WI: The MS Herald of Free Enterprise didn't happen

MS Herald of Free Enterprise was a roll-on/roll-off (RORO) ferry which capsized moments after leaving the Belgian port of Zeebrugge on the night of 6 March 1987, killing 193 passengers and crew.

The modern 8-deck car and passenger ferry, owned by Townsend Thoresen, had been designed for rapid loading and unloading on the competitive cross-channel route, and there were no watertight compartments. When the ship left harbour with its bow-door open, the sea immediately flooded the decks, and within minutes it was lying on its side in shallow water.

Although the immediate cause of the sinking was found to be negligence by the assistant boatswain, who was asleep in his cabin when he should have been closing the bow-door, the official inquiry placed more blame on his supervisors and a general culture of poor communication in Townsend Thoresen.

The vessel was salvaged and put up for sale, and on September 30, 1987, was sold to Naviera SA Kingstown, and was renamed Flushing Range. Then on March 22, 1988, she was taken to Taiwan to be broken up.

Since the disaster, improvements have been made to the design of RORO vessels, with watertight ramps, indicators showing the position of the bow-doors, and the banning of undivided decks.

In the IOTL timeline, it was killed all 193 passengers and crew, in the ITTL timeline, it survived, to avoid many killing passengers and crew.
 
A ro/ro ferry sinking is inevitable because of flaws inherent in the design, but the accident need not have been similar to MS Herald of Free Enterprise in every detail. Specifically, the Herald capsized in shallow water, during the day, a few minutes after leaving port. That's close to the best case scenario for a maritime disaster. On Herald, 193 of 539 passengers and crew perished, or 36%. When MV Estonia sank in 1994, 853 of 989 passengers and crew died, or 86%. The Estonia capsized and sank at night in the frigid Baltic; arguably that's close to the worst case scenario for a maritime disaster, at least in peacetime.

If Herald had been loaded to capacity (1400 passengers, 80 crew) and 36% of those people died, that's 533 lives. If it were fully loaded and it sank at night in the North Sea (adjusting its route a bit) with an Estonia-like death toll, that's 1272 lives lost. A slightly larger, Estonia-sized ship, fully loaded with 2000 passengers and 186 crew, with a 14% survival rate, is 1880 lives lost, greater than Titanic.

What I mean by all this is that there has to be a major accident that leads to the safety improvements seen after Herald of Free Enterprise IOTL. Some ro/ro ferry must sink. But that sinking could have been much more costly in terms of lives than Herald was for us.
 
But Ro-ro ferries operate in the Scottish islands without incident. And the seas are stormier...I used to be a frequent traveller on them
 
But Ro-ro ferries operate in the Scottish islands without incident. And the seas are stormier...I used to be a frequent traveller on them
Ro-Ro ferries operate all over the place without incident, until they have an incident, I guess the point is that the design has compromises to work, and that sooner or later those flaws would be highlighted and changed, just as the Estonia and the Herald both led to changes.
 
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