Yacht sunk “why not at a safe distance”? the weather expert’s doubt –

The news over the past two days has been dominated by the sinking of the sailing ship off the coast of Palermo. The search for the six missing resumes this morning. The firefighters’ speleo divers inspected the inside of the wreck yesterday, in operations that they themselves described as “long and complex”. The divers managed to open a gap in the hull of the 56-meter wreck. There were 22 people on board the vessel, 15 were rescued and the lifeless body of a crew member was recovered. In the meantime, attempts are being made to understand what factors may have caused the tragedy. “If a vessel leaves its original position for which it was designed, then it sinks” and “I think the vessel was in the wrong place at the wrong time”. This is how Rosario Marretta, professor of Computational Fluid Dynamics at the University of Palermo, commented on the incident in an interview with Repubblica.

“I understand that the topside of the sailing vessel, that is, the part located above the waterline, was quite high. In this case, if the air current hit the side of the vessel almost perpendicularly, both aerodynamic and hydrodynamic resistance came into play, causing the boat to capsize, the size of which determined the increase in resistance,” he continued. The professor stated that the “sailing vessel was positioned on the wrong side.” Then the final comment: “It is normal to look at nautical and meteorological charts, but assuming that a waterspout formed and that the speed and direction of the wind could be increased instantly and locally, we must ask ourselves why, with a weather forecast that was significantly worsening, the boat was in the middle of the night at a distance that was not a safe distance from the coast.”