A luxury cruise ship is hit by a rogue wave and overturned on New Year’s eve in this month’s remake of the 1970’s classic action adventure movie the Poseidon Adventure.  This time around the movie is called Poseidon, and without giving away the plot, the film follows a group of would be survivors trying to find their way out of an upside down ship slowly filling with water.

 

But what are the facts of shipwreck survival and who would you want on your team?  

 

Flipside spoke to Peter Collings, an expert in Egyptian wrecks from the UK.  He first explored the wreck of the Al Khafain within days of her sinking.  Just like the fictional Poseidon, she capsized and turned upside down in November 2005, when she was being towed to shore after a fire in the engine room.  A large air bubble was trapped in the bottom of the ship and this keeps her upright but inverted.  Coincidentally, the former P&O car ferry was also actually called the Poseidonia for 17 years of her working life.

 

Peter describes some of the difficulties in diving, exploring and moving around an upturned shipwreck, ‘The main problem is disorientation, your eyes and your brain cannot agree.  Ceilings become floors and vice versa. The tables in the canteen are stuck to the dining room floor, which is now the roof.  Everything is topsy-turvy.’  To add to that, when diving you are hovering in the water, weightless, you can hang upside down almost as easily as the right way up. Some people experience vertigo, the sensation of falling even though they are not, and others become claustrophobic, fearing being confined in a small space.  As Peter says, ‘There can be a lot of psychological issues in diving wrecks.’ For safety, and use in dark or low visibility spaces divers use line on reels to mark a route into and out of a wreck so that they cannot get lost.  One thing Peter mentions about his upside down wreck is the terrible noise.  When flipped, the metal plates that make up the hull are subject to immense unusual stresses and the screeching and grinding of tortured metal can be heard from some distance away as water conducts sound so well.  

 

The former Poseidonia was a roll on roll off (RORO) ferry.  The failure of the car deck doors in these have been responsible for the biggest losses of life at sea in recent times.  In September 1994 a ferry running between Estonia and Sweden in the cold Baltic sea became unstable when high waves buffeted the car deck doors and water began to get into the hull.   Soon the ship began to tip over, listing 30 degrees off to the side.  Most of those who survived had already got out on to the decks at this point.  Doors and stairways turned into lethal pits and people were crushed by falling equipment inside the vessel as the tilt made moving around almost impossible in the dark.  Of the 982 passengers aboard, 300 escaped the wreck but only 137 were saved by rescue helicopters from Sweden, Finland and Estonia.  

 

Mike Tipton is a human physiologist specialising in sea survival at the University of Portsmouth.  He studies the reactions of the body in these extreme situations and has studied the Estonia disaster extensively. The vast majority of people who escaped the ship died from a  ‘cold shock’ reaction. Only a third of those who got out actually survived because of this.  Cold shock is an involuntary gasp reflex, you hit the water and the shock of plunging into icy seas causes you to breath in.  Only a little over a litre of water on a third of a full breath is enough to drown you.

 

‘Its traditional in this kind of research to do it to your self first before you try an experiment on volunteers,’ says Mike, ‘I have been in cold water (lab and sea) too many times to count. My longest: 4 hours at 3°C wearing a safety suit, the toughest: 90 minutes in 10°C wearing swimming trunks, and the scariest: underwater in 5°C water wearing everyday clothes.’