Swedes Endure Heartache Over Ferry Disaster

Police were writing tickets, patrolling the streets and making arrests, but the Stockholm police department, like much of Sweden, was finding the heartache Thursday nearly too much to bear.

Sixty-eight employees of the police force were among the passengers aboard the ferryboat Estonia, which sank in the turbulent Baltic Sea early Wednesday in one of Europe’s worst maritime disasters. Five employees survived, but the others are among the more than 800 people still missing and presumed dead.

“It is like a whole generation has vanished,” said a teary-eyed Lotta Eriksson, who like the victims is a civilian employee of the department. “There is an enormous emptiness everywhere, in the canteen, in the corridors.”

The police employees, who were attending a union seminar aboard the Estonia, were among a handful of large groups from communities across Sweden that made up much of the passenger list. In a country where ferry cruises are a favorite national pastime, images of pajama-clad corpses being snatched from the sea have created a deep sense of agony not felt since the assassination of Prime Minister Olof Palme eight years ago.

“People are exhausted both physically and emotionally,” said Soren Carlsson, chief nurse at Stockholm’s Sodersjukhuset, a hospital where some of the 140 survivors have been treated. “There is sadness today. Maybe the anger comes tomorrow.”

In the central Swedish town of Jonkoping, anguished church officials were at a loss to explain why 15 evangelists returning from a Bible trip to Estonia were consumed by the sea. Six members of the group survived, but the loss was so great to the Pentecostal Church’s Bible school that officials expect to have to cancel the program.

“The headmaster and another teacher are among the missing,” said Bo-Eric Malmvall, a church board member who was comforting distraught relatives Thursday. “Hope is very small right now. The church has been open day and night, but we don’t have answers.”

The mood was equally melancholy in the eastern town of Norrkoping, where none of the 56 members of a retirement club have turned up alive. The club had organized one of its many getaway excursions, this time to the Estonian capital of Tallinn for some shopping and sightseeing. For about $120 each, members got meals, lodging and transportation for three days.

The sense of horror in the industrial town southwest of Stockholm was made worse by accounts Thursday of the panic aboard the sinking vessel. Some survivors hospitalized in Finland spoke of desperate efforts to get off the ship, with some frail and elderly passengers, knowing that they could not make it, giving up and dropping to the floor in tears.

“People here are seeing pictures in their minds of their relatives and friends trapped in the ferry at the bottom of the sea,” said Gert Forge, a psychiatric nurse at the Norrkoping senior citizen center. “The biggest problem here is that none of the 56 has been found.”

Finnish Coast Guard Capt. Raimo Tiilikainen, who is in charge of the rescue effort, said 65 bodies had been retrieved from the sea by late Thursday. Although accounts continue to vary on the number of people on board, authorities say there are as many as 800 still in the sunken boat or lost at sea.

Finnish forensic pathologist Antti Jaaskelainen said the job of identifying the bodies was under way, but the effort has been difficult because the victims were exposed for many hours to the cold seawater. Family members have been asked to provide photos, medical records and, in some cases, personal objects that might be used for DNA matching tests.

In Stockholm, owners of the ferry apologized for the disaster and said they were eagerly searching for one of the craft’s two captains, who was reported by Finnish authorities to have survived. Officials from Estline, the ferry’s part owners, said they have not been able to locate Estonian Capt. Ahvo Piht.

“I am sure he will be able to provide valuable information,” said Sten-Crister Forsberg, executive vice president of Nordstrom & Thulin, Estline’s Swedish parent company. “I can assure you, in that weather he was probably on the bridge.”

Forsberg said the cause of the sinking was still unknown, but he hinted that the investigation was focusing on eyewitness accounts of water flooding the large car deck. Although Forsberg insisted that the seals on the deck ramps were not faulty, he said the flooded deck was probably “the main cause of the accident.”

Per Forsskahl, managing director of the Finnish Ship Owners Assn., also said water leaking into the ship probably caused the accident, and he pointed an accusing finger at the crew.

“There must have been something wrong with the way the crew handled the situation,” he said.

Swedish and Finnish news reports have speculated that the Estonian crew was not up to the job, was hired on the cheap and may have contributed to problems because of inexperience and some language barriers. Estline officials said the Estonian crew members were qualified to run the vessel.

The magnitude of the disaster--and the level of exasperation--grew Thursday when the Finnish coast guard reported that the ferry had apparently been carrying 1,049 passengers and crew members, instead of 964, as it had previously said. But in Stockholm, Estline officials said 982 people were on board. There was even disagreement over who belonged on the passenger list.

Above flowers and candles left by grieving friends and relatives in Tallinn, a long tally of victims was taped to a ferry terminal wall. Among them was 26-year-old Kulli Tanava.

But Tanava had not been on the ferry. She had taken it two days earlier.

“No, I am not calling from the ship,” she told Tallinn’s KUKU radio Thursday. “I am alive and well.”

Murphy reported from Stockholm and Walsh from Turku, Finland. Times special correspondent Eva Tarm in Tallinn, Estonia, also contributed to this report.

Worst Ship Disasters

Some of the worst marine disasters this century:

* Feb. 16, 1993--Overcrowded ferry sinks between Jeremie and Port-au-Prince, Haiti, estimated 500 to 700 dead.

* Dec. 14, 1991--More than 460 passengers and crew die after a coral reef tears a hole in a ferry’s side near the port of Safaga, Egypt.

* Aug. 8, 1988--As many as 400 drown in India when a ferry capsizes in the Ganges River.

* Dec. 20, 1987--1,749 drown when the ferry Dona Paz collides with the tanker MT Victor in the Philippines.

* Jan. 27, 1981--580 killed when Indonesian passenger ship Tamponas II catches fire and sinks in Java Sea.

* Sept. 26, 1954--1,172 killed when Japanese ferry Toya Maru sinks in Tsugaru Strait, Japan.

* Dec. 3, 1948--3,920 die when the refugee ship Kiangya explodes and sinks near Shanghai.

* Nov. 1, 1948--A Chinese merchant ship with as many as 6,000 people aboard explodes and sinks off southern Manchuria, killing all aboard.

* April 14-15, 1912--1,503 are killed when British steamer Titanic hits iceberg in North Atlantic.

Source: Times wire reports