Capsizing of the Herald of Free Enterprise (1987)

On the evening of March 6, 1987, the Herald of Free Enterprise, a roll-on roll-off ferry of the Townsend Thoresen company, leaves the Belgian port of Zeebrugge for Dover with her bow door open. Water floods the vehicle deck, the ship rolls over in less than two minutes a few hundred meters from the mole, and 193 people die. The British inquiry places the immediate cause in the omission of the assistant bosun in charge of closing the door, asleep in his cabin, whom no one replaced or checked on. It goes higher up, above all: the company had no system to know whether the door was closed, its masters had asked in vain for an indicator light on the bridge, and contradictory operating instructions weighed on schedules. The inquiry speaks of a disease of sloppiness running through the company from top to bottom. That conclusion led the IMO to adopt the International Safety Management Code, the ISM Code, in 1993, made mandatory for ferries in 1998 and then for the rest of the fleet. The company's criminal responsibility, tried in London in 1990, ended without a conviction. For insurance, the loss is a total loss of the hull and a considerable passenger liability, covered by the hull policy and the protection and indemnity club. It established the idea that a management failure is shown in the shipowner's procedures, and that it can be read in underwriting.