Original subtitles

NARRATOR: Today our oceans are ruled by a race of giants.

Megaships.

Up to a third of a mile long.

SCOTT: It's just absolutely gigantic.

NARRATOR: But when leviathans die.

CHRISTOPH: What destroyed this huge giant?

NARRATOR: They take their secrets to the deep.

Lost inside the most awe-inspiring shipwrecks

on the planet.

Imagine if we could empty the oceans,

letting the water drain away

to reveal the secrets of the sea floor.

Now we can.

Using accurate data and astonishing technology

to bring light once again to a lost world.

Why did Britannic, sister ship to the Titanic,

plunge to the bottom of the seas?

How did one simple mistake send a super-tanker to her death?

CHRISTOPH: It was the worst oil spill in history.

NARRATOR: And can a ghostly voice help solve

a deadly megaship mystery?

[theme music plays].

NARRATOR: Few of us see it.

But we all depend upon it.

A vast global network of Megaships.

LARRIE: Ocean shipping is the lifeblood of the world economy today.

Over 90% of world trade is carried on the water.

NARRATOR: Over the last 40 years,

carrying capacity has tripled, to almost 2 billion tons.

Ship builders are locked into a race.

Bigger ships mean cheaper transport costs,

and lower prices for consumers.

JAMES: In ship building there's always been this

desire to build bigger,

and the ships of today are giants of the sea.

NARRATOR: A century ago, ocean giants don't carry cargo.

They carry passengers.

In the golden age of the ocean liner.

And the biggest of them all is the Titanic.

When she tragically sinks in 1912,

improvements are made to her sister ship,

the Britannic,

launched just two years later.

She's the same length as Titanic, but 18 inches wider.

However, before Britannic can carry a single paying passenger,

World War I begins.

And she is turned into a vast, floating hospital.

882 feet long.

Weighing 53,000 tons,

and with enough beds for 3,300 patients.

After five successful voyages,

she sets out for the

battlefields of the eastern Mediterranean.

Steaming towards the British naval base at Mudros,

traveling in the Kea channel.

It's a clear day, with no enemy in sight.

But shortly after 8am...

she sinks in just under an hour.

30 people die, but over 1,000 are rescued.

The contradictory stories of the survivors begin

a century of controversy.

JAMES: When Britannic was lost the key questions were,

had it been torpedoed?

Or had it been sunk by mines?

NARRATOR: A mine is a tragic accident of war.

A torpedo, aimed at a clearly marked hospital ship,

is a war crime.

SIMON: There was always a mystery about what really

happened to the Britannic.

NARRATOR: Historian, Simon Mills believes hard evidence

may lie in the waters, off Kea Island,

in Greece 400 feet down.

SIMON: It really was a case of finding out

what the weapon was.

Trying to find physical evidence on the seabed

of what actually sank the Britannic.

SCOTT: It's a deep dive, it's a tough dive,

but really excited about getting in the water.

NARRATOR: Below the surface: a lost world,

and a wreck of startling proportions.

SCOTT: And as you look up you have this,

this beautiful deep blue that silhouettes the whole wreck.

It takes your breath away it really does.

NARRATOR: Divers only ever see a small fraction

of this lost giant.

SIMON: It's absolutely massive.

She's the largest liner on the seabed and as a result um,

when you're diving on her you just cannot see everything.

NARRATOR: But now, we can drain away the Mediterranean

and see Britannic in full.

First, the bridge.

Then, the bow, lying on its side.

And almost 1,000 feet away: three massive propellers,

each as big as a house, and all still in position.

The largest ship of her age, bigger than any cathedral.

SCOTT: It's just on a different scale.

It, it's just absolutely gigantic.

NARRATOR: Gigantic and perfectly preserved.

SIMON: You can compare it to the Titanic,

which is broken in half, twisted, mangled and, uh,

in a terrible condition really.

Whereas Britannic you'll actually find that everything

is practically as it was on the day she sank.

OWEN: Outstanding, absolutely outstanding!

NARRATOR: So what really sank her?

Looking for leads, Simon turns to newspaper reports.

SIMON: She was very, very big headlines

for several weeks after.

The Germans allegedly had torpedoed an innocent

British hospital ship.

NARRATOR: Two eyewitness accounts speak of a deliberate

attack, with torpedo tracks spotted in the water moments

before the explosion.

In 1916, attacking a hospital ship runs against

all accepted rules of war.

So is this really the site of a war crime?

The drained wreck site reveals evidence

no diver could ever see.

Face down on the ocean floor,

a deformed section of the ship's hull,

probably 40 feet long and eight feet wide,

where steel plates are bent inwards.

Clear evidence of a devastating explosion

on the outside of the ship.

What weapon could create this type of blast damage?

Simon is determined to hunt down physical evidence.

Using a submersible, he scours the seafloor:

focusing on a spot half a mile from the wreck site,

the area where the explosion was reported.

For hours, he sees nothing except sand and rocks.

No sign of torpedo parts or fragments.

But the drained landscape does reveal something.

It's heavily encrusted but identifiable as a small piece

of metal three feet across.

SIMON: It looks like a cracked eggshell.

NARRATOR: The object is exactly the shape and size

of the casing of an E-type sea-mine:

A standard German device from World War I,

and it's lying close to the spot where

the explosion was reported over 100 years ago.

SIMON: When you see finally see it there in front of your

own eyes you think yea, fabulous, we've done it.

Now we finally have the physical evidence.

NARRATOR: The mine fragments end a century of controversy.

It's irrefutable evidence that eye-witnesses were confused

and that Britannic was not deliberately targeted by a

German submarine.

In fact, some reports of a torpedo turn out to be nothing

more than wartime propaganda.

SIMON: No U-boats were reported to be active in this

area on the day that the Britannic was sank.

To be absolutely categoric, she was sunk by a mine.

NARRATOR: With the key evidence from the drained

wreck it is now possible to reconstruct Britannic's

final, fatal moments.

She steams through the Kea Channel.

On her way to pick up thousands of injured soldiers.

She strikes the mine

probably laid three weeks earlier by a German U-boat.

SIMON: There's a huge massive bang,

the ship shook literally for about 30 seconds.

NARRATOR: The explosion smashes in the starboard side,

water floods into a boiler room.

JAMES: With so much of the hull opened to the ocean,

Britannic was doomed.

NARRATOR: The damage is far more extensive than that which

sank the Titanic and Britannic is quickly overwhelmed.

Another boiler room floods.

And another, until the massive ship reaches its buoyancy limit,

sealing its fate.

It takes just 55 minutes from explosion to sinking.

The rapid loss of Britannic, and the Titanic before her,

alarms the world's ship designers.

For the first time international shipping standards come into force.

LARRIE: It did spur the international community into action.

NARRATOR: The new laws are intended to make all ships

harder to sink.

And that's never been more important.

In the decades after Britannic,

the era of transatlantic air travel dawns,

and the number of ocean liners declines.

But the number of giant ships doesn't fall.

There are new cargoes.

One above all: Oil.

The world's appetite for Arabia's black gold is insatiable.

Moving it from the Gulf to Europe,

America and Asia is a lucrative business and

requires a new kind of ship: the supertanker.

Up to a quarter of a mile in length,

these leviathans can carry

nearly half a million tons of crude.

It's vital they're built to be safer than

any previous cargo ship.

But are they?

CHRISTOPH: It was the worst oil spill in history.

NARRATOR: The 1,100 feet long oil supertanker, Amoco Cadiz,

is in the English Channel,

loaded with 1.6 million barrels of crude oil.

The colossal ship is traveling from the Persian Gulf

to Rotterdam when off the coast of Brittany, France,

she hits heavy seas, and sinks.

Spilling her entire load

across the coast of north western France.

JAMES: Amico Cadiz is the world's first great

super tanker shipwreck disaster.

What makes it important is it's not loss of human life

it's the amount of oil on a coastline.

The images of oil-covered birds flashed around the planet.

NARRATOR: The clean-up alone costs the oil company

$200 million.

But how did an almost new supertanker

simply break apart?

Two miles off the coast of Brittany an expedition is underway.

Led by diver Christoph Gerigk.

CHRISTOPH: We are here to investigate the wreck.

We are trying to work out what happened.

NARRATOR: While Christoph searches underwater,

a survey team scans the seabed with side-scan sonar,

for the very first time.

KYLE: The Amoco Cadiz is a really big ship,

it's never been scanned before,

so we're gonna be the first people to actually see it.

We can just keep going straight.

NARRATOR: After an hour they get a hit, and it's a big one.

KYLE: Right here, that's the wreck right there,

that's the stern.

CREW MAN: It's huge! That is really huge.

It's massive.

KYLE: It is a big ship.

CREW MAN: It's amazing, that's amazing.

NARRATOR: The sonar data offers a tantalizing top-down

image of a large section of the hull.

Using the scan as a guide

Christoph's team focuses on an area 115 feet down.

CHRISTOPH: It's an exciting experience to dive the Amoco

because it's just so huge.

It is a big wreck, it's maybe the biggest wreck in the world.

You feel really small compared to it.

Inside the tanker is like in a big cave.

You never know where it ends.

NARRATOR: Underwater footage offers glimpses of this giant.

Now we can do better.

And slowly a lost behemoth, emerges into daylight.

First, the stern.

220 feet long by 160 feet wide.

Then, one of the five massive oil tanks.

Finally, the bow, disappearing into the sand.

CHRISTOPH: It's a landscape of destruction and violence.

The wreck is completely ripped apart, like this.

NARRATOR: So how was such a huge ship torn to shreds?

The drained wreck provides a key piece of evidence.

In one of her compartments:

what appears to be a hairline crack

and there's more.

All across the hull, larger sections, cracked open.

A closer look reveals why,

a metal skin only an inch and a half thick,

a skin that once encased over 200,000 tons of oil.

CHRISTOPH: To me it's very surprising that such a big

ship has such a thin hull.

NARRATOR: The Amoco Cadiz may be nearly as big as the

Empire State Building, but her hull is paper thin.

CHRISTOPH: It's a crack which destroyed this huge giant.

NARRATOR: Now, based in part on the evidence from the

drained wreck, we can reconstruct exactly how

the Amoco Cadiz met her end.

The enormous tanker hits a force 10 gale,

with winds of 60 miles per hour

and waves up to 40 feet high.

A powerful wave slams into the rudder,

smashing apart the steering gear,

making the 1,100 foot long ship impossible to control.

Over the next 12 hours,

the Amoco Cadiz is pushed ever closer to Brittany:

notorious for its jagged rocky coastline.

Finally, at 9:04 in the evening

the inevitable happens.

One tear, and another,

is all it takes to rupture the weak single-hulled ship

like an eggshell hitting a wall.

There are no human casualties.

All 44 men aboard are rescued by helicopter.

But a region of France famous for its wildlife and natural beauty

is drenched in 220,000 tons of oil.

CHRISTOPH: It was the worst oil spill ever.

It was the worst oil spill in history.

NARRATOR: The Amoco Cadiz changes the way the world sees giant ships.

CHRISTOPH: In the aftermath of the disaster and other

disasters of the same kind there was a new law which

created the obligation for a double-hull construction.

NARRATOR: In theory, a double-skinned hull should be

able to withstand the worst the sea can throw at it.

But as the global economy continues to expand,

demand for ever-bigger vessels grows unabated,

putting new strains on the work horses of international trade:

the bulk carrier.

These giants carry almost half of the world's cargo,

shunting raw materials

from one side of the planet to the other.

The MV Derbyshire is one of this new generation of tough

super ships, almost 1,000 feet long with a state-of-the-art

double-hull and nine massive holds,

she can pack in over 160,000 tons of cargo.

Derbyshire is a true colossus, with a range of 10,000 miles.

In July 1980, she leaves Canada laden with iron ore,

heading for Japan.

Then on September the 9th,

she suddenly disappears without a trace.

Without even a mayday call.

And no sign of the 42 men and two women on board.

Their families demand answers.

DAVID: It was the ultimate shipping mystery,

one minute it's there and the next minute it's gone.

NARRATOR: Shipwreck hunter David Mearns is looking for

a lost giant.

The MV Derbyshire.

DAVID: It was a ship lost without a trace.

[radio chatter].

DAVID: Something catastrophic happened to this ship,

and we had to bring back the evidence.

NARRATOR: It won't be easy.

With no mayday message Mearns has no reliable fix

on Derbyshire's final position.

And the China sea is almost two and a half miles deep here.

DAVID: Everybody talks about the needle in a haystack.

Well first off you need to know where the haystack is.

NARRATOR: The only hint, reports of oil slicks in the

days after the ship went missing.

DAVID: That's a clue to where the ship was lost.

Heading, Two Zero, beautiful, right down the line.

NARRATOR: Using sonar and gut instinct,

Mearns scans the area for days.

Without success.

Finally, on day three...

DAVID: Okay, we've got a large target.

NARRATOR: They spot something.

DAVID: We see this great big structure in front of us,

and we're moving in to it, very very slowly.

And we're counting down to this object, 50 meters,

40 meters, 30 and 20

and then finally at about 10 meters

out of the gloom comes this great big piece of steel

which was the side of the Derbyshire.

And that was it, we had found it.

This is the grave site for 44 people.

NARRATOR: The underwater cameras pick out

pieces of twisted metal.

Now, as the deep ocean drains away we can reveal

the full scale of this lost giant,

for the first time in nearly 40 years.

A huge bow 160 feet by 140 feet

upright on the seafloor,

broken off like a discarded toy.

Nearby, the cover of one of the ship's holds.

Then, behind the bow, something totally unexpected.

The rest of the ship, obliterated.

Reduced to tiny pieces and

spread out over half a square mile.

DAVID: It's total utter destruction.

We're not talking just hundreds of pieces;

we're talking thousands of pieces.

We were just shocked.

NARRATOR: How could a modern ship,

engineered for safety and with a new double skinned hull,

end its life like this?

DAVID: The real question was, you know not that it was

broken, but what caused the ship to sink?

NARRATOR: Three years later, another expedition to the

wreck site looks for answers.

Lead engineer is Andy Bowen.

ANDY: For us the first instinct when we saw the

debris on the sea floor was just awe, really.

The immensity of the destruction was really a

mind-blowing thing to, to witness first hand.

How a ship could be so completely destroyed.

NARRATOR: New data provides a telling clue.

All around the bow, there are air vents.

Closer inspection shows they're open.

Their covers ripped away.

Water could have entered here,

flooding this section of the ship.

And if the bow was flooded,

the whole vessel would become increasingly vulnerable,

dragging her down lower and lower into the sea.

This may explain why she sank, but not why she's

in fragments on the sea floor.

And when Andy looks closely at pieces of the fragmented

vessel, he makes a remarkable discovery.

All along the edges, tiny, brittle fracture patterns.

Evidence that an explosive force has blasted the hull apart.

Could there be some kind of design flaw with the

Derbyshire's strengthened hull?

The answer lies in the strange effects of the sea on a

sinking double-hulled ship.

When a ship sinks, at around 200 feet down the pressure is

seven times greater than it is at the surface.

Most ships implode as they pass this critical point.

But a double hulled ship behaves differently.

As it crushes down, air trapped inside the empty

spaces and voids is violently compressed.

Pressure builds until it's strong enough to blow the

hull apart with a force equivalent to 16 tons of TNT.

[explosion].

It's a phenomenon known as implosion-explosion and

takes only a matter of seconds.

DAVID: It's like taking a balloon and popping it.

NARRATOR: Only this effect can explain the Derbyshire's

scatter pattern on the seabed.

Yet it doesn't explain why she sinks so quickly.

However, using all the evidence,

it's now possible to recreate the Derbyshire's exact fate,

in frightening detail.

NARRATOR: The 960 foot long cargo ship, MV Derbyshire,

is fully laden, and headed for trouble.

There's a typhoon in the area, which suddenly changes

direction to put the Derbyshire in its path.

Waves repeatedly crash onto the deck.

Knocking the ventilator covers off the front of the ship.

Sea water slowly fills a storage area inside the bow,

gradually tilting the whole vessel nose down

into the stormy seas.

DAVID: At this point in time the bow is full,

and waves are rolling up the deck of the ship.

NARRATOR: Through the night, the ship is dragged lower and

lower into the water, but in the chaos of the storm

the crew doesn't notice.

DAVID: Then total disaster struck.

NARRATOR: A massive rogue wave,

possibly as high as 90 feet smashes in the hatch cover of

hold number one,

filling the hold with thousands of tons of water.

With this extra weight,

the Derbyshire is now sinking fast.

As she goes down, the hatch covers of her other holds are

exposed to the raw power of the sea.

[explosion].

LARRIE: It was a lot like an underwater bomb going off.

NARRATOR: Hold number one completely floods,

the others follow swiftly in a deadly domino effect.

DAVID: The vessel is being filled with water and being

pulled down by the bow.

NARRATOR: In just two minutes she is gone.

LARRIE: The crew had no time to react,

no time to send out a mayday.

NARRATOR: There are no survivors,

and no sign that any lifeboat is ever launched.

This disaster helps spur even tougher action to regulate

cargo ship construction.

Stronger air vents on bulk carriers,

along with alarms to warn if they're open.

DAVID: Ultimately that has really helped in terms of

preventing further accidents.

LARRIE: Since those rules came into effect,

the rate of loss of bulk carriers has been cut

effectively in half.

NARRATOR: And safety has never been more vital.

The decades after the Derbyshire tragedy,

witness the most important revolution in shipping for

centuries: Containerization.

JAMES: Container ships changed the world.

NARRATOR: These ships are a crucial cog in globalization:

a massive increase in international trade links.

Today, the biggest container ships can carry

over 20,000 standardized containers.

These vast floating warehouses can be controlled by fewer

than 30 people and use high technology to plot

the safest and most fuel-efficient routes.

But they're not infallible.

One of the latest container ships,

the El Faro is carrying almost 400 containers

along with 300 cars and trailers

from Jacksonville, Florida, to Puerto Rico.

In suddenly menacing seas, she runs into trouble.

Her Captain, Michael Davidson, uses a satellite phone to make

a desperate call for help.

NARRATOR: But before he even gets a chance to explain

what's happening, his 800 foot long megaship

vanishes off the map.

Along with all 33 people on board.

JAMES: El Faro is the greatest marine tragedy to hit the

United States in decades.

NARRATOR: The disaster shows that even the most advanced,

modern ships can sometimes fail.

NTSB investigator, Eric Stolzenberg is on mission

to find out why.

ERIC: What happened to the El Faro was a mystery.

We didn't have any witnesses; we didn't have the evidence

because it was lost on the seafloor.

NARRATOR: Eric locates the wreck using its last known GPS position:

it's in very deep water: 3 miles down.

Sonar images suggest that the debris is spread across an

area of 19 million square feet.

Andy Bowen, once again the lead engineer,

is eager to retrieve the ship's 'VDR' or Voyage Data Recorder.

ANDY: A voyage data recorder is essentially a black box,

similar to what would be in an aircraft and so it records a

variety of data streams, so conversations,

telephone calls, radio calls.

NARRATOR: Any data recorded there could be key to

understanding what went wrong with the El Faro.

First the team needs to confirm the wreck's identity.

They use a camera-mounted unmanned vehicle.

As it descends it begins to pick up ghostly images.

Twisted metal and then,

unmistakable evidence.

Yet only as the waters recede can the full scale of this

gigantic cargo ship become clear.

A true leviathan of the deep, 800 feet long,

standing upright as if still in harbor.

Surrounded by dozens of containers.

A scene of utter devastation.

ANDY: It was a stunning sight.

Almost a blast zone of disturbed sea floor.

NARRATOR: Working with the US navy, they immediately

start searching for the VDR 'black box',

ordinarily attached to the ship's communications mast.

But the mast has been ripped away.

And in a debris field as vast as this,

finding it won't be easy.

ERIC: The VDR is only about the size of a basketball,

7 inches by 8 inches, it's a small cylinder.

NARRATOR: Can the team track it down,

and use its data to understand what happened here?

NARRATOR: A team of investigators is painstakingly

scanning the huge wreck site of the El Faro.

They're looking for its VDR, the Voyage Data Recorder,

a tiny, basketball-sized object that could explain

why it sank.

ERIC: Kinda like a needle in a haystack on the bottom.

NARRATOR: After five days, with search-time running out

they spot something glinting in the ROV's lights.

ERIC: It was just enough to catch somebody's eyes and so

we drove in that direction.

NARRATOR: It's a third of a mile from where it should be.

The water's murky, and the ROV moves slowly.

But as soon as the object comes into view, it's clear,

this is the VDR.

The light is from its reflective tape shining back

at the cameras.

ANDY: There was a tremendous relief for everybody because

that was a major, major objective.

NARRATOR: After a year on the seabed,

does it still contain its vital data?

The investigators start by replaying the voice recordings.

ERIC: Yeah, it was difficult to listen to the VDR.

ERIC: We know how it ends, but they don't.

NARRATOR: The VDR offers first hand evidence but

that's not all.

It also contains information on the ship's final position

and movements.

Showing that shortly before she sinks,

the El Faro is flooding in hold number 3.

NARRATOR: Going back to the drained wreck reveals

something hidden in plain sight.

All along one of the upper decks:

large open loading areas.

It's common practice to leave them open like this because

the crew expect that any water that enters here

will quickly drain away.

But then the VDR reveals a critical clue.

NARRATOR: A scuttle is a hatch often located between decks.

Looking at a plan of El Faro shows that if she listed

severely in the hurricane, thousands of tons of water can

flow in through this point, flooding her lower decks.

Cars in the hold break free, and strike water inlet pipes,

increasing the flooding.

Data from the VDR clinches it:

the El Faro is listing as much as 18 degrees

amid hurricane force winds and mountainous waves.

These openings are the chink in this giant's armor.

Immediately the ship is flooded, she becomes unstable,

and just 20 minutes later, loses all power.

ERIC: The Captain does ring an "abandon ship".

NARRATOR: But it's too late.

The El Faro, and all her crew, are gone.

ANDY: Till the very end it was incredible bravery.

NARRATOR: The tragedy shows that even the most modern ships

aren't immune to the effects of nature at its wildest.

In the meantime, the world's sea-lanes get ever more

crowded, and the ships plying them ever bigger.

LARRIE: At every stage where we've built larger and larger ships,

we ask ourselves the question:

How much bigger can we get?

And the truth is nobody really knows how big we can go.

NARRATOR: Cargo ships are today reaching epic proportions,

the biggest in the world is the OOCL Hong Kong

at over 1300 feet long.

Even giant passenger ships have re-emerged.

Cruise liners like the Symphony of the Seas

now carry over 6,000 people.

The technology keeping these maritime giants safe

continues to improve.

But however well they are built and commanded,

the ocean giants of the future will always have to face,

the uncontrollable power of the ocean.

Captioned by Cotter Captioning Services.