On the 10th of April, 1991, the Moby Prince - an Italian passenger ferry - collided
with another ship, resulting in an oil fire on the deck of the Moby Prince.
The crew promptly radioed for help and herded passengers to a fireproofed room within the ship.
The Moby Prince was mere minutes from a Port Authority base,
and the fire was spreading relatively slowly. It seemed all but certain that they would be
rescued in plenty of time... and yet as the minutes ticked by, help never came.
The fire on board the Moby Prince would turn out to be one of the worst maritime disasters in
Italian history, in part because of a few tiny human errors and one tragic miscommunication.
The Moby Prince was built in 1967 in an English shipyard near Liverpool, and was
originally operated by a dutch company, sailing the route between Harwich and Hook of Holland.
In 1984 the vessel was sold to NAVARMA, an Italian shipping company that operated
numerous routes between the mainlands and islands of France and Italy.
On the day of the disaster the Moby Prince was sailing a route between
Livorno (a destination popularly known by English-speakers as "Leghorn") and
Olbia in Sardinia - a journey that would normally take just under seven hours. Visibility was clear
and the seas were calm as 75 passengers boarded the vessel, joining 66 crew already in place.
Given that the ferry had a maximum capacity of 1,200 persons it was a relatively quiet service.
At 22:03 the Moby Prince departed. Nothing seemed to miss as it took its usual route out of the
harbour at Livorno. However, before it could get fully clear of the harbour it collided with
another ship that was sitting at anchor. The Agip Abruzzo was a tanker ship loaded with thousands
of tons of crude oil. The Moby Prince's prow sliced directly through its number seven tank,
spraying a huge quantity of oil onto both boats and into the water.
The two craft were briefly stuck together by the collision. The captain of the Agip
Abruzzo was able to maneuver in such a way as to unstick them, although doing so caused even
more oil to be ejected from the damaged tank. While the crew of the Agip Abruzzo managed to
maintain control after the collision, the crew of the Moby Prince were not so lucky.
The oil which had sprayed onto their ship had almost immediately caught fire, creating a
blazing inferno on the prow. The crew were forced to flee the control room - indeed they had to do
so with such haste that there was not time even to cut power to the engines. Thus, blazing fiercely,
the Moby Prince remained in motion, spiraling slowly away from the sight of the collision.
With the crew forced out of the control room by the blaze the situation on board the passenger
ferry was chaotic. The fire soon spread across most of the deck, making evacuation into life
rafts an impossible task. Instead crew members mustered passengers in the De Luxe Hall in the
interior of the ship. This was a room specially constructed with fireproof doors and walls.
Meanwhile the radio operator was making repeated calls for help. Of course he could not reach the
fixed radio set in the control room, and so was broadcasting using a portable transmitter.
"Mayday. Mayday," he called. "Moby Prince. Moby Prince. We are in a collision.
We are on fire. Firemen needed." And then, more plaintively, he continued,
"Mate, if you do not help us we will burn. Mayday. Mayday."
As the fire consumed the ship the De Luxe Hall remained unaffected. Temperatures were
initially tolerable even as waves of fire ate through the surrounding structure.
The crew and passengers waited. They had barely left the harbour. Help was only minutes away. They
could not escape their situation by themselves, but it seemed certain that rescue would come.
What the passengers and crew on board the Moby Prince did not realize
was that a terrible failure in communications was, at that very moment, taking place.
Rescuers had indeed been mobilized from the mainland... but they were attending to the Agip
Abruzzo. The tanker was now ablaze, and intense efforts were being made to extinguish the flames.
Nobody was looking for the stricken Moby Prince, as the captain of the Agip Abruzzo had mistakenly
reported that the collision had been with a small tugboat and not with a large passenger ferry.
To those on scene, extinguishing the fire and rescuing the approximately 30 crew on board the
Agip Abruzzo took priority over looking for the other vessel involved in the collision,
which they believed to be a small tugboat with only a few crew on board.
Authorities might have been alerted by the mayday call from the Moby Prince,
but the transmission was weak and thready. If they heard it at all they
may have misunderstood the garbled message as a report of the burning Agip Abruzzo.
The end result of these failures of communication is that nobody was looking for the Moby Prince.
Nobody realized that there were souls on board who urgently needed rescue. Indeed
it wasn't until an hour had passed that the burned hulk of the Moby Prince was discovered.
The tugboat which located it also rescued the only survivor of the disaster, Alessio Bertrand,
a ship's boy who had thrown himself from the stern of the ship when the fire first broke out.
Finally realizing that another large craft was in need of assistance, firefighting boats converged
on the Moby Prince. The flames were extinguished and fire hoses were used to cool the hull
as quickly as possible. Eventually a lone rescuer was able to board and attach a tow line. By the
time any meaningful rescue could be affected the morning of the following day had almost dawned.
By this time there was nobody left alive to save. It was discovered that all 140 people on board
were deceased... but they hadn't been killed by the flames. Instead they had suffocated to death.
It was discovered that as the crew of the Moby Prince fled the control room there had not been
time to switch off the air conditioning system. As the ship burned this system had circulated carbon
monoxide and other poisonous gases into the De Luxe Hall, suffocating those who sheltered there.
While the vast majority of victims were found in the fireproof hall, some bodies were seen on
the deck itself. Despite the devastation around them they too were unburned. It was speculated
that they had survived the choking fumes in the De Luxe Hall and subsequently attempted to escape...
only to be overwhelmed by the heat radiating from the hull as they tried to cross the deck.
A videotape found in the ruins of the De Luxe Hall confirmed suspicions that for almost an hour
the heat and fumes within the shelter had been tolerable. If the radio operators call
for help had been heard, if the Moby Prince had been found, if rescue had been swifter,
there is every chance that the majority of those on board would have lived.
In the aftermath of the disaster an investigation was launched.
It was a complex one, with few clear conclusions.
Poor visibility caused by localized fog was said to be a contributing factor in
the initial collision... but some qualified witnesses disagreed with this assessment,
stating that visibility on the night was clear.
Likewise the Agip Abruzzo might have been anchored in a zone where it should not have
been anchored... but conflicting reports prevented a conclusion from being reached on this point.
A rumor that the crew of the Moby Prince had been distracted by the broadcast of a football match
appeared in newspapers... but this notion was discredited
following questioning of the lone survivor.
It was noted that military ships might have been maneuvering in the area at the time of the
collision, with some believing that covert ship movements might have caused the moby prince to go
off course and collide with the tanker. Again, however, this could not be concretely proven.
With this multitude of uncertainties, apportioning responsibility for the tragedy was almost
impossible. Several individuals were charged, including crew members from the Agip Abruzzo,
and members of the Port Authority... but ultimately all charges were dropped,
or the people accused were absolved of any wrongdoing. To this day the tragedy still
looms large in the public consciousness, with many feeling that questions have been left unanswered
and those responsible have gotten away without proper punishment.
While the exact truth of every aspect of the Moby Prince disaster may never be known, one thing is
certain: this was a disaster wherein several small errors had catastrophic consequences. A missed
mayday call, a collision incorrectly reported, rescue efforts focused on the wrong vessel.
Were it not for any of these mistakes things might have ended very differently. The destruction
of the Moby Prince was a disaster that came heartbreakingly close to being averted altogether.