Original subtitles

A ship wreck in the Greek islands.

Hundreds of people fight for survival

in a swirling storm.

We need to help this man!

With their lives on the line,

some people become heroes.

Don't let go!

Others do whatever it takes to stay alive.

Keep her away! She'll kill us both!

Investigators uncover an extraordinary

chain of events.

Small mistakes which have deadly consequences.

Mayday! Mayday! We're doing 90 miles an hour.

Out of control!

Take a life jacket!

- Where's the coast guard? - Don't let go!

A passenger ferry pushes its way through a storm.

What is that?! Whoa!

Oh, my God!

Within sight of land,

this Greek islands ferry is sinking

in high winds and stormy seas.

There was a hole, and it was gonna sink,

and it was gonna sink fast.

A huge rescue operation kicks in.

Rescuers must risk their own lives.

I never want to be in that situation ever again

because it was terrifying.

But I had enough time to think this is the part where I die.

It was like a catastrophe, it was as if it was coming

the end of the world for this island.

For the people of Greece, it's a national disaster.

The worst of its kind in 30 years.

Discovering why it happened

will take months of detective work.

And raise this question:

How safe are the ships we sail on?

The Greek capital, Athens.

This great metropolis has a 3,000-year history.

A history built around the city's easy access

to the Mediterranean.

The harbour district of Athens is called Piraeus.

Ferry boats ply back and forth

between here and the more than 200 islands

scattered throughout the Aegean Sea.

For island hoppers,

this is where the adventure begins.

It's here somewhere. It has to be.

Heidi, today would be good.

I'm hurrying!

Are you sure you don't--

Tuesday, September 26, 2000.

Christine Shannon and Heidi Hart,

from Seattle, are close friends.

They've bought tickets for a ferry ride

to the island of Paros

166 kilometres to the south-east.

- Express. Samina? - Express sounds good.

How long's the ride?

Christine's 32, and teaches pre-school.

Heidi's 26, and just graduated from college.

She wants to go into business management.

It's been a crazy kind of day.

They'd planned on going to the island of Santorini,

further south.

- I had it? Okay, let's go. - We have to hurry!

I have the tickets!

Always rushing!

We'd been enjoying Athens the night before

a little too much, and we overslept

and missed our Santorini boat.

I had never heard of Paros.

I even asked them,

"Well, show me on a map where the island is."

And, then I said, never mind. It doesn't matter.

Let's just go. It's the next boat.

Let's go somewhere.

So, it was a fluke that we were on that boat.

Here's where chance is steering them.

It could be a whole lot worse.

If you dream of a Greek getaway,

Paros is just what the guide books promise.

Life is laid-back

and the backdrop is enchanting.

Around 12,000 people live on Paros year-round.

In tourist season,

add to that a 100,000 visitors.

Ferries from Athens head for the harbour

in the main town, Parikia.

There's constant traffic back and forth to the mainland.

As one boat's leaving, another one shows up,

bringing hundreds more eager visitors.

Christine and Heidi are among 472 passengers

who board the Samina today.

As they get ready to embark, one thing becomes clear.

Some of the boats on the islands run are modern,

newly built.

But the Samina comes from a different era.

She's been criss-crossing the Mediterranean since 1966.

The Samina was launched before these two were born.

And though they don't realize it,

Greek safety laws say that in a little over a year,

the Samina will be pulled out of service

and sent to the scrapyard.

I made a few jokes to Christine about,

the lifeboats don't look very safe.

If we get into trouble out here, I said,

we'll be screwed.

And I said, well,

there's no icebergs in the Aegean.

So, we should be okay.

- Say cheese. - Cheese.

The Samina can carry more than a thousand passengers,

along with her 61 crew.

So today the ship's less than half full.

Katrina Stark and her cousin Sarah Davis,

both from New Zealand, are backpacking.

So that means...

Like Heidi and Christine,

they're literally sailing into the unknown.

We had no plans.

We went to get on the very first ferry that was leaving.

Going wherever it was going to take us,

and that happened to be first stop Paros.

At 7:15, two hours into the journey,

the sun is setting.

There are still three hours to kill

before the Samina arrives.

The sports fans on board,

passengers and crew,

know just how they'd like to spend the time.

There's a major soccer game playing live on TV.

Athens star side, Panathanaikos,

are up against their German rivals, Hamburg.

The reception wasn't very good

and so they had various staff come along

trying to fix the TV,

and everyone was putting suggestions

on how to fix the TV, and it seemed to be quite

important to everybody on board that they get to see this game.

At 8 PM, the Samina passes the island of Kythnos.

They're on schedule to reach Paros

at around a quarter past ten.

The wind is rising.

The sea is growing rougher.

But these northerly winds, known as the meltemi,

are frequent at this time of year.

The Samina has weathered conditions much worse than this

over the past three decades.

I'm going to take a nap!

Heidi and Christine are the only people left outside.

They think their tickets don't allow them to go in.

Goodnight! Wake me when we're there.

I said, "We have third-class tickets,

we have to stay out on the deck.

It's gonna be a cold, wet, terrible night."

But I didn't even think to go downstairs

where most of the people on the boat were.

For the crew of the Samina,

the night-time journey is routine.

Hazards such as reefs and rocks

are all clearly marked on their charts.

Many have warning lights.

Two jagged outcrops rise from the sea

within sight of the main harbour on Paros,

Parikia Bay.

Known as the Portes, or the Gates,

they lie five-and-a-half kilometres from the town.

For every mariner sailing these waters,

the Gates of Paros are a familiar landmark.

They're welcoming, but dangerous too.

The rocks rise 25 metres out of the sea.

Every passing ship must give them a wide clearance.

At night, a beacon light on the taller of the two rocks

sends a clear warning to sailors.

Stray too close to the Gates of Paros,

and disaster will follow.

They're still two hours away.

But they're sailing into a growing storm.

Despite the weather,

Christine and Heidi are still out in the open.

Had I known we could go to any other part

of the boat at that point in time, I would have.

But I didn't know,

and actually being in that part of the boat

I think was very fortuitous for us,

because we were able to be aware of what was going on later.

Being out on the deck will help save their lives.

Soon everyone aboard will be fighting for survival.

On the evening of September 26, 2000,

the passenger ferry Express Samina

leaves Athens' harbour, Piraeus, heading south-east.

She's making for the island of Paros,

five hours away in the Aegean Sea.

As the sun sets, the weather deteriorates

until by nightfall, the ship is being buffeted

by a northerly gale.

But the crew are used to such conditions.

Their ship is big enough, tough enough,

to survive far worse.

The Samina is 115 metres long,

more than a soccer field,

and 18 metres wide.

Passengers are widely dispersed.

Heidi and Christine are out on the open deck.

Katrina and Sarah are inside the main passenger lounge.

The nerve centre is here, the engine room.

It's below the waterline,

but is protected by a series of watertight doors.

The crew need to move about.

But the ship is safe, so long as they lock the doors

tight behind them.

To reduce the rolling effect of the waves,

the ship also has a stabilizing system,

like small wings that extend out into the water.

It's still a bumpy ride,

but it doesn't stop passengers moving about when they want to.

As we got further away and night began to fall,

the seas got rougher and it became stormy,

until it got to the point where you couldn't even

walk on board,

you had to kind of stumble sideways.

People were kind of laughing.

It was kind of funny at the time.

Being from a place where we ride ferries

quite often, it wasn't really a concern to us at the time.

But it was pretty rough out there.

It's 10 PM.

The wind has now risen to nearly 50 kilometres an hour.

Waves are cresting two metres high.

Despite the gale, visibility is good.

Those are the lights of Paros.

The Samina's on time

and still pushing forward at 33 kilometres an hour.

Then suddenly...

...the ship lurches sharply to the left.

- What's that? - I don't know.

The boat turned enough that it startled me awake.

I woke up and was kind of dazed a little bit.

You can't just park a boat like you're parking a car.

And so, I though it was odd that I felt this G-force

of the boat turning.

Christine said, "Hey, there's lights.

I see shore, we must be getting pretty close to docking."

The lights of Parikia,

even car headlights, are clearly visible

just five-and-a-half kilometres away.

But then another light cuts through the darkness.

What the...?

Whoa!

Oh, my God!

Oh, my God!

This rock just comes out of nowhere,

just out of the black night.

I'll never forget what it looks like in my mind.

It was this brown, kind of craggily

sandish-looking rock

that had lights on top of it shining down

so it illuminated it.

And it made it look like a movie set.

The side of the boat scraped along the side.

I could have walked over and touched it.

And you could hear down on the lower decks of the boat

that the metal was just ripping apart.

The unthinkable has happened.

The Samina has crashed against the Gates of Paros.

One million kilos of ship grind against the rocks.

It was the worst sound, and it was the loudest sound

I've ever heard in my life.

It sounded like fingernails on a chalkboard,

just, God's fingernail

on the biggest chalkboard in the world.

There was a hole,

and it was gonna sink, and it was gonna sink fast.

The shock wave reverberates through the ship.

Suddenly, there was a big lurch

to the right side of the boat,

and people who were standing up got thrown off their feet.

Everything in the bar smashed.

I looked out the window, and there were two large rocks

we passed that looked white,

lit up by the light inside the ship.

I don't know what that was.

Oh man, it just doesn't sound good, you know?

In a situation like this,

the time frame is so hard to put back together.

But it seemed like maybe a minute or two

until the boat started to noticeably lilt

to the side and tip.

And that's kind of when the chaos started.

We have to get off the ship!

Lots of people were crying. Lots of people were praying,

holding on to each other, yelling.

There was no alarm or siren.

There was no one to tell us what we were supposed to do.

We need to get off this boat and we need to leave right now!

We don't have to panic.

Christine said to me,

"The Titanic took hours to sink."

And I said, "We don't have that much time."

We don't have hours, Chrisine!

We need to leave now!

Okay, okay, okay.

In my mind I thought,

"This boat's gonna sink and we're all gonna die."

All these people were trying to get life jackets.

Being taller, I was able to reach over the heads

of most people who were trying to get hold of life jackets

and grabbed two.

The Samina has 61 crew members.

But where are they?

Passengers must fend for themselves.

I yelled to Christine, "Come here,

I think I found life vests."

Okay, it doesn't open. Just take them out.

At this point people were starting to run past us.

And I was saying, "Here, take these!"

And throwing them out, and people were just panicking.

Take life jackets!

Within minutes of the collision,

the ship's lights go out.

Passengers are plunged into darkness,

until emergency generators kick in.

And then the first flare went off.

This eerie red glow

coming down over the ferry

gave it a whole other feeling of just terror,

that we're out in the night,

in the dark,

and the ferry's gonna sink.

Get out of the way!

At the harbour, port officials are now aware

of the developing crisis.

Port authority vice commander Dimitrios Malamas

starts to organize a rescue.

He needs all available boats right now.

What vessels do we have in the area?

Alexis Bisbas runs a yacht charter business in ParAikia.

The first I heard of the disaster

was a phone call I got from the port police

at about 10:15.

Can I get out there with my boat

as quickly as possible?

Just to help with whatever might be necessary.

There was no way that we had any idea

that it was going to be a disaster of that magnitude.

Paros has a medical centre

equipped for the islanders' basic needs,

not a major disaster.

Doctor John Polyzoides

was an ER surgeon for 35 years.

Though retired, he helps run the centre.

We saw the ship was going down,

and there were a lot of boats and lights and so on,

but I personally did not expect anything tragic

to come out of that, because it was so close

to the harbour.

Aboard the Samina, many of the 472 passengers

are in a state of sheer terror.

It was chaos.

It was people not knowing what to do,

and waiting for a captain or a crew to help us.

There was a woman who went through the door just before us,

and as soon as she got out onto the deck,

she climbed over the railings and just jumped off,

like, didn't look back or didn't say anything to anybody,

and just climbed over and threw herself off into the water.

There were people holding children over the railings

wanting to throw them down to people in the water.

It was quite a terrible scene.

The wind hampers efforts to abandon ship.

They were releasing inflatable life rafts,

but they weren't attached to the ship,

so as soon as it was released,

there was a big storm,

it would get picked up by the wind

as soon as it was inflated,

and they were just blowing halfway to Athens.

The rafts blow beyond the reach of many passengers

who've already leapt into the sea.

In the confusion,

Heidi Hart is knocked flying,

striking her head.

Heidi! Are you okay?

I kept thinking, "If I black out now, you know,

I'm done for. This boat's sinking.

I have to stay conscious."

I had this adrenaline rush,

and there was a feeling that I would call terror.

I knew instantly this was gonna be a fight for our lives.

There was some point in time where I literally felt myself

leave my body and instincts kicked in.

Everybody was running to the rear of the boat,

and Christine just looked at me and said...

Go that way, to the front of the boat.

And she said, "But nobody's up there."

It was the darkest part of the boat,

it was the highest part of the boat.

She said, "Nobody's up there."

I said, "I don't care, go."

And luckily for us,

that's where we found a lifeboat

hanging over the side of the ship.

Heidi and Christine have escaped the sinking ship,

but they're still at the mercy of the storm.

When we'd jumped into the lifeboat,

it wasn't orderly, "Here's your seat."

It was, jump.

Where you land is where you are.

And so, we were just kind of all pig-piled

in this lifeboat together.

The battle for survival takes an ugly turn.

Each passenger must decide,

help others or fend for themselves.

There were five or six men in the back of the boat

and they were fighting with each other.

They were yelling at each other. As the ferry was sinking,

they kept pointing at the ferry and fighting with each other.

And this is when I see the guy

swim up to the boat, so I started getting ready.

I'm thinking, "Okay, I need a rope.

I gotta throw him something. He has no life vest on."

We need help here, somebody!

Get up, get up!

Help us, would you?! To grab him!

The only thing you could see was his eyes and his nose

coming out of the water, and he was just barely making it,

swimming towards us.

Everybody else on the boat was yelling,

"No, no, we can't take any more people on."

I've got you, don't worry! I've got you!

Heidi leaned over and grabbed

this gentleman's hand,

and I reached over and grabbed her by the waist,

and she told me, "I'm not letting go."

And I yelled to the other people,

"She's not letting go."

He had taken off almost all of his clothes,

he was wearing just his underwear.

Somebody grab him!

We need some help! We need to help this man!

I'm not a very big person, I'm five-feet tall.

Just me trying to pull him in the boat wasn't gonna work.

That's it!

The men in the lifeboat realize

that Heidi won't let go,

and finally help haul the drowning man on board.

I don't know what they were thinking,

they were panicking.

So, who am I to judge

what other people were thinking and doing?

But...

There was a lot more that could have been done that night.

Of the 533 people who set out on the Samina,

many are now in the sea.

Others are still trapped on the vessel itself.

The ship begins to roll over.

If it goes down,

dozens of people will be dragged down with it.

Oh, my God!

The passenger ferry Express Samina

has struck rocks near the island of Paros,

in the Aegean Sea.

533 passengers and crew

face a battle to survive in high winds and stormy seas.

Some people have managed to clamber into a lifeboat.

Others have stayed with the ship,

and now fear it will sink beneath them.

At that stage, we were on the deck

trying to figure out whether it was a good idea

to jump overboard as well,

but we were tilting further and further

and it was getting to the point where we didn't really

have that choice anymore.

It's 10:50.

40 minutes after the collision.

Sarah!

Are you being me?

As the Samina continues to roll,

Katrina Stark has little choice.

She hauls herself over the rail.

The ship has turned completely on its side.

Katrina is sitting on the hull.

Should she try to swim for shore

or wait for rescue?

While I was sitting there thinking about that...

all of a sudden,

the ship just sank underneath us

and sucked us down, and everything around it.

I don't know how much time we were under the water,

but I had enough time to think, okay, well this is the part

where I die, this is the part where I drown.

I kind of thought, well, okay, that's fine.

And had enough time to be okay with that.

Just as we got there,

we saw the ferry sinking,

which was...

...an extreme sight.

To see this entire ship

sink beneath the waves

and to be gone,

and just leave us in our little lifeboat,

it was amazing.

It was almost beautiful in a sad sort of way.

And then complete blackness, darkness.

Huge waves.

The Samina sinks two-and-a-half kilometres

from the Gates of Paros.

Even without its engines,

wind, waves, and the ship's own momentum

carried the Samina closer to shore.

The sea here is 38 metres deep.

As the Samina goes down,

huge bubbles of air escape from the ship,

making the water less dense,

making objects in the water sink more quickly.

Katrina Stark sinks several metres

before the buoyancy of her life jacket

pulls her up again.

As suddenly as I had been sucked under,

suddenly I popped out the top.

Sarah!

Her priority now is to find her cousin, Sarah.

In the storm, she can't tell where she is.

The waves were so big that for one second,

it sounded like she was over there,

and so I tried to swim that way. And then the next second,

it sounded like she's over there,

I tried to swim that way.

Sarah!

Sarah!

I can hear you, but I can't see you!

Sarah! Sarah!

Eventually I just said to her, okay,

make sure you get on a boat and get back to land,

and I will see you back on shore.

At 11:15 PM,

Dr. Polyzoides receives his first casualty of the night.

But something doesn't add up.

They brought a man on a stretcher.

He was semi-conscious,

and when we started working on him,

he had hardly any blood pressure.

And when we were resuscitating him,

I realized that he was dry,

which meant that he didn't actually...

He was not from the ship.

Anyway, we carried on.

Eventually, we lost him.

He died in our hands,

and then people came and said, you know who it was?

And I said no.

His patient isn't from the Samina,

but the disaster still claims its first victim.

The man is Dimitrios Malamas

who had been helping organize the rescue.

In the crisis, he'd suffered a heart attack.

He was 40 years old.

So you can understand

even at this early stage,

although we did not know the number of people

that we were going to lose,

there was that sense of tragedy immediately

from the very beginning.

A local shopkeeper, George Skandalis,

grabs his video camera

and captures these first raw images

as survivors begin to appear.

As soon as we got close enough to shore,

when I saw this white cathedral

with a blue-domed top,

that was when I finally knew we made it.

We're gonna get to shore, we're gonna be alive.

I felt more alive than I've ever felt in my life.

Giddy, almost giddy.

And actually afterwards,

one of the things that I had to come to terms with

was that people died and I felt so alive.

One of the local fishing boats now appears,

crowded with people who've been dragged from the sea.

Local boat owner Alexis Bisbas

is part of the rescue flotilla, searching for survivors.

One minute we were flying across the top of a wave.

The next minute we were burying the bow of the boat

into the previous wave.

We had water coming across the decks.

I've been sailing all my life.

I've never had a situation like that.

I never want to be in that situation ever again

because it was terrifying.

He plucks 25 people from the sea

in three trips out into the stormy waters.

One of the amazing things in these situations

is the way that people behave.

A young guy that we pulled out

was still carrying his portable stereo system,

so the one hand is trying to grab hold of the boat,

and the other hand, as we realized,

was being hampered by this stereo system

that he still had in his other hand.

One of them was an old lady who had tied to her life jacket,

her bag, and as we were trying to drag her into the boat,

we realized that something was stopping her.

And I went to cut

her free of this bag,

and she said to us that if we did,

we should throw her back, because that was

her entire life in this bag.

Many survivors are in a state of shock.

All are cold, wet, and exhausted.

Just a few hundred metres away,

dozens of people are still in the water

trying to stay alive until they're spotted

by a rescue boat.

Katrina Stark and a fellow survivor,

a total stranger,

are now clinging desperately to a piece of wreckage.

My first surprise about being in the water

was that it was warm.

I was really expecting the water to be cold.

There were big waves, and you just had to cling on

tight to the piece of wreckage.

Not too far away from us was an older Greek woman

who couldn't swim.

And she was panicking,

and screaming and yelling,

trying to get someone to come and save her.

Hold on!

We have to save her!

And the guy that I was with was saying

she's going to want to come over to us,

and if she grabs hold of us, she's going to drag us down.

Keep her away! She'll kill us both!

She had kind of wild eyes, like she was clearly panicking,

and a big wave came

and washed over her, and she didn't come back up

out of the water. She had drowned.

There are still some signs of hope.

Some people have been pushed south by the wind.

Miraculously avoiding being smashed onto the rocks,

they've wound up on a sandy beach,

the bay of St. Irene.

A life raft beaches in the same spot.

They're safe now,

but the terror these little children have gone through

is hard to comprehend.

More than 400 survivors have now wound up on the dockside.

Many have suffered a terrifying ordeal in the water.

They're rushed to the medical centre,

where Dr. Polyzoides has now assembled

a team of 15 medics.

Some doctors and nurses based on the island,

others, tourists who've come in to assist.

Between 11:30 and 12,

the first drowned

was brought in on a stretcher.

And although I worked for 35 years

as an accident surgeon,

it was a horrible experience.

That was the beginning of the horrific feeling

which I had, that this is serious now.

At midnight, after an hour in the water,

Katrina Stark is brought to shore.

We were the last people that they were able

to bring up onto the boat.

They headed back for the harbour,

and on the way, they stopped a couple of times

to pick people up,

but they would go to pick them up

and realize that they were dead, and so they'd just leave them

where they were.

Katrina doesn't know if her cousin made it.

Sarah?

Katrina!

I have never been so happy

to see anybody in my whole life.

How did you get here?

And I just grabbed hold of her,

and I wouldn't leave her side for a second.

I'm so happy to see you.

Are you okay? Are you keeping warm?

Yeah.

It was terrifying. It's been five years

since the accident, and I still have nightmares,

I still think about it.

It will still make me cry.

It was traumatic and it was very scary,

but it was also

a singularly defining moment in my life

where I was able to use all of the resources

I had to survive.

Pull, pull, pull!

I don't think I would have chosen not to live through this.

At half-past midnight,

more than two hours after the collision,

the rescue operation is becoming more and more

a search for bodies.

When you start seeing the bodies in the sea,

somebody that I knew that an hour ago,

they were breathing, and suddenly they're dead,

and they're...

It was very distressing.

It took me a very long time

to put it out of my mind.

It was very difficult.

Twenty-five people are now confirmed dead.

As victims continue to arrive,

Dr. Polyzoides is overwhelmed.

Do I go to this room and try and save someone?

Do I wait and see whether he's worth saving?

And it was like a catastrophe,

it was as if it was coming the end of the world

for this island.

So it was almost like you're seeing a movie,

it's not happening to you.

Every half an hour, the number of bodies increased.

By 2:30 AM, the number of dead reaches 60.

There's no room for so many bodies in the medical centre.

The church of St. Nicholas on the waterfront

now becomes a temporary morgue.

The search for people, alive or dead,

continues right through the night.

Very soon, investigators will begin to ask tough questions.

Who is to blame for the sinking?

Why did so many people have to die?

The passenger ferry Express Samina

has sunk in a storm in the Aegean Sea.

Already 60 people are confirmed dead.

Many more need medical treatment.

Morning reveals the power of last night's storm.

A lifeboat lies smashed to pieces on the rocks.

Life rafts blew away, empty.

A message board at the harbour front

lists who's alive and who's still missing.

Bodies will continue to wash up on the beaches for days to come.

There are not enough coffins on Paros.

More arrive.

Even the most experienced professionals

are touched by the trauma.

I was so shaken by this that I didn't sleep

for two nights, and on the third night

when I went to sleep,

I dreamt that my son was drowning.

Very quickly, the grief turns to anger.

Where were the crew when the ship hit the rocks?

Where were they when the passengers needed help?

Rumours spread like wildfire

and are picked up by the media.

Were some members of the crew watching the soccer game on TV

when they should have been steering the ship?

The captain, 53-year-old Vassilis Yannakos,

is held for questioning by the police.

On Paros, the funerals begin.

Here, a four-year-old boy, drowned with his father.

Divers discover 10 bodies

trapped inside the hull of the Samina.

The last body is found floating

two weeks after the sinking,

50 kilometres north of Paros.

Altogether, 80 people have died.

75 passengers, five crew members.

This is Greece's worst shipping disaster

in more than 30 years.

A national tragedy.

In the bitter aftermath,

the spotlight falls on the company

which owned the Samina, and its vice president,

Pantelis Sfinias.

He could face criminal charges,

as well as multi-million-dollar compensation claims.

Two months after the sinking,

police surround a body lying on the sidewalk

outside company headquarters in Athens.

Sfinias has jumped out of his sixth floor window,

committing suicide.

Maritime experts

at the National Technical University of Athens

begin an inquiry.

Detailed testimony is gathered from 46 crew members,

as well as 192 passengers.

The Greek legal authorities want the university

to give them a thorough explanation of what happened.

Professor David Molyneux

of the National Research Centre of Canada

is one of the world's leading experts on ferry safety.

He's studied the findings of the Greek investigators,

who came up with a startling realization.

What they found at the inquiry defied some of the initial

speculation concerning the age of the ship.

And the accident in fact turned out to be caused

by something completely different.

Testimony reveals each small but critical factor

that, together, turn a routine ferry crossing

into a national disaster.

Three hours into the journey,

the crew switch on the ship's autopilot.

The autopilot is an electronic link

between the compass and the rudder,

correcting the rudder a little bit one way

or the other to bring you back where you want to be.

Even on autopilot,

a crew member should constantly monitor the ship's position.

It's bad practice to leave an autopilot unattended

particularly in bad weather,

because the wind, the waves, and the current

are all acting to drift the ship in one direction,

and that kind of steady drift is not compensated for

by the electronics in the autopilot.

As the weather grows worse,

the crew deploy the ships' stabilizer system,

to make the ride more comfortable for the passengers.

The stabilizer uses two small fins

to counteract the roll of the ship.

But something extraordinary has happened.

Only the starboard, or right-hand

stabilizer fin has extended.

Very unusual. Normally we'd expect

both stabilizers to be working at any one time.

With just one stabilizer,

the ship is no longer symmetrical,

so the flow around the ship is unbalanced,

and as a result, the ship will tend

to drift one way rather than to go in a straight line.

With only the starboard stabilizer,

the Samina is pulled, slowly but surely,

to the right.

It's a deadly malfunction.

Captains aim to stay at least 740 metres left

of the Gates of Paros.

But when the Samina arrives,

she's on collision course.

A crew member makes a last-minute attempt

to steer the ship to the left.

But the ship can't turn quickly enough.

Whoa!

Oh, my God! Oh, my God!

It was very unfortunate the ship got holed,

but there was really no reason why the ship should have sank.

The damage was within the range

that you would normally expect a ship to survive.

Get off this ship!

The east face of the taller pinnacle

is where the ship strikes

at 12 minutes past ten PM.

There's a six metre lengthways gash,

as long as a telephone pole,

and one metre wide.

Are you okay?

But this hole is well above the water line.

No water should enter the ship.

Moments later, a second impact.

The stabilizer fin bends backwards.

It stabs, like a dagger, through the ship's side.

Oh, my God!

This three-metre gash is below the waterline.

Even worse, it's exactly alongside the engine room.

The main generators are knocked out.

Electrical power is cut throughout the ship.

One more!

The investigating team orders divers

to make a detailed survey of the wreck of the Samina.

Inside, they discover the final piece of the puzzle.

Even with two large holes, the ship could have been saved.

One final error sealed the fate of the Samina.

The passenger ferry Express Samina

strikes rocks near the Greek island of Paros.

With two gaping holes in her starboard side,

she capsizes and sinks in 38 metres of water.

Divers go down to survey the wreck

and make a startling discovery.

Like all large seagoing ships,

the Samina is divided into separate compartments,

sealed by watertight doors, like this one.

Safety laws insist they remain locked while the ship is at sea.

On the Samina's last journey, some of the doors were open.

If you imagine in your house,

every time you went through a door from the kitchen,

you had to close it, lock it,

move on to the living room, open that door,

close it, lock it, and carry on.

It really does slow down your everyday life,

so there is a tendency sometimes to leave these doors open.

One more!

Because they're left open,

water is no longer confined to the engine room.

And now that the power is cut,

the crew can't close the doors remotely.

Twenty-nine of the crew are called back

for a second grilling by investigators.

This testimony provides an exact picture

of the ship's last moments,

data which is now built into a computer model.

At 10:15, three minutes after the collision,

the ship is listing only five degrees to the right,

but filling fast through that hole in the engine room.

By 10:25, she's listing 14 degrees.

Now the six-metre gash, which was above the waterline,

is exposed to the sea.

This is the point where the Samina

and 80 of those on board are doomed.

The ship can't withstand this degree of damage.

The Samina is what's called a ro-ro ferry.

It stands for roll-on, roll-off.

This is a modern ro-ro ship.

Vehicles simply reverse in through the stern doors

and then drive out at their destination.

It's a cost-effective design

with a potentially fatal flaw.

The worst shipping disasters in recent times

have involved vessels designed this way.

The Herald of Free Enterprise went down

with the loss of 193 lives

at Zeebrugge in Belgium in 1987.

850 were drowned aboard the ro-ro ferry Estonia

in the Baltic Sea in 1994.

Unlike a cruise ship or a cargo vessel,

which are divided into many smaller compartments,

the vehicle deck of a ro-ro ship is one large, open area,

highly vulnerable to rapid flooding.

Imagine comparing flooding an egg box

with flooding just an empty cardboard shoebox.

The shoebox would tend to fill up very quickly,

whereas an egg box would tend to fill up

each compartment at a time.

So the egg box would stay afloat,

whereas the shoebox wouldn't.

This open space is especially vulnerable,

because it's so close to the waterline.

The car deck on a ro-ro ferry is low,

to make driving the vehicles on and off easy.

As a result, you're relying on those watertight compartments

to keep the ship afloat in the event of damage.

By 10:29, the Samina is listing 23 degrees.

- Are we almost there? - Yes.

She's now tilting so much

that it's impossible to launch more lifeboats.

Only three of the eight she carried got away.

Three minutes later, at 10:32,

she's listing 33 degrees.

At around 10:50,

the ship turns completely on her side.

We know the exact time that the ship sank

because the clock on the bridge was stopped

at two minutes past 11.

Divers surveying the wreck

make their most important discovery.

Of the ships 11 watertight doors,

nine were left open.

The most important aspect of this accident

was leaving the watertight doors open.

As a result, the ship flooded,

it lost all its reserve of buoyancy,

and eventually sank.

If the doors had been locked,

despite the navigational error which put the ship

on the rocks, despite the hole in the engine room,

this would probably have been a survivable accident.

The trial of ship's captain Vassilis Yannakos

and seven others began in May 2005,

more than four years after the disaster.

The sinking of the Samina led to safety improvements.

Greece cut the maximum working life

of passenger ferries from 35 to 30 years.

The tragedy also helped speed the introduction

of voyage recorders, like an airplane black box.

They're now mandatory in all passenger ferries.

Some good came out of bad.

For the first time since those dramatic events,

Katrina Stark has come back to Paros.

It's an emotional return.

It was a pretty traumatic thing to go through,

but it's quite a character-building experience,

and I think it plays a large part in who I am today.

For their role in helping to save lives,

Heidi Hart and Christine Shannon

were given an award for heroism by the city of Seattle.

I understand my strength a lot more,

and I can live freely...

without the restraints of being scared of what's unknown.

Because life is an unknown.

Even for a heroine, it's tough to look back.

Christine and I,

we always say, "We were the lucky ones.

We were in the right place at the right time."

And that is the only thing I can think of

why we made it and so many other people didn't.

And it breaks my heart.

difuze