Rather than cut engines, assess the damage and look for ways to assist, the Crystal quickly resumed its former course, steaming toward Tokyo harbor for a half-hour before suddenly executing a U-turn and returning to the crash site — as if the ship’s crew had belatedly realized what had happened.
Investigators have spent the past week surveying the damage, reviewing logs, recovering electronic records — a “black box” aboard the Crystal and stored radar data from the Fitzgerald — and interviewing crew members. There should also be an audio recording from the bridge of the destroyer, like the harrowing tape of a 2012 collision between a different destroyer, the Porter, and an oil tanker, in which no one was injured.
Under strict orders not to talk about what they saw that night, the crew of the Fitzgerald is mostly keeping its counsel while grieving the loss of its shipmates. But one sailor, contacted via social media, offered what may endure as an epitaph for the accident.
“All I can say is,” the sailor wrote to The New York Times, “somebody wasn’t paying attention.”
On Friday, Rear Adm. Brian Fort, a veteran warship commander, was ordered to lead the Navy’s main investigation of the collision. The multiple investigations now underway — two by the Navy, one by the United States Coast Guard, others by the Japanese Coast Guard and the Crystal’s insurers — will probably provide answers. But even if the Crystal crew was asleep, Navy veterans say the far more maneuverable Fitzgerald will likely bear much of the blame.
“This is the kind of thing the Navy is brutally honest about,” said Bryan McGrath, who commanded a destroyer in the Atlantic from 2004 to 2006. “To the extent that the Fitzgerald did anything wrong, we’ll find out all about it, and there will be consequences.”
The two ships now sit in ports a short drive apart on the coast south of Tokyo, the 9,000-ton, $1.5 billion Fitzgerald at Yokosuka naval base, its home port, and the 29,000-ton Crystal at Yokohama.
The Fitzgerald has a section of its starboard side caved in, where the Crystal smashed directly into Commander Benson’s stateroom, tearing it open and leaving him injured. Sailors had to bend back the door of his cabin to free him and get him inside the ship, the United States Naval Institute News reported. Beneath the water line, the container ship’s flared bow also tore a large gash in the destroyer’s hull, officials said.
As seawater poured in, some 116 crew members were asleep in two flooded berthing rooms. The ship’s radio room was damaged and much of its communications gear ruined or left without power. Sailors fought the flooding for an hour before sending out distress calls, the institute said.
The bodies of the seven men who died were recovered by divers from flooded spaces sealed off to keep the ship from foundering, a wrenching decision by officers in the chaotic aftermath of the crash.
There are many signs that the Fitzgerald had almost no warning of the approaching collision: the fact that the captain was in his cabin and that no shipwide alarm had rousted sailors from their bunks. “As to how much warning they had, I don’t know,” said Vice Adm. Joseph Aucoin, commander of the Seventh Fleet, at a news conference on Sunday. “That’s going to have to be found out during the investigation.”
Less is known about what happened aboard the Crystal, which had been chartered by a Japanese company to bring cargo from Nagoya, on Japan’s central coast, to Tokyo. Manned by a Filipino crew, it was far less damaged than the Fitzgerald. On Wednesday afternoon, a large blue tarp hung from a gash in the front of the ship, large scratches were visible on the port side and a section of the bow was crumpled.