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Video of the sunken Ehime Maru
A Tribute to the Missing
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By Tanya Bricking
Advertiser Staff Writer
Despite political pressure from the Japanese government and the families of those lost at sea, the U.S. Navy isn’t ready to commit to raising the Ehime Maru.
And an expert said yesterday that even if it remains 2,003 feet underwater, the same techniques that helped deep-sea explorer Robert Ballard examine the wrecked Titanic could be used to determine what happened to the 174-foot Japanese fisheries training vessel after it was rammed by a U.S. Navy submarine.
The Ehime Maru was carrying high school students, instructors and crew on a research trip when the USS Greeneville ran into it 10 days ago. Twenty-six people were rescued, but nine are missing and presumed dead. Japanese families and officials remain adamant that the ship needs to be brought to the surface and the bodies found.
"We met with the families of the missing yesterday, and the families gave us their request to forward to the U.S. government — to bring the ship up," said Eisei Ito, a foreign affairs leader in the Democratic Party of Japan and a member of the upper house of Parliament. "That is something the families are requesting the most, and they said they want the U.S. government to promise to bring the ship up."
So far, the Navy isn’t making any promises. Officials won’t say much about how they might raise the ship, and say they are concentrating on examining the wreckage.
Titanic search offers clues
Looking at the wreckage with sophisticated deep-sea devices could be enough to determine what happened and whether any bodies remain inside, said Gene Carl Feldman, an oceanographer at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland.
The Navy also could learn from Ballard’s submersibles, he said.
"What Ballard did with the Titanic was go down with Jason Jr., a submersible the size of a big microwave," said Feldman, who has worked with Ballard and created an Internet site (www.jason.org) as part of a foundation to teach children about sea exploration.
Smaller than the Navy’s Scorpio II, which is being used this week to examine the Ehime Maru, technology used in the Titanic research effort was small enough to fit into openings, open doors and cut and grab things.
"They parked on the deck by the grand stairway and sent Jason Jr. down four levels," Feldman said. "That would be the most likely way to do it."
But he doubts that remote-operated submersibles would be used to bring up bodies, if any are found.
"It would be gruesome," he said. "That brings on nightmares just thinking about it. I think it would probably be better just to declare it a memorial site, a grave site like the Arizona Memorial," which serves as a tomb for the crewman who died on the battleship in waters off Pearl Harbor.
Wreckage deep under sea
The wreckage of the Ehime Maru is 10,000 feet shallower than the depth where the Titanic went down after striking an iceberg in the North Atlantic in 1912.
But it’s still about 753 feet deeper than the record deep-sea dive.
The wreckage is almost six times deeper than the Russian submarine Kursk that sank last year at 350 feet.
It is eight times as deep as the wreckage of the 1999 crash of Egypt Air Flight 990 and 16 times deeper than the 1996 Atlantic crash of TWA Flight 800. The same deep-sea submersible, called Deep Drone, employed now off Oahu now was used in the searches of those airplane crashes in the Atlantic Ocean.
Pulling the Japanese vessel to shore would be "unbelievably difficult," Feldman said. "I don’t know that they’ve even brought up a whole ship that deep. I don’t think they could bring it up by cable. I think the weight would be too much."
Some ships have been raised by sealing them and filling them with foam to get the water out and make them more buoyant, but raising a vessel from 2,003 feet is a daunting task, he said.
Navy relies on submersible
For the Navy, it’s too soon to talk about raising the Ehime Maru, said Lt. Phil Rosi of the Navy U.S. Pacific Fleet.
The Navy is relying on the Deep Drone submersible, controlled from the USS Salvor, to look around the exterior of the Ehime Maru. The Navy’s other deep submersible, the Scorpio II, was still under repair yesterday for a hydraulic problem.
The Scorpio found the Ehime Maru late Friday night and captured video images of the ship.
"The lift capability on the Scorpio is about 350 pounds if there’s something they feel the need to be brought up," Rosi said yesterday. "Whether or not they decide to bring anything up is premature. Right now, it’s just a data collection survey."
Advertiser staff writer Walter Wright contributed to this story.
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