MAYDAY

The maritime industry is a very tough one, and the profession of mariner traditionally required courage. As we all know, the sad truth is that there are more than thousand maritime disasters occurring every year only in the British waters. So, you can imagine the scale of the problem and understand that something shall be done to improve the situation and reduce the human losses to the absolute minimum.

Nicholas faith, who is the author of this nice title, has explored the maritime safety in the twentieth century trying to find out the real causes of the two disasters, that are on the list of the most tragic maritime disasters of the century, namely the sinking of the “Estonia” ferry in 1994, and the loss of the “Herald of Free Enterprise” which occurred eight years earlier. What happened that caused these tragedies and how could they be prevented?

Why the number of the human losses was so incredibly high in both cases? What were the main lessons learned? In his publication, Nicholas Faith made a good attempt to perform the thorough examination and analysis of the numerous evidences provided by the marine engineers, ship designers, rescuers, doctors, as well and other experts in order to understand the real causes of these accidents.