Relatives of Faina Valiullina, a victim of cruise ship sinking, cry during her funeral outside Kazan, on the Volga River, in central Russia, Tuesday, July 12, 2011. Russia is observing a day of mourning for victims of a cruise vessel that sank while crowded with holiday-makers on July 10. Divers are still searching for 15 missing bodies. (AP Photo/Misha Japaridze)
The rain was light. The winds were moderate, And the waves were only one meter high.
Russia’s shipping tragedy last week was a perfect storm — of human error.
The Volga riverboat ‘Bulgaria’ was designed to carry 140 people, but it was loaded with 208. Most of the 59 children seem to have been waved on board without tickets. Almost two thirds had the same birth date: Dec. 30, 1999.
Launched shortly after Stalin died and last overhauled in 1980, the 56-year-old ‘Bulgaria’ was no longer licensed to carry passengers.
But, oddly, on June 15, a Russian river inspector signed off on its seaworthiness.
One of its two engines, on the port side, was broken. The ship listed to starboard, possibly because all the diesel fuel had been pumped into starboard tanks. At the dock Sunday morning, some passengers and crew told the captain, Alexander Ostrovsky, that the ‘Bulgaria’ should not sail.
Out on the Volga, it was a sweltering hot Sunday afternoon for passengers in a vessel constructed before air conditioning. To cool off, passengers and crew opened all the portholes in the low slung river boat.
Once in the middle of the Volga, Europe’s largest river, the captain decided to turn his listing boat. A wave caught it broadside.
With party music still blasting from loudspeakers, the ‘Bulgaria’ sank in three minutes. For the next 90 minutes, dozens of survivors floundered in a diesel slick, three kilometers from shore.
Although there were cases of heroism, the captains of two passing cargo boats are now under investigation for not stopping to rescue drowning passengers. Of the passengers, 80 percent of the men, 32 percent of the children, and 26 percent of the women survived. The captain, his wife, and their children drowned.
This weekend, cranes are to start lifting the cruise ship off the river bottom.
The dark tragedy of the ‘Bulgaria,’ with 129 dead or missing, evokes the kind of tale I would hear from the upper reaches of the Congo when I worked in Africa in the 1980s, or of the Amazon when I worked in South America in the 1990s.
Unfortunately, it is now emblematic of transport in post-Soviet Russia.
Twenty years ago, when communism collapsed, state owned planes and boats were up for grabs. Their new owners used them, until they sank or crashed.
Of the 120 cruise ships now plying the rivers of European Russia, none was launched after 1985, the twilight years of the Soviet Union. The majority, 70 ships, were launched over 40 years ago.
Last year, ‘Novaya Gazeta’ newspaper reported that 2,300 sunken boats and barges now dot the bottom of the Volga. About half were scuttled by their owners since 2007.
When Russia’s President Dmitry Medvedev demanded that “old rust tubs” no longer ply the nation’s waters, Vladimir Varfolomeyev, an editor at Ekho Moskvy radio station, retorted in his blog: “The old tub is our entire state.”
“Poorly controlled, despite the notorious power vertical, it’s thoroughly rotten and therefore allows for operation of these leaky washtubs,” he wrote.
Leaky washtubs on the waters. Flying coffins in the skies.
An AN-24 passenger plane, owned by the Angara Airlines, floats after a hard landing on Siberia's Ob river on July 11, 2011. The aging Antonov had 37 people onboard. Seven were killed, and 31 survived. REUTERS/tv2.tomsk.ru/
On Monday, while divers were fishing bodies out of the ‘Bulgaria,’, an aging Soviet plane flying over Siberia developed engine trouble. At 6,000 meters altitude, the left engine of an Antonov-24 operated by Angara Airlines, burst into flames. The pilot managed to bring it down for a hard belly landing on the Ob River. Seven people died, but 31 survived.
Indeed, Russians now live in a state of aviation segregation.
American Boeings or European Airbuses ply most of Russia’s international routes, or routes within European Russia.
But most flights in Siberia and the Far East are handled with old Soviet-made Antonovs, Yaks and some Tupolevs. For these far flung communities, the alternative can literally be: paddle your canoe.
Air company managers seem to fly the planes until they crash – and then blame pilot error for crashes. It is simplest and cheapest to blame the dead.
So far about 10 percent of the Antonov 24s have been lost in crashes since production stopped in 1979.
Rotting planes and sinking boats are part of a wider collapse of manufacturing that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union. Today, Russia, the world’s largest country, no longer makes the river boats or passenger jets needed to span its vast distances.
Follow James Brooke on Twitter: @VOA_Moscow