Figure 3.1 The roll-on, roll-off passenger ferry, Estonia, which went down in rough seas, September 28, 1994. Over 850 people died, making the accident the worst peacetime sea disaster in Scandinavian history. Shown here docked in Helsinki, a year before the disaster. (Photo taken by Mary Beth Williams, co-editor.)
The Estonia Disaster: National Interventions, Outcomes, and Personal Impacts
The Republic of Estonia lies south of Finland between Scandinavia and Russia. This Eastern European country is small and has approximately 1,500,000 inhabitants. When the Soviets introduced glasnost, Estonia sought its independence from Russia. It was re-recognized as an independent nation in 1991, and the first free elections in Estonia were held in 1992. Estonia has chosen to model itself after its closest capitalistic neighbor, Finland, and travel between the two nations is frequent, both by air and by sea. One major means of travel is by passenger ferry. Both Finns and Estonians speak unique languages that are similar and rooted in the far eastern Ural Mountains of Russia.
Finland, a member of the European Union since 1995, is one of the northern-most countries in the world. Finland, too, has a history of warring with the Russian Empire and lost part of its territory to the Soviet Union at the close of World War II. Finland has a population of 5 million; much of the Finnish economy is based upon its rich forests.
The HMS Estonia, a ro-ro (roll on, roll off) passenger ferry, had a long career of transporting individuals between Scandinavian countries. The ferry was built in Germany in 1980 with a capacity of 1,500 passengers and 460 vehicles. It was launched July 5, 1980, as the Viking Sally on its maiden voyage between Turku, Finland, and Stockholm, Sweden. Between 1990 and 1992, it was owned by the Silja Line and registered as the Silja Star and was then part of the Wasa Line, registered as the Wasa King. In 1992, it was purchased by Estline, a joint venture between the Nordstrom and Thulin Shipping Company of Stockholm (which owned 47% of the line), the Estonian State (which owned 50% of the line), and an unnamed Swiss citizen (who owned 3%). Officially, the ship was owned by the Estonian Shipping Company out of Cyprus.
The Estonia began its run between Tallinn, the capital of Estonia, and Stockholm on January 1, 1993. At the time of its registry as an Estline vessel, this 157-meter (approximately 480’) passenger ferry was the only one to traverse the route. The ship was equipped to hold over 1,500 passengers, the majority of whom slept in small cabins near the car decks for the overnight journey.
On September 27, 1994, the ship was commanded by Arvo Andersson; a second Estline captain, Avo Piht, was on board as a passenger. The majority of the 189 crew members (27 of whom were dancers and singers employed to entertain the passengers on their overnight journey) were Estonian and had received instruction or education in Sweden. The Estonia was licensed by Sweden and had undergone an official inspection by Swedish authorities prior to this trip. The inspection revealed that the rubber seals around the hatch were slightly damaged. However, the inspectors did not believe that the seals were a threat to the integrity of the ship. The inspectors also found that three of the rope bands used to secure the trucks in the car deck were slightly damaged.
THE DISASTER OF SEPTEMBER 28, 1994
On the evening of September 27, 1994, into the morning hours of September 28, 1994, after passengers, vehicles, and cargo were loaded on board and the bow port was securely closed and inspected, the Estonia left Tallinn and sailed into the Baltic Sea. Because bad weather (with gale force winds of 60 miles per hour) was expected, cargo marshals double checked all vehicles to make sure that they were securely tied down prior to departure; in addition, they rechecked them every half-hour during the journey. As usual, the ship left in the late evening for its overnight trip to the capital of Sweden.
This evening, passengers and crew totaled at least 989. On board were persons of various nationalities and ethnic backgrounds, although the majority were Swedes (at least 552) and Estonians (163). For many of these individuals, riding across the Baltic was a reward for hard work, a short vacation, a means to return home, or time to relax, party, and “get away.”
As the ship crossed the Baltic Sea, Captain Andersson changed course from a westerly to a more southerly route to sail more with the wind and decreased his speed to 8 knots from 15 or 16 knots due to rough seas. The Uto Fort Radar Station observed these changes. A crew fireman made his hourly check of the boat, including the car deck, and had nothing out of the ordinary to report. Before 1:00 a.m., the speed of the ship decreased to 5 knots, according to radar observations. The fireman reported later that the car deck was still dry at this time. This evening, it held 32 cars and trucks, a house trailer, two busses, and four caravan cars, according to a 23-year-old passenger, Dutchman Stefan Duyndam.
Shortly after 1:00 a.m., third engineer Narcys Treu heard loud noises from the bow area and felt the recoil of two heavy blows to the bow that shook the whole ship. Engineer Treu heard the deck crew report to the bridge that water was coming into the car deck. The captain sent Treu down to check on the noises; he was met by people rushing up from the lower decks.
By 1:10 a.m., the Captain began to turn the ship to the right, to the wind, perhaps to return to Tallinn and to make sailing easier. However, the ship was not particularly responsive. As the ship turned sideways, the waves and wind drove water into the car deck on the right side, and the ship began to list heavily. By 1:24 a.m., the list was between 20° and 30°. At this point, it became impossible to use the ballast tanks to balance the ship because those on the left side were already airborne. Thus the ship continued to list more and more. Soon the main engines stopped, and the reserve power engines on the eighth deck were turned on.
Treu attempted to restart the port (left-side) engines but was not successful. By now, the list was 60 degrees, and Engineer Treu had to run on the walls of the engine room to get out. At 1:30 a.m., the bridge issued a general alarm. The auxiliary engines stopped, but emergency batteries and diesel generators continued to work; there was never a blackout on board. Surviving passenger Jaan Stern recalled that he heard strong waves beating against the ship shortly before the alarm was sounded. He noted that water was already appearing on the floor of his first-deck cabin.
At 23:24 Greenwich Mean Time (GMT) or 1:24 a.m. local time, when the Estonia sent a mayday call, the weather was extremely rough on the Baltic. Some waves were reportedly several apartment stories high; winds were at gale force of 95 kilometers (60 miles) per hour and the temperature of the sea was approximately 8–10°C (50°F) (Eesti Ringvaade, 1994).
The first mayday, sent by a portable radio, was barely heard by the Silja Europa ferry traveling in the Baltic and was not heard in Turku, Finland. The distress call did not indicate that the ship was sinking, just that there was some trouble. The crew then appeared to change radios from the hand-held set which had no high-gain antennas or high transmit power. The mayday call at 1:24 a.m. used a proper emergency radio. The last clear call said, “It seems really bad here,” and a later transmission of location could hardly be understood. Within relatively few minutes after listing, the ship sank in international waters 59 23’ and 21 42’, 20 miles south west of Uto, in Finnish territorial responsibility, at a depth of approximately 90 meters (300 feet).
When the call was heard at the Finnish rescue center in Turku, the operator alerted the Finnish Frontier (Coast) Guard. Their priority was to get rescue vehicles airborne before deciding which other organizations needed to be involved. This decision is in agreement with what Mitchell (1996a) calls the first priorities in a disaster. These priorities include accessing the survivors and rescuing (if possible) trapped survivors; establishing emergency medical triage and treatment with transportation and hospitalization; initiating law enforcement activities (e.g., setting up phone lines, establishing a command post, interrogating survivors as soon as is possible); providing for communications and sectorization of the incident; activating resource assessment (what do we need and what do we have?); acquiring resources (including notification of other countries); and logistical managing of rescue efforts (including all the helicopters, ferries, and other ships).
Weeks later, the investigation into why VHF emergency transmissions either were not sent or were not picked up by monitoring frequencies (e.g., in Sweden) determined that a Russian military naval base located about 300 kilometers (180 miles) east of the site of the disaster on Suursaari Island (Great Island or Gogland) was either jamming the VHF frequency or had failed to break transmissions using the proper push-to-talk switch. The Finnish organization monitoring the use of frequencies, the Telehallin-tokeskus, had reported this failure to the Russian authorities many times. The problem was periodically corrected and would then reappear. Investigators determined that the failure was due to negligence, not sabotage. In other words, a radio on the island transmitted continuously on channel 16 and blocked other transmissions. Thus, the Swedish Rescue Center could not have heard any transmissions from the Estonia. Furthermore, even if the frequency had been open, the list of the ship was so great that the transmission range would probably have been limited to 40–60 kilometers (24–36 miles). The conversation between the Estonia and the Silja Europa was heard in Turku because Finnish relay links were designed to convey even very weak emergency signals. The Swedish Rescue Center received notification perhaps 15 minutes later than if it had come from the ship or from Turku.
At 1:35 a.m. Finnish time, the M/S Marietta, steaming to the scene, was able to see the Estonia’s lights. However, she sank at 1:48 a.m., and the Uto Radar Station (located in Finnish territory) lost contact. According to survivors, the ferry sank within 15–20 minutes after the alarm sounded. The Marietta did not reach the scene until 2:30 a.m., when her crew began rescue operations.
The Extent of the Disaster
The sinking of the Estonia, in which 852 people perished, was the worst peacetime sea disaster in Scandinavian history and the worst disaster in Swedish history since the 1809 war against Russia, when more than 500 Swedes were killed. Other Scandinavian sea disasters with extensive loss of life occurred during wartime. For example, on January 30, 1945, a Russian submarine sank the German transport Wilhelm Gustloff, a 25,484-ton ship that held troops and civilian refugees; thousands died.
Prior peacetime sea disasters in that area of the globe did not have as devastating a number of casualties. In 1990, the Scandinavian Star caught fire while sailing between Norway and Denmark; 150 persons died. In January 1993, the Polish freighter Jan Hevelius sank while enroute to Sweden; 50 persons died. In March 1994, the Sally Albatross, a large passenger ferry sailing from Helsinki, Finland, to Tallinn, Estonia, ran aground in the ice during daylight hours. However, a potential disaster was averted because passengers were not sleeping in their cabins. A sister ship rescued all passengers and crew and returned them to Helsinki, where Finnish psychologists waited to provide educational information about stress, acute stress, and posttraumatic stress as well as to hold debriefings. (This author was not among those debriefers, although he provided information and support to those who went to the terminals.) The Sally Albatross was eventually salvaged after water from the hold was pumped out.
The sinking of the Estonia was a disaster of especially great magnitude. Because the onset of the disaster was extremely rapid, the number of casualties (852), in contrast to the number of rescued persons (137), was very high. No one was prepared for a disaster of this magnitude. The Disaster Victim Identification Team in Finland had been organized only a relatively short time before the disaster (1991) and practice scenarios had not included a sea disaster, let alone one of this magnitude.
There were also immediate questions about the locus of cause for the disaster. Was it due to bad weather conditions? Was it due to mechanical failure from improperly constructed equipment or from improperly maintained equipment? Who was at fault, if anyone?
Rescue Operations
Under the leadership of Commodore Raimo Tiilikainen, commander of the Archipelago Area Sea Rescue organization, rescue operations were well coordinated and effective. Both the weather conditions and the nighttime occurrence of the disaster limited visibility and placed extreme pressure on the rescuers. The rescue attempts began in the middle of the night and employed a total of 15 helicopters. The Finns believed that using more would be too risky.
The Swedish Rescue Center got the alarm at 0.55 a.m. Swedish time (1.55 a.m. Finnish time), and their first helicopter was airborne by 1:35 a.m. (2:35 a.m.), 1 hour postdisaster. However, three of the nine Swedish Vertol helicopters that responded developed malfunctions in their hauling mechanisms and winches (e.g., ropes broke) and had to return to base to be repaired before returning to action. These malfunctions occurred, perhaps, because of the high wind (at its highest, a velocity of 25–30 meters per second, or 80–100 miles per hour). Three Swedish surface rescue haulers also developed some problems; their crews reported that the weather conditions were among the worst they had ever experienced.
At the time the helicopters were launched, winds were between 20 and 27 meters per second (or 70–85 miles per hour) and the water in the sea, at the most, was 10°C (50°F). At this temperature, a male could survive in the sea for perhaps 30 minutes before hypothermia led to death. Women might survive slightly longer because of their additional layer of body fat.
The degree of exposure to trauma was high for these rescue workers. The physical conditions, as have been noted, were extremely treacherous. Rescuers were exposed to mass death and scores of bodies, primarily in the lifeboats. They knew they had only a limited amount of time to save any individuals and, therefore, the rescuers put themselves at risk in the face of hostile elements of nature. They had to cover an immense area of sea quickly while making sure that helicopters did not collide with one another as the winds tossed them through the air. Their actual involvement in the disaster was rather short; rescues took place within a 6–7 hour window of time.
Finnish helicopters were also used in rescue operations. One helicopter, while attempting to deposit rescue workers on the deck of the local command ship, had little reserve power to gain altitude because of the bad weather conditions. As this operation occurred, a wave raised the ship to within a half meter of the helicopter, almost causing another disaster! The first rescue helicopter, containing five survivors, landed on the deck of the Silja Symphony at 4:10 a.m.; five more survivors landed 2 hours later, and eleven survivors and one deceased victim landed at 7:57 a.m. Two of the rescued were women; the rest, men.
As the ship listed, passengers and crew on deck threw life rafts in the water. Some landed upside down. Passengers and crew then threw themselves into the water and tried to get into or onto those rafts. Investigation showed that the life rafts from the Estonia were poorly designed. Many of them tipped over in the heavy seas and floated upside down. Survivors were repeatedly washed overboard, particularly from the overturned rafts, or were swamped by waves. Some survivors had to cling to the top of these overturned rafts to survive. Also, because rafts did not have numerical markings, helicopter crews found it difficult to keep track of which ones had been checked for survivors. In some instances, crews made triple checks of the same raft.
Some ships who came to the rescue found that they were unable to raise their own rescue boats after they had been lowered because the seas were so rough (Downing, 1995). The Viking Line and Silja Line ferries that were in the vicinity did not have proper equipment to aide in the rescue of passengers. For example, the Viking Mariella sent down rubber floats and a steward in a diving suit. Over 7,000 persons traveling on the four Finnish car ferries and the one Swedish car ferry, as well as over 1,000 crew members, witnessed these attempted rescue scenes. In many instances, there was little to be done as the rescue ferries’ lifeboats were crushed by heavy waves against the sides of their mother ferries (Saari, Lindeman, Verkasalo, & Pryta, 1996). (Many of the crew on one Finnish ferry reported initial symptoms of acute stress during the first week after the disaster. The majority of males were symptom-free 8 months after the disaster, although 24% of the women still suffered from general traumatic symptoms (Saari, Lindeman, Verkasalo, & Pryta, 1996).
IMMEDIATE RESPONSES TO THE DISASTER
The Media
The first news report “hit the air waves” at 6:07 GMT. The magnitude of the disaster made it an international event with high drama (auf der Heide, 1989), and the media were quick to note the scope of the tragedy. For example, approximately 13 hours after the ship sank (allowing for a 7-hour time difference), news footage brought the disaster to the American public. Media were given limited access to the military island upon which the rescue command post was created as the nearest point of land to the disaster. Members of the media also helped Finnish police officials by disseminating information, including lists of names of survivors.
The members of the Union of Finnish Psychologists worked with the media to keep them well informed and to protect survivors from intense media exposure. Their interventions protected the privacy of the survivors. The broadcasts of the media, in general, were done without extensive gruesomeness, avoiding detailed descriptions of the numbers and conditions of the dead. (As Young, 1994, noted, the media often broadcast photographs that show gory details of a tragedy or sensationalize stories of rescue or tragedy. Media personnel who have some knowledge of trauma and traumatic stress reactions are more concerned with dissemination of accurate information, not speculative conclusions. In any crisis, let alone a crisis of this magnitude, media personnel seek information. In this crisis, assigning persons to provide factual information through designated spokespersons helped to quench the thirst for details.)
The present author, as psychologist member of the Disaster Victim Identification Team, shuttled back and forth among teams of law enforcement officials, psychologists, and others and provided information to a variety of sources. With extensive media experience, I was aware of the need to include information about the impact of a crisis on the victims, families, rescue workers, and others in my interviews.
The Victims: Initial Reflections
Exactly 989 persons were on board the ship; 137 persons were rescued, resulting in a loss of 852 passengers and crew. Five hundred thirty-nine Swedes were among the missing, and 38 of the 93 bodies brought to Finland were Swedes. One body was sent to Sweden. Two additional bodies were found later (one, months later). A total of 95 persons were eventually identified (The Estonia Disaster, 1994).
The victims were from a wide range of localities and occupations but many shared a common factor. For example, 68 members of the Stockholm Police Department and 22 mothers from the municipality of Lindesberg, Sweden, died. Many of the Swedish victims were pensioners: 56 were from Norkorpping and 44 were from Borlange. Lundin (1994) noted that hardly a person in Sweden, a country with a population of approximately 9 million inhabitants, was untouched personally by the disaster.
Two hundred fifty or more Estonian families lost one or both bread winners in the disaster, and at least 1,000 persons suddenly became dependent on outside support for survival. Fifty-five of the recovered bodies of victims were crew members. Most of them, as crew, had earned rather small salaries and did not have pensions. One Estonian factory had sent an entire department (mostly wives and mothers) on a short vacation on the ship. They all perished. Another Estonian town lost the personnel of its entire governmental organization. Very few of the victims were Finns (12 of 15 Finns on board died), since this ferry originated in Tallinn, Estonia, rather than Helsinki, Finland. All 11 of the children under 12 years of age known to be on board perished. Twenty-three of the 27 children aged 12 to 18 also were victims. Fifty-three women and 42 men were found dead; 340 men and 417 women were among the missing.
The Survivors
One hundred thirty-seven persons survived the disaster; an additional survivor died later in the hospital. Ninety-seven of the 137 survivors were initially rescued by helicopter; 40, by ferries. Fifty-four of the 137 survivors were Swedes, 28 of whom were taken to Stockholm. Swedish policeman Tom Jonsson was the only one of the officers returning from attending a law enforcement conference in Estonia who survived. Most of the survivors were relatively fit, young males who made their way out of the lounges, cabins, and bars. The majority of these survivors initially suffered from hypothermia but recovered fairly quickly. Huddart (1994) reported via Reuter News Service in an Internet Dispatch that “only the young and strong could have made their way out of the lounges and cabins and up sharply sloping decks as the ship listed suddenly and catastrophically.” In addition, bars and restaurants on the upper decks tended to have younger persons present in the early morning hours. Of the passengers, 80 males and 14 females survived.
One fourth of the survivors were women, and the youngest survivor of the four children was a 14-year-old Norwegian boy who managed to get out from below the main deck. Forty-three (31 men, 12 women) of the 162 crew members were survivors; the most senior crew member among them was second engineer P. Tuur. The visiting captain also survived (Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1994).
Some survivors and many bodies were brought to the military island, Utö; 99 survivors eventually were taken by car ferries (including some deposited on ferries by helicopters as well as those rescued by ferries) to hospitals at Turku, Mariehamn, Tammisaari, and Hanko, Finland. Although it was necessary to interview survivors as quickly as possible before they returned to their countries of origin in order to get as much specific information about the circumstances of the disaster while the information was fresh in survivors’ minds, nurses in Turku believed the police were too intrusive in their questioning and were angry that such interrogations were necessary. The police, on the other hand, acted in their official capacity in order to determine as quickly as possible what had happened in the disaster.
Thirty-eight survivors went to the hospital in Helsinki, where they were treated, observed, and then transferred to a hotel to be debriefed and counseled by three psychologists speaking six languages (Saari, Lindeman, Verkasalo, & Pryta, 1996). By the third day after the disaster, 55 of the survivors had returned to Estonia.
Initially, Russian submarine designer Anatoly Kuteinikov of St. Petersburg stated that hundreds of survivors could have survived inside the hull in air cushions for at least a week. However, Swedish and Danish experts refuted that theory, noting that water pressure at a depth of 90 meters would make survivors mentally unstable very quickly, and the temperature of 10–12°C (45–50°F) would make survival impossible (Baltic News Service, 1994a).
What made this disaster particularly traumatizing for survivors? The situation they faced, once they abandoned the ship, was extremely dangerous. The seas were very treacherous, and survivors were in danger of drowning if not dying from hypothermia. Many of them huddled together for hours in or on life rafts that were thrown from the ship as it sank. Many of the rafts were upside down and could not provide shelter.
Roles of the Intervention Teams
In many disasters, too much psychological “help” comes to the rescue. Mitchell (1996a) terms this onslaught of professionals “mass convergency.” However, this “help” is frequently not helpful at all. Survivors need some time to process what has happened; rescue workers need time to do their jobs. The priorities that were listed earlier must take precedence. Therefore, the roles of psychologists in the initial stages of the disaster included providing support only to those individuals who were significantly at risk, providing advice to command staff, and giving immediate assistance to the survivors, their families, families of the dead, bystanders on the ships, and other nonemergency personnel on the scene (crews of the other ships). Their role was not to offer treatment to these survivors or to families and friends of survivors and the dead. In his foundation newsletter, Mitchell (1996a) wrote that “people are not ready to manage their stress reactions when they are caught up in disaster operations. … They suppress their emotions in order to keep their mental and physical stamina up so they can complete the various tasks assigned to them during the disaster” (p. 2). It is important to let functioning people do what they have to do as rescuers until the disaster operations are completed.
In Finland, the postdisaster work was, in essence, a national effort as the national disaster response teams mobilized. The largest groups involved were the DVI (a law enforcement team), the 20-person emergency group, and the 20-person reserve group from the Union of Finnish Psychologists. The Union team members had had various kinds of training in trauma and disaster management. Members of all teams were released from their normal duties within 24 hours of the disaster and, in conjunction with the Finnish Red Cross, responded to the disaster in a number of ways (Eränen, 1994). The majority of the psychologists worked in Helsinki, although six members went to Tallin for a week to organize local crisis teams, train Estonian responders, counsel families of survivors, and participate in joint interventions with the Estonian Red Cross and the Ministry for Social Affairs and Health (Saari, Lindeman, Verkasalo, & Pryta, 1996). Over a 10-day span, team members held over 250 debriefings and clocked over 2,400 working hours.
Psychologists helped with the emergency work with rescuers, survivors, onlookers, families of victims (particularly in Estonia), and ferry crews. They also coordinated local groups who responded, including the Hanko Emergency group, Parainen Emergency Group, and the University of Turku Central Hospital Group.
Work with the 7,000 passengers and 1,200 crew who observed the rescue operations from one Swedish and four Finnish ferries (including the Silja Europe, Silja Symphony, and Viking Mariella) as well as a number of freighters included a variety of interventions. Materials about crisis reactions, acute stress reactions, and posttraumatic stress disorder were distributed in six languages to passengers on Finnish ferries when they disembarked at the Port of Helsinki. Pamphlets also included a hotline number. Phone contacts were made and debriefings were offered as well to these persons.
Many of the survivors with whom the teams worked experienced crisis reactions or acute stress reactions. In other words, they felt anxiety, shock, disbelief, anger, and other emotions. Burgess and Roberts (1995) noted that survivors are often most willing to seek help during this period. Therefore, the members of the teams who were available to debrief survivors and do other activities that helped with the information processing of what happened did so at an opportune time for intervention (Hartman & Burgess, 1988).
Crisis intervention groups were also immediately organized in Stockholm at Police Headquarters and the Estline Terminal. The Estonian government offered 24-hour counseling through the weekend, and information about financial assistance was distributed to the families of the victims. Staff from counseling centers in Estonia were asked by Finnish psychologists and police officers to help with families and friends of victims; many went over to assist Estonian efforts through direct service and training.
Rescue workers do not escape the emotional impact of their jobs. Disaster scenes and interventions may task the limits of human coping, particularly if rescue workers are not prepared for the magnitude of the traumatic event (Dunning, 1990). Ideally, immediate, brief interventions for rescue workers during and after a disaster help mitigate the stress of the impact. However, it is not always possible to provide such interventions. In fact, many rescue workers may seek to distance themselves from the event as soon as possible in order to maintain the ability to do their jobs.
One way to offer help to rescue workers postdisaster is through a structured debriefing, whether educational and informational or psychological. The goal of debriefing is to help the rescue worker integrate the disaster into his or her life history. Paton and Stephens (1996) note that debriefing is “a non-threatening education on reactions to trauma and coping strategies … delivered in everyday language to normalize predictable reactions” (p. 179). They conclude that “debriefing is a helping process” (p. 195).
Critical incident stress debriefing is a standardized approach to providing short-term assistance to persons involved in crisis situations or disaster. It may be offered or ordered to persons involved in rescue efforts, depending on the nature of the incident, the policies of the organization, and the needs of the rescuers. Debriefing sessions held with team members foster natural connections among teams and help rescuers to provide witness to what they have experienced, felt, and need to know (Dunning, 1988; Dunning, 1996). One aspect of debriefing is storytelling, set within limits in order to prevent overload and retraumatization. Debriefings must be done sensitively and skillfully to provide relief to rescuers who are stressed and to strengthen their hardiness so that they can go on with the job at hand and not succumb to fatigue and the horrors that they have experienced. Dunning (1996) noted that debriefing needs to be conducted within a philosophical atmosphere of wellness, increasing rescuers’ sense of control, cohesion, communication, commitment, and sense of challenge. Thus the major roles of debriefing are to provide clarification and to help rescuers recognize that they are experts concerning the disaster itself, not further victims. Debriefing provides an opportunity for emotional disclosure in a supportive environment (Pennebaker, 1992).
The basic model used for debriefing in Finland is the Mitchell Model (Mitchell, 1983; Mitchell, 1988; Mitchell, 1996b; Mitchell & Everly, 1993). This model has seven stages identified as the introductory phase, fact phase, thought phase (cognitions), reaction phase (individual disclosure of emotions), symptom phase, teaching phase (education about posttraumatic stress response syndromes), and re-entry phase (winddown and reassurance that reactions are normal and triaged help is accessible). Secondary goals of debriefing include exploration of the literal and symbolic meanings of the disaster, cognitive restructuring, skill building, building of group/team support, and initiation of the grief process (Dunning, 1990).
The majority of rescue workers recover from working with critical events without long-term traumatic effects even without debriefing. However, those who were debriefed appear to have fared somewhat better than the nurses at Turku Hospital who did not receive debriefing (Nurmi, in press). Saari, Lindeman, Verkasalo, and Pryta (1996) write that, ideally, debriefing occurs shortly after a disaster, before the human mind can close down. The goals of debriefing are to “confront the participants with reality … [and] what actually happened …”; to process reactions by allowing victims “to talk through their experiences, impressions, feelings and thoughts”; to help prepare participants for future reactions and symptoms, should they occur, normalizing their appearance to increase tolerance of them; to strengthen coping mechanisms through mental exercise or later direct action; and to “enhance feelings of affinity” among persons who share the disaster experience (p. 136).
Many of the Finnish rescuers were debriefed either by the present author, as psychologist with the Disaster Victim Identification Team (DVI), or by members of the Red Cross-sponsored teams from the Union of Finnish Psychologists. During debriefings conducted by this author, rescue personnel and police personnel talked to one another and shared experiences about multiple-death disasters. Debriefings occurred when the time allowed or suited them to occur; in truth, reality dictates the opportunities one has for debriefing.
Rescue workers, including this author, felt a sense of death overload. I was especially impacted when I first saw all the bodies lined up on the ship which transported them from the military island of Uto and the temporary morgue to the mainland. I and my partner debriefed the body handlers who worked at the military island evacuation center and who had placed the bodies in temporary coffins, working for long hours over a 2-day period and suffering extreme exhaustion. These body handlers were police officers from the Turku Police Department sent to the island by the various rescue services. The large number of dead in this temporary morgue was stressful to them. It was also their job to photograph and document the victims before preparing the bodies for the return to the mainland. Body handlers were debriefed 2 days after they finished their work, either at the Turku Police Department or with their units of the Frontier Guard. Also debriefed were police officers who interrogated survivors in Turku University Hospital.
I remained in Turku until Saturday (2 days after the sinking), when I returned with the bodies to Helsinki. I also served as liaison officer between the DVI team and Red Cross crisis intervention teams in Finland and Finnish delegations in Estonia. I gave up-to-date information to each team about the status of body identification, including when and where bodies could be seen, and I also debriefed and counseled police investigators who worked with families of the dead in Estonia.
The scope and enormity of an event and the exposure of rescue workers to the injury, mutilation, and death of victims are very important variables that can lead to severe reactions. In addition, when rescue workers have to operate under adverse conditions, more demands are then placed on them (Hartsough & Myers, 1985; McCammon, 1996). In this disaster, the weather conditions were horrible, and workers were put at risk due to the high winds, rough seas, and cold water temperature. The workers were also operating under a serious time pressure to minimize hypothermia in victims. As it was, many survivors died because of the weather conditions as well as poor equipment.
Rescue workers as well as others involved often seek to find meaning in the disasters they face. Reverend Kaj Engström, chaplin and debriefer for the DVI team, spontaneously initiated religious rituals when the bodies were brought from the military island to Turku.Rituals can provide social support and help rescue workers integrate the experience into the past. Several emergency room nurses worked at the military island and participated in these rituals. However, most rescue workers were not available when the bodies returned to the mainland of Finland and, therefore, did not have the benefit of participation.
Work With the Dead and Families of the Dead
Interpol requires the staffing and organization of a DVI team. Its mandates are to help in the identification of the dead when disasters occur within its territory and to go to foreign countries to help in identification of the dead who are its country’s citizens. In Finland, the DVI team was organized under the auspices of the Central Criminal Police and mobilized December 20, 1991.
The majority of members of the team are police officials. The actual team has about 20 members and includes a debriefing team consisting of myself (a police psychologist) and a clergyman. The DVI team conducted two airline disaster training scenarios annually prior to the Estonia disaster but was not prepared for an event of its magnitude.
The Estonia disaster introduced the DVI team to the world. The team mobilized before noon on September 28, 1994, and contacted trained officers from local police units all over Finland to assist in the disaster victim identification. Initially, as has been noted, most bodies were taken to Hanko and to Utö military Island, where body collection was extremely stressful, before the latter bodies were sent to Turku.
The work of the DVI team lasted 5 weeks, 93 victims were identified in the Search Center organized at the University of Helsinki. The center was responsible for conducting autopsies, fingerprinting the bodies, identifying dental structures, and conducting post-mortem forensic pathology activities. When a match was made between antemortem and postmortem data, a commission of a forensic doctor, forensic dentist, and police officer officially determined the final identity of the body and signed the identification certificate. The Identification Center (also in Helsinki) was responsible for technical and tactical investigations as well as working with the property of victims. According to Finnish law, investigation of the cause of death (in a disaster as well) belongs to the police and, in this instance, to DVI-recruited doctors. It was necessary to conduct an autopsy on each of the 93 bodies brought to Finland to help in the identification. The autopsies revealed that the majority of the victims died of drowning or hypothermia.
Some members of the team went to Estonia to help gather information from victims’ families. These officers brought pictures of the dead with them. Also, two Finnish police officers trained Estonian colleagues to fill out the antemortem form that had been translated into Estonian. Many of the police officers who were sent to Estonia to meet with the families of the dead needed individual support sessions after they participated in debriefings 2–3 weeks after the disaster.
The team instituted numerous self-care measures during its time together. Technical debriefings, psychological defusings (a shorter form of debriefing), work hours that did not extend past 5 p.m., trips to the sauna in the evenings, and a final dinner that included colleagues from Sweden, Estonia, and Norway who had worked with the team helped members withstand stress and combat vicarious traumatization. The more informal defusings were conducted by myself in a supportive manner at the end of the work day, particularly with members of the autopsy team. Defusings were also conducted with officers who worked with the deceased victims’ belongings. Team members worked under the constant watchfulness of the media as well as international forensic experts. In general, members of the team were resilient and defined the event in understandable terms. They used their personal emotional resources, interpersonal resources, and cognitive resources to cope with the disaster’s aftermath.
Members of the Finnish National Crisis Team cooperated across international boundaries with relatives of the dead in Estonia as well. Team members went to Estonia to conduct debriefings and offer psychosocial support.
MEMORIALS, INVESTIGATIONS, AND CONCLUSIONS
The Finnish Perception of Death
The Finnish people, in general, have a Lutheran conception of death, although they are not very religious in outward practice. Finns believe in God and salvation. Death is final and definite, and therefore most Finns do not believe in reincarnation. To the Finnish people, it would be an appropriate and fitting decision to let victims of the disaster lie in the ocean. Finns have been astonished, therefore, that the Swedes have had such extensive discussions about reclaiming the bodies so they could go to their home areas. On April 18, 1996, Swedish Prime Minister Goran Persson decided to reexamine the decision to cover the ferry with a concrete shell, just days before the first stones were to be poured to make the resting place of the ferry a permanent grave site at a depth of between 180 and 270 feet, approximately 60 miles off the southwest coast of Finland.
The disaster was a national tragedy to the Finns but not a tragedy in the same sense as it was for the Swedes or Estonians. Very few victims (reports vary from 10 to 12) were Finns by citizenship. Between 50 and 100 had Finnish surnames/family names and were of Finnish origin; at the time of the disaster, however, they were Swedish citizens who had emigrated to Sweden.
When news of the disaster became public early in the morning of September 28, 1994, Finland, as a nation, was shocked and reacted very strongly. However, the first question asked was “Which boat went down?” When the first newscast at 5 a.m. revealed that the boat was not from Turku or Helsinki, Finland, but from Tallin, Estonia, there was relief that it was not a Finnish ship full of Finns.
Memorials and Rituals
Rituals which are culturally sensitive provide a sense of group identity and give guidance for healing. They offer a way for survivors and families of the dead to share their grief and give one another mutual support. Rituals, commemorations, and memorials reassure survivors and families that the dead are remembered and, at the same time, provide a sense of closure to the disaster. Some memorials and rituals occur within the context and frame of religion; others, within the context of other avenues of commemoration (Meichenbaum, 1994). Jay (1994) also notes that prayer (as ritual) is a way to bind an individual’s loss to the losses of a community or group (or nation).
Finland has had an established system of national mourning for some time. National mourning takes place when a major accident or air crash occurs and 10 or more persons die (e.g., a previous air crash in which 17 politicians died was responded to with national mourning). The scale of disaster that results in national mourning, because of the size of Finland as a country of approximately 5 million population, is much smaller than in other countries.
After the disaster, the President and Prime Minister immediately expressed the deep concern of the Finnish State and offered condolences to Estonia and Sweden in particular. Flags immediately were flown at half-mast, and the same official day of mourning was adopted by all three countries.
In Sweden, one of the first symbolic communal responses to the tragedy was that of Prime Minster Carl Bildt ordering all state flags to be flown at half-mast. He then went to Turku to meet with and thank members of the rescue teams. A state of mourning was also declared in Estonia, and Estonian national radio immediately changed programming from rock and roll to more somber music.
Reverend Kaj Engström, a member of the DVI team, used culturally sensitive, religiously based rituals during the rescue operations to help Finnish rescue workers deal with their experiences and to honor the dead. These rituals served as a way for Finns present to share the grief. When approximately 60 bodies were brought in temporary coffins to Turku by boat, Reverend Engström conducted a short religious ceremony at 2 a.m. While filming of the transportation of the bodies from the boat was not permitted for the general media, the Finnish Police filmed those services and incorporated them into the official police video. Seeing those 60 bodies in their temporary coffins en masse was a very moving experience for myself as well. When the visor of the boat bringing the bodies to Turku opened and the coffins were exposed in their rows, deep sadness was experienced.
On the night of October 8, 1994, the bodies of 93 identified individuals were placed in funeral clothes and were then transported from the University of Helsinki to a temporary mortuary by a cortege of hearses. Again, only the Finnish police filmed the cortege. Eventually, these identified victims were transported from the mortuary to their home countries.
Religious rituals instituted weeks later when these identified victims were returned to their homelands brought a degree of closure to Finland’s role in the tragedy. For example, 60 Swedish victims were transported by truck from Helsinki to Turku in a daylight profession. Finnish citizens lined the roads and held flowers to show their respect for these unfortunate individuals. The bodies were then sent by boat to Stockholm. Religious ceremonies also were conducted by Reverend Engström when Estonian victims were sent by boat. The rituals were designed to help those working on the body collection and identification jobs with our own coping and mental health. They also were organized, as the bodies were sent back home, as a symbolic way to show relatives that the victims were being honored and handled with respect. The body handling and transport also gave the families of the deceased a positive view of the Finnish Police.
The exact number of dead will never be known because of the incomplete passenger lists. By the first anniversary of the disaster, in spite of protests from the survivors’ group and others, the governments of Sweden, Estonia, and Finland decided to turn the resting place of the ship into a gravesite, covering it with stones or cement to prevent entry by divers.
The Final Report
According to the Washington Post Internet Report of August 30, 1996, poor maintenance caused the door of the Estonia to rip open and kill the 800+ individuals who remained on board. Hinges on the door, according to the attorney for the Meyer-Werft Ship Company, which built the ferry, were “in disastrous condition.” Estline supposedly knew about this problem, although the owners have denied any fault. Initially, the International Commission organized to investigate the disaster (with representatives from Sweden, Estonia, and Finland) blamed the shipbuilders and stated that the cargo door locks were not strong enough to withstand the intensity of the Baltic storm that occurred (Joint Accident Commission, 1994a, 1994b; Karpinnen, 1994; Rikken, 1994). A British military expert, viewing a Swedish videotape of the ferry made a few days before the disaster, utilized reconnaissance photography techniques to evaluate the hinges. His investigation said that the interior cargo door’s hinges had deteriorated. Thus, when the ship turned and the waves hit it sidewise, the cargo door ripped off. The attorney also added that “the ship was not seaworthy. … They knew about the decisive point, the leaky ramp seal. … It was gross negligence by the shipping company.” The bow visor was leaky and the interior vehicle ramp that folded to form the additional barrier was also leaky because it had a broken hinge. The gap from the break was stuffed with rags. According to the investigation, water flooded in through these leaks and made the ferry unstable. As it began to list, and as the Estonia turned sideways, waves ripped off the cargo door.
The Final Report (1997) indicates that the bow locking devices failed due to wave-induced impact loads creating opening moments about the hinges. Thus, large amounts of water ran into the deck and the vessel capsized (Estonia Final Report, 1997). One group of survivors is suing the German company that built the boat; the German company is suing the Finnish shipping line because the line originally accepted the boat from the German firm when the boat sailed between Turku and Stockholm. This suit is against the Finnish State and is being defended by an American attorney. Other legal battles involve attorneys and experts from Germany, France, Sweden, and Norway as well as the United States (Estonian News Agency, 1994). Conclusions were that weather conditions, technical defects in the doors, high speed of the boat and delays in issuing evacuation orders led to the enormity of the disaster (Estonia Final Report, 1997).
DVI team members also met several times postdisaster to process their interventions and debrief themselves. During these meetings, team members affirmed their shared values, including the commitment to aid families of victims of other disasters in the least painful manner through identification of victims as quickly as possible. In October 1995, the team conducted a special seminar to examine its work and to make recommendations for future disaster response.
The sinking of the Estonia was a transport disaster of significant consequence; it had an impact on whole nations as well as on numerous smaller communities and organizations. It underscored the necessity for broadly based crisis interventions involving multiple agencies and multiple levels of interventions, crossing international boundaries as well as multinational teams (auf der Heide, 1989; Williams & Nurmi, in press).
Interventions both during and after a disaster can lead to new behaviors, can teach lessons to those who were involved, and can provide ways of learning new coping skills. In other words, disasters also offer opportunities for growth (Kalayjian, 1996). One such opportunity was afforded to the DVI team. The team’s capability to respond and cope with a major disaster were tested and later analyzed. The consensus is that the team did an admirable job without forewarning or drills for a disaster of this magnitude.
Although there were no comprehensive trauma centers in existence in either Turku or Helsinki, Finland was fortunate to have a DVI team in place, in contrast to Sweden and Estonia. The DVI team became a working entity because of this disaster. Members of the team, and the team as a whole, had not been prepared for this type of disaster or its breadth. The call came, the team mobilized, and the work continued for weeks. When the last body was identified and the trucks departed to return the victims to their home countries, DVI members were able to return to their “normal” jobs. However, the impact of the disaster on these individuals continued. Personal philosophies of life changed. Workers needed some time off to rejuvenate or to reenter into families, jobs, shift work, commitments, and communities. Members found it very difficult to change roles and become “just another regular fellow” after they had faced such a disaster.
Instead, the DVI team had become a community of its own. Not only did members work together during and after the disaster, but they had to take a supportive role in disaster intervention. They offered debriefings to most rescue groups and sent teams to Estonia as well. The teams were flexible; members took time off from their regular, daily jobs to go where they were needed. Teams were collaborative and worked well with other organizations and debriefers, including myself, who served as liaison between the various teams and the authorities and rescue workers. In Finland, private practitioners and non-invited agencies did not swarm to the scene of any component of the disaster because, culturally, that response would not have been appropriate. (This is in contrast to the Oklahoma City disaster in which professional groups, professionals as individuals, and others swarmed upon that scene to offer help, debriefing, defusing, and any other type of intervention.)
Personal Reactions
As the psychologist on the DVI team, I continue to experience a personal impact from the Estonia disaster. The work was intense and demanding; I have become content with less in my material world and want to live quietly and peacefully. The level of exposure to real pain and sorrow has shown me just how insignificant one individual is in the scope of things. I and other members of the DVI team received a “baptism by fire” for which we had not been prepared. I acknowledge that my job was to serve my team. I did not talk with relatives but did talk with police who were talking with relatives. I prepared, with my partner Rev. Engström, to meet the relatives; he did, I did not. I was there with all the bodies and faces in pictures, but the relatives did not come when I was there.
The work has had an impact on my philosophy of life; disaster and my work (as police psychologist) have made an impact on me. Earlier, I found it easier to believe in God and life after death. However, I have seen so much tragedy in the last 5 years that I have started to disbelieve. On the other hand, I want to believe in a Higher Power—let’s call him/her/it God—that is common for all of us. I respect religion and Lutheranism and won’t divorce myself from the Church. I have not lost my belief in rituals; on the contrary, my experiences reinforce the importance of religious rituals for me. Rituals are important for the living, not for the dead. They are important for us who are mourning the dead. This is in conflict with my earlier beliefs. This disaster has enforced my belief in religion as a formal process. On the other hand, it leads to a disappointment in God. I am constantly confronted with the question of where God is when something like this happens.
National Community Reactions
The Finnish people, as a nation, are resilient. This tragedy challenged their response resources and the belief of emergency services and the government that the greatest disaster the nation would face would be an airline disaster. No one expected a ferry disaster to occur. Thus, the DVI team, prepared to face a disaster on a smaller scale, was called upon to perform and deal with massive death in a different mode. The tragedy itself was quick; the rescue and recovery process took only a few hours. Some responses were informal (e.g., Finns lining the roads with flowers in hand as they paid homage to the coffins that were being taken to the ships); others were formal, including funerals, memorials, and a National Day of Mourning.
The sinking of the Estonia led to changes in attitudes and assumptions about the safety of travel by ferry. No longer is the Baltic Sea seen to be benevolent and kind to its travelers. Hundreds of persons now lie entombed on its murky bottom. Schemas about safety have been challenged (Janoff-Bulman, 1992), and the belief that a similar disaster may recur is strong among the Finnish people. Still, ferry travel increases yearly as more and more people traverse the Baltic and the Gulf of Finland (Popeski, 1994).
Lessons Learned
The most important conclusion from work with the Estonia rescuers, survivors, and families is that this disaster has underlined the importance and purposefulness of stress management interventions and rituals (Hiley-Young & Gerrity, 1994; Hodgkinson & Stewart, 1991; Paton, 1996). Critical incident stress management interventions and the development of appropriate rituals are very important for healing of rescue workers and other disaster helpers. However, one intervention alone (e.g., a defusing or a debriefing) is not enough. Multiple methods of intervention are needed to help those affected to heal: Group sessions, individual consultations with psychologists, defusings, and other interventions are necessary. The entire range of critical incident stress management interventions is necessary in a disaster of this consequence.
A second realization gained from both observation and research is that workers in a disaster as great as this one can see the stress in one another’s faces and doings. However, they do not necessarily recognize the same level of stress in themselves. For this reason, it is important that more than one professional helper be available to check on how the personnel involved in disaster rescue and disaster work behave and think. These persons need to be flexible and careful when approaching and working with disaster workers. It is not possible to apply, systematically, only one set method with all workers. Any person who works with and debriefs rescue workers needs to be sensitive enough to find the right method for the right situation.
Establishing a schedule for debriefings is not always the way to provide support. For example, doing defusings (short, immediate interventions) with police officers who were answering phone calls from the thousands of concerned relatives and friends of potential deceased individuals turned out to be a very effective intervention. Doing one-on-one sessions with officers who went to Tallinn, Estonia to work with the relatives of the deceased or with those officers who worked on the military island was also the right choice of intervention. However, these individuals did not need therapy and would not have responded to persons who utilized the language of therapy in their interventions. However, relying only on the two members of the DVI team (myself and my partner) to do these one-on-one sessions was not satisfactory. In the future, it is important to have more than two persons available for such sessions.
A third lesson learned is that it is better to wait to give help to helpers until after they are removed from the “throes” of the disaster (Williams & Nurmi, 1994). Initially, rescuers want to do their jobs and then sleep and eat. These activities are more critical than debriefing. Interventions scheduled for the first day of a disaster or even the first day after a disaster are not ideal. The helicopter crews and winchmen needed to be debriefed after their missions were concluded, a couple of days after the disaster rather than during the height of their involvement.
A final lesson that has been learned through a disaster of this magnitude is that different teams, different agencies, and different groups of professionals are exposed to different types of stress. In spite of training and education, professionals do not appear to have been prepared for exposure to the prolonged stress that came with the sinking of this ferry. Rescue workers, for example, generally expect a rescue operation to take a few hours of time. In this instance, rescue operations took over 2 days for helicopter pilots and crews and weeks for members of the DVI team who were identifying and autopsying the 93 decomposing bodies, answering the thousands of phone calls, and working with the relatives of the deceased.
This level of prolonged stress has to be taken into account when interventions are being organized. Critical incident stress management interventions with these helpers cannot be limited to just one debriefing or one defusing. Rules for practice need to be established (Robinson & Mitchell, 1993). Rescuers, police officers, and others must decide the length of work time and when to close the work day. These individuals cannot be driven so hard that they lose energy, because they cannot be replaced. For this reason, the DVI team lived together at a hotel, finished the work day at 5:00 p.m., and then went to the sauna to ventilate and debrief.
In conclusion, the sinking of the Estonia has had a major impact on the country of Finland. It has underlined the importance of having established, prepared crisis teams at numerous levels of intervention, ranging from the governmentally sponsored DVI team to teams organized by the Union of Finnish Psychologists. It has affected me in many ways and has changed me dramatically. It is the hope and prayer of all Finns that such a disaster will never repeat itself. In this instance, the majority of survivors and victims were not of Finnish origin and, therefore, the cultural impact on the nation was not as great. However, the whole of Scandinavia is still reeling from the impact of this disaster and the recognition that travel across the Baltic can never be fully safe and secure.
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