what is the phenomenon that sank the yacht –

Investigators are working to put the pieces together and understand what really happened at dawn on Monday 19 August, when the super-sailing ship Bayesian, flying the English flag, sank off the coast of Palermo. The investigation, at the moment, is against unknown persons for shipwreck and multiple manslaughter, but the prosecutor of Termini Imerese, Ambrogio Cartosio, does not hide the possibility of “unpredictable developments”. The press conference called by the Prosecutor’s Office six days after the shipwreck, which cost the lives of seven people (including the British billionaire Mike Lynch and his daughter Hannah), serves first of all to break down the wall of incommunicado between investigators and the press. Then come the first certainties about what happened in the Porticello harbour, which sweep away days of unconfirmed rumours. “The sailing ship was hit by a downburst”, explains the deputy Raffaele Cammarano who is investigating the disaster with Cartosio.

It is a meteorological phenomenon with strong gusts of wind that come out of a thunderstorm. In other words, the downburst “consists of very strong descending gusts of wind, that is, from top to bottom and in particular comes to life when there is a strong thunderstorm in the area or imposing clouds (cumulonimbus) from which it originates”, we read in Il Giornale. “These descending currents also have two characteristics: in addition to violence (gusts can reach up to 180 km/h) they are able to spread in all directions as soon as they impact the ground (in this case the sea surface). This phenomenon is unpredictable and is often feared by airplane pilots during landing”, it is explained.

The evening before the tragedy, “there was no storm alert”, assured the Commander of the Palermo Coast Guard Raffaele Macauda. Light also sheds on the location of the six bodies recovered inside the sailing ship by the speleo-divers: “They took refuge in the cabins on the left side, where the last air bubbles had formed – says Bentivoglio Fiandra, reconstructing, in fact, the last seconds of life of the victims -. The first five bodies were found in the first cabin on the left side, the sixth in the third on the same side”. No one is registered as a suspect, for now, but things could change “even before” the recovery of the wreck, a condition that the prosecutor of Termini Imerese has defined as “fundamental” for a serious development of the investigation.