Pinoy Marino Rights
Atty. Dennis Gorecho
The creation of International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) due to Titanic tragedy
Belfast, Northern Ireland – I saw several murals on the Titanic during my recent street art hunting in this city.
Ireland is deeply interconnected with the RMS Titanic as both its birthplace where it was constructed, and its tragic final port of call before heading into the Atlantic Ocean.
RMS Titanic was a British ocean liner that was constructed at the Harland & Wolff shipyard on Queen’s Island, with its keel laid in 1909 and launched in 1911. Shipbuilders worked tirelessly for two years to create the mammoth structure , and eight workers died during its construction.
Carrying over 2,200 passengers and crew, the ship was celebrated as the pinnacle of luxury and engineering, featuring grand interiors, opulent cabins and state-of-the-art safety measures.
Many passengers aboard were emigrants seeking a new life in America. Some were among the wealthiest individuals of the time.
It sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912 as a result of striking an iceberg on her maiden voyage from Southampton, England, to New York City, United States.
Despite being deemed “unsinkable” , the collision buckled the hull, causing five of its compartments to flood—one more than the ship was designed to survive.
Only 20 lifeboats were aboard, which was not enough for the more than 2,200 passengers and crew.
Approximately 1,500 died making the incident one of the deadliest peacetime sinking of a single ship. At least 79 who died were born in Ireland.
A visitor attraction called Titanic Belfast opened in 2012 on the site of the former Harland & Wolff shipyard that contains more than 12,000 square metres (130,000 sq ft) of floor space that tells the stories of the Titanic.
I noticed in some of the murals musical elements which perhaps give tribute to the musicians of the Titanic.
The musicians in James Cameron’s 1997 film Titanic represent the real-life eight-member band who heroically played to calm passengers for as long as they possibly could as the ship sank. All of the members perished.
The actual band members are famously depicted playing “Nearer, My God, to Thee” during the ship’s final moments.
The 1912 sinking of the RMS Titanic exposed severe gaps in maritime safety that led to the creation of the International Convention for the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) in 1914.
It is the most critical international maritime treaty concerning the safety of merchant ships with its primary objective of establishing minimum global standards for the construction, equipment, and operation of vessels to protect the lives of passengers and crew:
(a ) SOLAS mandated that all passenger ships carry enough lifeboats for everyone on board, a direct response to the Titanic having only enough space for roughly half its passengers.
(b) SOLAS introduced a requirement for 24-hour radio watches.
(c ) SOLAS required a group, now known as the International Ice Patrol, to monitor icebergs in the North Atlantic.
(d) Regulations for taller watertight bulkheads and better hull designs were introduced to prevent ships from sinking rapidly after damage.
(f) SOLAS made passenger ship crew training and lifeboat drills mandatory
In the Philippines, the collision on April 22, 1980 between M/V Don Juan with the oil tanker M/T Vector off the Tablas Strait in Mindoro was described as “Asia’s Titanic” and “world’s worst peacetime maritime disaster” surpassing the sinking of the Titanic 75 years earlier.
The vessel left Manila for Bacolod at 1:00 p.m. on April 22, 1980, where most passengers were vacationers, students coming home after graduation or a break in big schools in Manila like the University of the Philippines, many belonging to families of wealthy and illustrious Negrenses.
At about 10:30 p.m., the M/V Don Juan collided off the Tablas Strait in Mindoro with the oil tanker M/T Vector. The collision brought forth an inferno at sea with an estimate of about 4,386 casualties. There are only 26 survivors.
The vessel was severely overcrowded, with at least 2,000 passengers not listed on the manifest. It has also been claimed that the ship did not have a radio and that the life jackets were locked away.
In Negros Navigation Co., Inc., vs. Miranda and De la Victoria (GR. No. 110398 November 7, 1997), the Supreme Court found Negros Navigation negligent in tolerating the playing of mahjong by the ship captain and other crew members while on board the ship. The captain and the crew failed to take steps to prevent the collision or at least delay the sinking of the boat and supervise the abandoning of the ship.
MT Vector was found unseaworthy and that its negligence was the root cause of the tragedy. The owner of the tanker was ordered to indemnify and reimburse Sulpicio Lines for damages. (Atty. Dennis R. Gorecho is the junior partner who heads the Seafarers’ Division of the Sapalo Velez Bundang Bulilan Law Offices. For comments, e-mail info@sapalovelez.com, or call 0908-8665786.)
