The last 16 minutes of the Bayesian tragedy

PALERMO - You can almost see it, the Bayesian sailing ship.

The Ais tracking system, which correlates a vessel's on-board instruments with coastal stations, precisely plots its course in the most tragic minutes, right up to the end.

A disaster map, in essence. The Bayesian's course in the last 16 minutes

It is one of the many documents acquired by the Termini Imerese public prosecutor's office, but it is also a track available to the Italian Sea Group, the company that took over the assets of Perini Navi, the shipyard that built the sailing ship in 2008. And they, starting precisely from the Ais tracking and cross-referencing all the other available data, have calculated distances travelled and Bayesian movements, times, winds and the yacht's rotation, from when the waterspout arrived until the last centimetre of the sailing ship ended up under the surface of the water:

16 minutes of pure terror.

Not just the 60 seconds captured in the famous video in which he is seen disappearing into the darkness: those were only part of what happened.

There was not the very fast sinking recounted by some witnesses. Sixteen minutes to get to safety, to raise the alarm, to try to avoid the sinking and, above all - for those who slept in the cabins furthest from the exits - sixteen minutes to realise that death was waiting there, hidden among the waves, the very strong wind and the water dragging ever lower.

3:50am: the waterspout and the swaying sailing ship In the Ais track the critical time arrives that it is 3.50am on the night between Sunday and Monday.

The gale is powerful, the wind picks up impetuously, the Bayesian begins to sway dangerously. The tracking system shows an area that graphically resembles a child's scribble on a sheet of paper: it is the sailing ship moving back and forth, then sideways, then forward again and back again.

3:59: the anchor has now given way Those scribbled marks on the paper say that the yacht was like a dog on a chain, tied to the anchor and unable to run away from danger. But after a few minutes 'you can see that there is no anchor left to hold,' interprets an investigating source. The anchor no longer holds, the boat is free but is in no condition to stand up to the wind that forces it to follow its course.

At 3.59 a.m. an important tack, again dictated by the wind.

4 o'clock, the blackout: the yacht is already taking on water It is probably at this point that the yacht begins to take on so much water that it becomes unmanageable; it is now at the mercy of the storm and in blackout, a sign that the water has reached the generator area or the engine room.

4:05am: the Bayesian sinks There are another six minutes between now and the end.

At 4.03 another slight course change, at 4.05 the Bayesian disappears, having 'drifted' a total of 358 metres. A few moments later (and it's 4.06 a.m.), its 'EPIRB', a sort of gps that acts as an emergency device, automatically sends an alarm for sinking to the 'Cospas Sarsat' satellite station in Bari, operated by the Coast Guard.

The shipwreck: the sailing boat sank vertically The superyacht - so the 15 survivors recount - went down from the bow, vertically, and then settled on the starboard side.

The ship's cook died trying to get out and was soon found; the other six guests, caught in the water in their cabins as everything toppled over, tried desperately to save themselves by searching for air.

This is the hypothesis of the investigators, who start from the cabins where they should have been according to the accounts of the surviving relatives.

'We found them all on the highest side of the sailing ship lying on the seabed,' reveals a qualified source who explains: 'We had maps with the location of the cabins and the positions of the guests, and that is not where we later recovered them.

Evidently, as the water came in, they tried to move around looking for safety'.

Translated via DeepL from Corriere della Sera

-pw- London