Herald of Free Enterprise - What if?
What If?
The Herald of Free Enterprise: What If the Bow Doors Had Been Closed?
Some disasters are separated from safety by hours, miles or a chain of extraordinary events.
Others are separated by something frighteningly small.
On the evening of 6 March 1987, the Herald of Free Enterprise left Zeebrugge bound for Dover.
Her bow doors were open.
Within minutes, seawater began pouring onto the vehicle deck. The ferry rapidly lost stability, capsized onto her port side and came to rest on a sandbank.
One hundred and ninety-three people lost their lives.
But what if the bow doors had been closed?
Imagine the same evening unfolding differently.
The loading is completed.
The final vehicles are secured.
Before departure, the bow doors are confirmed shut.
The bridge receives positive confirmation.
The Herald of Free Enterprise leaves Zeebrugge.
She accelerates into open water.
There is no torrent of seawater rushing across the vehicle deck.
There is no sudden list.
Passengers continue towards Dover, perhaps eating, talking, resting or preparing for the drive home.
The ferry reaches Britain.
For almost everyone aboard, 6 March 1987 becomes an entirely ordinary journey.
That is what makes the disaster so difficult to contemplate.
The ship herself was not doomed when she left the berth.
The catastrophe depended upon a series of human and organisational failures lining up at precisely the wrong moment.
A crew member responsible for closing the doors was asleep.
Others assumed the task had been completed.
The bridge had no direct indication showing whether the bow doors were open or closed.
The vessel sailed.
And a ferry designed to carry hundreds of passengers and vehicles entered the sea with the most important watertight barriers still open.
If the doors had been closed, 193 people would have survived that night.
But there is another uncomfortable question.
Would the wider weaknesses exposed by the disaster have remained hidden?
The official inquiry went far beyond the actions of individuals aboard the ship. It identified serious shortcomings in the way the company itself operated and famously described a “disease of sloppiness” within its management.
The tragedy helped change attitudes towards ferry safety, operating procedures, communication and corporate responsibility.
Without the disaster, some of those changes might have come later.
Perhaps another ship, another crew and another group of passengers would eventually have paid the price.
That is one of history’s cruelest contradictions.
Disasters often reveal dangers that were already present.
The Herald of Free Enterprise did not create those dangers.
It exposed them.
So perhaps the most important “What If?” is not simply:
What if the bow doors had been closed?
It is:
What if the warnings, weaknesses and unsafe assumptions had been recognised before a catastrophe was needed to expose them?
Because on the night of 6 March 1987, the difference between a routine crossing and one of Britain’s worst modern maritime disasters was measured in minutes — and in a pair of open doors.
What If? is a free series from Billy’s book club exploring pivotal moments in history and asking how events might have unfolded if one decision, warning or circumstance had changed.
To discover the full documented story of the disaster, the investigation and the failures that led to it, read The Herald of Free Enterprise by Bill Stewart.