This just in about the crash of a 40 foot walkway leading to the Queen Mary II when she was in dry dock in France. On November 15, 2003, the shipyard which built what was at the time the world’s largest cruise ship hosted a party on the ship. The day before the reception, the yard built a make shift walkway leading to the ship. It was built not according to any written plans but according to memory. When the reception was underway and hundreds of people were crowded onto the walkway, it collapsed sending the people down some to their deaths. There were 16 wrongful deaths and 29 personal injuries. The ship builder and the subcontractor which built the walkway were put on trial in France for manslaughter. Here are the details:

Shipbuilder on trial over gangway deaths on liner
SUSAN BELL
IN PARIS
THE French shipbuilder of the giant luxury liner Queen Mary 2 went on trial yesterday charged with the manslaughter of 16 people and injuring 29 after they fell 18 metres to the ground when a walkway collapsed during a visit.

The shipbuilder, Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique, Endel, which it subcontracted to build the walkway, and four employees of each firm face up to three years’ imprisonment for involuntary injury and manslaughter.

However, a lawyer for the 130 civil parties in the case asked yesterday for the charges be requalified as “a deliberate fault”, for which the maximum sentence is five years in prison.

The accident, on 15 November, 2003, took place while the Queen Mary 2 - the world’s largest liner at the time of its construction - was in dry dock at Saint Nazaire in western France undergoing pre-delivery sea trials.

The shipbuilder and its subcontractor are accused of failing to carry out obligatory security checks before allowing hundreds of guests to use the narrow 14 metre-long walkway to board the ship for a guided tour. The two companies are also accused of having employed insufficiently trained personnel.

An investigation into structural reasons for the accident concluded that the design of the walkway was deficient. It was installed “without plans and from memory” the day before the tragedy, said the president of the court, Alain Le Dressay.

Among the 45 victims of the accident were 26 employees of a cleaning firm and 19 guests who had been invited to visit the liner.

“I want justice to be done,” said Marlene Cassard, a survivor who lost her husband, a senior executive at Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique, her brother and three close friends.

“I thought it was the end. I fell on people and people fell on me,” she said. “I opened my eyes and found myself in the midst of torn bodies and heaps of metal.”

Her son, Eric, added: “We just want the defendants to say ‘yes, we messed up’, for them to assume their responsibilities.”

Yves Violette, a representative of the 130 civil plaintiffs, said: “We are well aware that nobody wanted to kill anyone, but the victims need to know the truth.”

The husband of a woman who died in the tragedy said: “How do these people sleep at night?”

Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique maintains it had full confidence in Endel. The contractor has claimed the walkway was being used in conditions for which it had never been intended. “The walkway should never have been used by members of the public,” Endel’s lawyer, Thierry Dalmasso, told the court.

Patrick Boissier, the head of Les Chantiers de l’Atlantique, said: “We have undeniably a moral responsibility for the accident.”

The trial is due to continue until 23 October.

AN OCEAN GIANT
THE 150,000-tonne, 17-storey, Queen Mary 2 ocean liner entered service in January 2004 with her maiden voyage from Southampton to Fort Lauderdale, Florida, followed by a series of Caribbean cruises and a trip to Rio de Janeiro.

She was overtaken last year as the world’s largest cruise ship by the Finnish-built Freedom of the Seas, which can carry up to 4,400 passengers compared to the Queen Mary’s 2,620 - but her height, length, and waterline breadth still remain unsurpassed by any other passenger ship.

Approximately 3,000 craftsmen in Saint-Nazaire, spent some eight million working hours on the ship, and a total of 20,000 people were directly or indirectly involved in her design, construction, and fitting out.

In total, 300,000 pieces of steel were assembled into 94 “blocks” off the dry dock, which were then stacked and welded together to complete the hull and superstructure.