“Endless Chain of Errors”, Why It Sank –

Four bodies recovered: those of the chairman of Morgan Stanley International, Jonathan Bloomer, and his wife, Judy; of the lawyer Chris Morvillo, of the law firm Clifford Chance, and his wife Neda. A fifth was found in the wreck. The missing bodies are therefore the British computer magnate Mike Lynch, who had wanted the floating party on the Bayesian, the super luxury yacht that sank off the coast of Palermo, to celebrate his acquittal, and his 18-year-old daughter Hannah. A few hours after the shipwreck, the Canadian-Antiguan chef Recaldo Thomas was found outside the wreck.

In parallel with the recovery operations, investigations into the causes continue. Pointing the finger at the choices made by those on board the sailing ship is Giovanni Costantino, CEO of The Italian Sea Group, the company that owns the assets of Perini Navi of Viareggio, which built the Bayesian in 2008. “Everything that was done reveals a very long series of errors. People shouldn’t have been in the cabins, the boat shouldn’t have been at anchor. And then why didn’t the crew know about the approaching storm?”, says the entrepreneur in an interview with Corriere della Sera.

For Costantino it is false that the storm was not predictable: “I have the weather maps here in front of me. Suddenly, nothing came… Ask yourself: why were no fishermen from Porticello out that night? A fisherman reads the weather conditions and a ship doesn’t? The disturbance was fully legible in all the weather maps”.

He defines the sailing ship as “unsinkable”, but “unless it takes on water. There is no other explanation”, he hypothesizes, providing a possible reconstruction of the event: “The ship was at anchor. At a certain point the anchor loses its grip and it moves, dragged by the wind that pushes it, taking it in the belly. It pushes it for 4 minutes”, he continues, “it rotates it and puts it in the position in which it sank. In these 4 minutes – and I take responsibility for what I say – the ship has already taken on water. Why do I say this? Because from the video images that you all published, you can see the vertical mast, first completely turned on and then turned off, except for the light bulb at the top that takes energy from a battery”.

Costantino makes some hypotheses on how the hull could have taken on water: “The stern hatch was certainly open”, and “we think that perhaps something else was open too”. The entrepreneur states that with the weather alert “it was inappropriate to have, as I read, a party”, but “it was necessary to armor the hull”, “after having placed the guests in the meeting point of the ship”, “start the engines and pull up the anchor or release it automatically, put the bow to the wind and send the keel down. The next morning they would have set off again with zero damage”. Instead “mistakes were made”.