[BITList] USN Mystery

[michael J Feltham]

Mystery deepens on how an NYK box ship collided

with US destroyer

AMERICANS have said little officially about how of an NYK 2,858-TEU ship came to nearly sinking a US destroyer a quarter of its size, but Japanese officials say the bigger box ship hardly noticed the impact in the night and continued on is way until deciding to make a U-turn and returned at 18 knots to learn what that crunching noise was all about. Despite the passage of a week, questions still remain about the cause of the collision that injured the warship's captain and took the lives of seven of its crew, whose bodies were found trapped in flooded compartments. The collision between the 9,000-displacement ton USS Fitzgerald and the 29,000-displacement ton ACX Crystal knocked out the destroyer's communications for an hour, and it was the returning freighter that sounded the first alarm, reported US Naval Institute News. Investigators now think Crystal was transiting to Tokyo on autopilot with an inattentive crew when it struck a glancing blow on the destroyer's starboard side at about 1:30 AM local time. Meanwhile, when Crystal's port bow hit Fitzgerald, the warship was performing a normal transit off the coast of Japan, USNI News understands. Above the waterline, the flared bow of Crystal caved in several spaces in the superstructure, including the stateroom of the captain, Commander Bryce Benson. The impact not only ripped a hole in the steel superstructure in the stateroom but also shifted the contents and shape of the steel so Benson was "squeezed out the hull and was outside the skin of the ship," a sailor familiar with the damage to the ship told USNI News."He's lucky to be alive." Fitzgerald sailors had to bend back the door of the stateroom to pluck Benson from the side of the ship and bring him inside. He and two other sailors were later evacuated from the ship by Japanese helicopter to a navy hospital at Yokosuka.source: Schednet 
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