Collision at Sea

A raddled grey-black fog festooned the sea off the New Jersey coast. Homeward bound after a twelve-day Caribbean cruise, the Grace Line's slick, new 20,000-ton luxury liner Santa Rosa steamed north, making a high-speed 20 knots in dangerous, heavily traveled waters. Her voyage was scheduled to end at her New York berth in just five hours.

At 3 a.m., 22 miles east of Atlantic City, most of Santa Rosa's 247 passengers lay asleep. In the bow, on lookout duty, Seaman Armando Gomez, 36, sighted the southbound tanker Valchem. "I heard her whistle a point and a half off the starboard bow," recalls Gomez, "and I reported it by telephone to the bridge. The second mate answered and said O.K. and blew our whistle." Ten minutes later, Gomez saw the tanker's lights ahead and off to the right, again reported to the bridge. Again the mate sounded the whistle. Then, says Gomez, "all of a sudden, within moments, I don't know how long, I saw lights off the starboard bow." The lights got "bigger and bigger, as though it was going to come down on me." Gomez ran for his life--and won.

Lights Out. In seconds, Santa Rosa knifed 40 ft. into the empty tanker's port side near the stern, flooding Valchem's lower engine room, shattering two boilers. Fire blazed in Santa Rosa's forward paint locker and amid the debris aboard the Valchem. In Valchem crew's quarters, just five or six feet abaft the deep cut, an oiler awoke into a nightmare. Said Artzy Vokeris, 53, in his broken English: "Lights out. Ship prow cut all lines. Gas steam in. Everybody trapped in room and can't see. I crawl on floor to get out. Butler and McKay right where collision is. Nobody see them anywhere. Joe Mora try to climb out porthole and pull self on deck. He fall in water. Everybody throw him life jacket, but I don't see him no more." Total dead: four Valchem seamen.

General Alarm. On Santa Rosa, passengers and crew felt the shock, heard the sound of the general alarm, rushed to dress. Gathering their life jackets, they streamed toward emergency boat stations. Some, like the shirtless man who stopped to put on a necktie, were momentarily panicky, but they were soon calmed by assurances from Captain Frank S. Siwik, 50, that there was no great danger. Siwik, master of Santa Rosa since her maiden trip last year, directed emergency work from the bridge, ordered fire fighters into the paint locker, radioed the Coast Guard for aid (a Coast Guard helicopter dropped extra carbon dioxide fire extinguishers). Siwik kept his ship's prow stuffed into the tanker's big gash, enabling his own crew to help fight Valchem's fire, facilitating the transfer of Valchem's 17 injured seamen to his own ship's hospital. For more than two hours Siwik held his position to keep the tanker from capsizing, drew away only after making certain that the stricken Valchem could stay afloat.

Six hours later, as a seagoing tug moved in to tow the crippled tanker to port, Santa Rosa, with Valchem's toppled stack perched on her prow, steamed for New York. Before she docked at 8:15 p.m., dozens of grateful passengers had signed a testimonial praising Santa Rosa's crew.

Even as Santa Rosa tied up, Coast Guard and U.S. Senate investigation committees started inquiries into the cause of the collision. The main mystery: both ships were equipped with radar, each was aware of the other's presence--so what had happened? Grace Line officials charged that Valchem had suddenly turned into Santa Rosa's path. Valchem's skipper, Louis L. Murphy, 33, claimed that after his radar man spotted Santa Rosa from eight miles and "dead ahead," he changed course to pass port to port according to the Rules of the Road. Santa Rosa then apparently changed course to the left, said Murphy. When he heard the liner's fog signal, he said, he stopped engines and sounded warning signals, but "the Santa Rosa kept coming and hit us."

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