with heavy winds and rain, he said.

A sister ship of the sunken ferry, the Al Salam 95, sank in the Red Sea in October after a collision with a Cypriot commercial vessel. Almost all the passengers were saved.

(Additional reporting by Amil Khan and Jonathan Wright in Cairo)

Hopes Fade For Survivors


Rescuers searching for survivors from the Egyptian ferry which sank in The Red Sea say there is almost no hope of finding anyone else alive.

Estimates of those rescued vary between 327 and 425, but 185 bodies have been found and nearly 900 people are still missing.

The ship capsized about 40 miles off the Egyptian coast during an overnight trip from Duba, Saudi Arabia, on Friday morning.

Transport minister Mohammed Lutfy Mansour said a fire broke out on the al Salam Boccaccio '98 ship shortly before it sank.

He said investigators were trying to determine if it contributed to the tragedy.

However, Egyptian authorities said they received no reports of trouble from the ferry before it sank.

Hundreds of angry relatives crowded outside the port of Safaga, where the ferry had been heading. Many complained that they had received no information about their loved ones.

The vessel was a "roll-on, roll-off" ferry, similar to the Herald of Free Enterprise which sank off Zeebrugge in 1987 killing 187 people.

David Osler, of Lloyd's List, said the "roll on, roll off" ferry design was associated with problems of stability.

He said: "It only takes a relatively small ingress of water to set up a sort of rocking effect which gains momentum and tilts the ship."

He said a collision or leak could be among the reasons for water entering the vessel, which measured 387ft long by 77ft wide.

Sky

Newindpress
Sunday February 5 2006 00:00 IST
Reuters

SAFAGA: Survivors of the Red Sea ferry disaster said its captain fled the burning ship by lifeboat and abandoned them to their fate, as hopes faded on Saturday of finding some 800 missing.

Some passengers plucked alive from the sea or from boats after the ferry sank early on Friday said crew had told them not to worry about a fire below deck and even ordered them to take off lifejackets.

Officials at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owned the Al Salam 98, were not immediately available to answer the allegations.

Rescue workers have recovered 195 bodies from the Red Sea and saved 389 people but about 800 more, most of them Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, are missing.

The survivors said a fire broke out below deck shortly after the 35-year-old vessel left the Saudi port of Duba on Thursday evening with 1,272 passengers and a crew of about 100.

The ship began to list but the crew continued to sail out into the Red Sea rather than turn back to the Saudi port, they told reporters in the Egyptian port of Safaga, where the ferry should have landed early on Friday.

Egyptian survivor Shahata Ali said the passengers had told the captain about the fire but he told them not to worry. “We were wearing lifejackets but they told us there was nothing wrong, told us to take them off and they took away the lifejackets. Then the boat started to sink and the captain took a boat and left,” he added, speaking to Reuters Television.

“The captain was the first to leave and we were surprised to see the boat sinking,” added Khaled Hassan, another survivor. Other survivors also reported that the crew played down the gravity of the situation and withheld lifejackets.

“There was a fire but the crew stopped the people from putting on lifejackets so that it wouldn't cause a panic,” said Abdel Raouf Abdel Nabi, one of the survivors.

“There was a blaze down below. The crew said 'Don't worry, we will put it out.' When things got really bad the crew just went off in the lifeboats and left us on board,” said Nader Galal Abdel Shafi, another arrival on the same rescue boat.

Shirin Hassan, head of the maritime section of the Egyptian Ministry of Transport, told state television the fire seemed to have broken out on a vehicle on the lower car deck.

The crew thought they had put the fire out but it flared up again, he said, citing a preliminary analysis.

DISTRESS SIGNAL

Rifat Said, 34, a passenger from Giza near Cairo, said: “We asked why there was smoke and they told us they were putting out the fire but it got worse. The ferry sailed on for two hours listing to the side. Then it just went onto its side and within five minutes it had sunk.

It was not immediately clear what happened to the captain, named as Sayyed Omar, or why coastguards did not appear to have received any distress signal from the ferry.

State news agency MENA said that on Friday morning a ship did pick up a message from the ferry's captain saying he was in danger of sinking. It did not say how the ship reacted.

Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, who has ordered an immediate investigation into the disaster, visited some of the injured in a hospital in the port of Hurghada on Saturday.

Mubarak ordered the government to pay 30,000 Egyptian pounds ($5,200) in compensation to the families of the dead and 15,000 pounds to each of the survivors, MENA said.

In Safaga, hundreds of weeping and angry relatives of passengers gathered in front of the gates of the port where the ferry should have arrived at 2 a.m. (midnight GMT) on Friday.

In the morning an official came and read out a partial list of the names of survivors to the assembled relatives.

Fathi Kamel cried out: “Allahu Akbar (God is Most Great)” when he heard that his nephew was among the survivors.

Other relatives broke down in tears when the reading ended and they had not heard the names they were waiting for. General Mahfouz Taha, head of the Red Sea Ports Authority, said rescue efforts would continue.

Egyptian presidential spokesman Suleiman Awad said on Friday there may not have been enough lifeboats.

“The speed with which the ship sank and the lack of sufficient lifeboats indicate there was some deficiency,” he told Egyptian television. But a shipping company official said the Saudi authorities had confirmed that everything was in order when the ship sailed.

MENA said the passenger list included more than 1,000 Egyptians, as well as other nationalities, including Saudis, Syrians, and a Canadian.

A sister ship of the sunken ferry, the Al Salam 95, sank in the Red Sea in October after a collision with a Cypriot commercial vessel. All but four of the passengers were saved.

Filed: 05/02/2006

Rescue teams have pulled more survivors from the Red Sea following Friday's ferry disaster, Egyptian police have said.

------------
Relatives are angry at the lack of information

But some 700 people are still missing after the Al-Salam Boccaccio 98 caught fire and sank in bad weather on a crossing from the Saudi port of Duba to Egypt.

A senior police officer in the Egyptian port of Safaga said 67 more survivors were recovered overnight. The new figures would bring the total number of survivors to more than 460.

Search teams have so far recovered 195 bodies. The ferry was carrying about 1,270 passengers.

Rani Kamal, third officer on the ship, said the car deck on the ferry had flooded as crew members battled a fire, causing listing which eventually took the ship down.

"The ferry sank due to firefighting operations. Water flooded the garage [car deck], which is where the fire started, and it pooled on one side," he said.

"Then the water increased and increased until the ship listed sharply. It listed five, then 10 degrees and then 15 and then 25 degrees and that was the beginning of the end."

Survivors have accused the crew of negligence, and said the captain abandoned the ship before making sure all the passengers had left the vessel.

At Safaga port, hundreds of relatives of the missing awaited news, some for a third day.

Authorities deployed more riot police after clashes yesterday between police and people angry at receiving so little information.

Telegraph

Man alive. Talk about dumb idiot fools adding decks. Is it just me, or does that ship just look plain WRONG !

Totally top heavy, and a wonder so many such idiot vessels are considered 'safe'. I sure as hell wouldn't get on something that looked like that.

Calrissian: prefers planes (crashing is less painful than drowning)