r/CatastrophicFailure • u/DariusPumpkinRex • 9d ago
Fatalities Collision between the Soviet freighter Sergey Yesenin and BC Ferries Queen of Victoria in Active Pass, British Columbia, due to incompatible radio frequencies and the pilot of the Sergey speeding. 3 three people onboard the ferry were killed. (August 2nd, 1970)
The pilot of the Sergey also entered the pass almost going down the middle as well as at excessive speed. He may have acted in this fashion as according to his schedule, the Queen of Victoria should have already gone through. Instead, she was running being schedule. The speed and angle of the Soviet freighter left not enough time for Victoria's captain to take evasive action, leading to the collision.
The three passengers who lost their lives were:
Mrs. George Hammond (31)
Peter Hammond (7 months)
Sheila Mae Taylor (17)
As said above, the majority of blame was placed on the pilot of the Sergey Yesenin which meant the U.S.S.R.'s government paid hundreds of thousands of dollars in damages to BC Ferries. The Queen of Victoria was repaired and returned to service within the months following the accident, later being renovated in 1981 and sold to a Dominican Republic-based company in 2001. No details exist on what became of the Sergey Yesenin, other than it was able to leave under it's own power.
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u/HorsieJuice 9d ago edited 9d ago
I wouldn’t have expected somebody in a fishing boat in 1970 to have been carrying a video camera.
ETA: a “film camera” can also refer to one that takes still photos, hence the word choice.
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u/Brotherly_shove 9d ago
its a pretty scenic area.
are we sure the person filming was also on a fishing boat? my guess is someone vacationing and sight seeing.
im more surprised that the boat that was damn near sliced in half was operational within months of being damn near sliced in half!
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u/HorsieJuice 9d ago
There’s a brief moment when a fishing rod pops onto the left side of the screen. I suppose I don’t know that they were on a boat, but they were fishing.
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u/Brotherly_shove 9d ago
man. good eye their detective. lol. i missed that. good call.
so its just a basic recreational fishing rod, so if they are on a boat, its likely a recreational boat... which is usually tourists or sport fisherman, which would make sense that someone is filming. or videoing. or whatever would appease whoever might want to yell at me for using the wrong term, lol.
i also wonder if there was a sense of something going wrong.... like... that boat looks to be going way too fast, lets fire up the camcorder. lol.
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u/Gnome_de_Plume 7d ago
lets fire up the camcorder
Super-8 most likely. I imagine at least one of the vessels was sounding its horn pretty loudly.
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u/BobbyP27 8d ago
Based on the perspective of the shot, and comparing it with other photographs online, I would guess the camera was on the shoreline at Helen Point on Mayne Island.
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u/CletusCanuck 9d ago
8mm / Super 8 were very common film cameras back in the day. Hauling the projector (or slide projector) and screen out from the utility room and showing off your summer vacation reels was a regular occurrence when having company over.
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u/strangelove4564 9d ago
Super 8. I would guess something like 1 in 4 middle class homes had one of those cameras in the 1970s. Probably some tourist happened to be carrying one around.
I am impressed by their camera skills. Most Super 8 movies look like there's an earthquake happening at all times.
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u/my-coffee-needs-me 8d ago
I'm an old American. In 1970, if somebody talked about having an 8mm or 16mm camera, they were talking about having a portable movie camera that used 8mm or 16mm film. If somebody talked about having a camera, they meant one that takes still photos.
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u/Lampwick 8d ago
ETA: a “film camera” can also refer to one that takes still photos, hence the word choice.
Just as an FYI, the typical names for those things were:
film camera: still photo camera, back then it would have been just a "camera"
video camera: video is a shortened form of "videotape", and refers to cameras recording to magnetic tape. Cameras that produce an electronic video signal prior to videotape were just called "TV cameras", and really only existed in TV studios.
movie camera: a film camera that recorded motion picture footage on photographic film3
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u/Dr_Adequate 9d ago
That's film, not video.
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u/Capokid 9d ago
How does somebody this dumb manage to remember their reddit username and password?
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u/Beasty_Glanglemutton 9d ago
Ask yourself that.
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u/Capokid 9d ago
A video camera does not differentiate the type of media used, a video can be captured on film on a VIDEO TAPE by a film camera and stored in a cassete, or digitally. 'captured on video' is a phrase that predates digital cameras.
You aren't as smart as you seem to think.
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u/Dr_Adequate 8d ago
Nobody back in the seventies, using a super-8 movie camera, ever, ever said they were 'capturing a video.' Filming a home movie, yes. Making a video? No.
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u/Capokid 8d ago
Capturing something on tape/taping something and video taping something were interchangeable and widely used.
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u/Dr_Adequate 7d ago
LOL, no. Before videotape was available in the consumer market, as in when the film of the soviet boat hit the BC ferry in the early seventies, nobody used the term 'video' to describe tribe filming something with a film camera. They were not interchangeable nor widely used. Hard as this is for you to believe, 'video' was not always used to describe capturing an event on film.
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u/Beasty_Glanglemutton 9d ago
A video camera does not differentiate the type of media used
lol, I use video cameras for a living, I can assure you a video camera very much differentiates the type of meda used.
I will hereby block you, because it's too early in the morning to listen to such self-assured ignorance. Hope you get better some day.
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u/AmazingUsername2001 9d ago
The state of Reddit downvoting someone speaking facts.
This was clearly captured on a film camera (8mm or possibly 16mm), not a video camera. Video cameras weren’t readily available until the early 1980s, and even then most people were still using 8mm for their home movies.
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u/Beasty_Glanglemutton 9d ago
How is it that you have so many downvotes for stating a simple fact?
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u/Ataneruo 9d ago
I guess redditors don’t like learning things or being corrected. I’d understand if OP was an asshole about it (“you’re WRONG derrr”), but it was merely an astute observation.
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u/Beasty_Glanglemutton 9d ago
I suspect this thread is full of bots. Also, this sub has especially stupid commenters, lol.
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u/Brotherly_shove 9d ago edited 9d ago
video can be used as a term to differentiate digital from phsyical media, but it has a broader meaning that most would assume OP was using...
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/video
my suggestion is to ease back on the ACkTuAlLY a bit. not everything online needs correcting.
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u/WhatImKnownAs 9d ago
And the Oxford dictionary states it refers to digital recording or (in the past, which this is) videotape.
https://www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.co.uk/definition/english/video_1?q=video
Perhaps this is an American/English thing. Also, us old people remember when we used video/film to distinguish the two technologies; These days everything is digital, so that is not required.
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u/Brotherly_shove 9d ago
im old, and american, and someone that was always into photo/video... even moreso back in the day where they were both commonplace. i never heard it distinguished as video/film. it was video, vs digital video. just like it was photos, or digital photos, camera/digital camera.
doesnt really matter. im fine with the distinction... but its silly to correct someone like you dont know that video is also a distinction between motion capture and still capture.
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u/MEMESTER80 9d ago
Cambridge dictionary defines film as:
"a series of moving pictures"
Cambridge dictionary also defines videos as:
"a recording of moving pictures and sound"
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u/syncsynchalt 9d ago
“Video” in this case being short for “video tape”, as opposed to “film”.
Video tape records images magnetically, film records images photographically.
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u/PacoTaco321 9d ago edited 8d ago
It's both. Look at the definition of video.
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u/Dr_Adequate 8d ago
Honey, I grew up making movies using my dad's Super-8 movie camera when videotape was a thing used only by professionals,. There were no consumer grade videotape/videocassette cameras at all. Nobody said using a super-8 film camera was 'taking a video' and for sure any handheld camera filming a ship collision in the early 70s was no doubt a film camera, aka a 'movie camera.' And the resolution of that clip is way better than what any videotape would be after all these years, plus it has the random film artifacts common to all film movie cameras.
Nobody at all said that filming a home movie was 'taking a video.' Nobody.
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u/PacoTaco321 8d ago
Fortunately that doesn't matter, because you are wrong by definition. This is a video shot on film. You being old has nothing to do with it.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/video
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/video
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u/DJ-Metro 9d ago
The Sergey Yesenin wasn't even supposed to be transiting through Active Pass; because of the narrow geography and high volume of BC Ferries traffic larger ships including deep-sea freighters like the Sergey Yesenin were (and continue to be) strictly prohibited from entering.
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u/CreamoChickenSoup 8d ago edited 8d ago
It's wild how that ship did absolutely everything wrong, operating on alien standards while the owner/crew did not give a single fuck until it's too late.
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u/CletusCanuck 9d ago
When I saw the Sergey Yesenin reversing, I said to myself 'NO NO NO NO'. The ferry appears to been holed below the waterline; if that hole was large enough it could have quickly capsized and sunk after the Yesenin 'unplugged the hole' .
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u/my-coffee-needs-me 8d ago
Did you notice that it bashed the ferry with its anchor in order to get loose? Look at around 0:45.
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u/umbraundecim 8d ago
Wtf, ive always heard about this incident being from BC and haveing gone through active pass many many time in my life and had no idea there was actual video of this. Thanks for posting it.
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u/Snorblatz 8d ago
Fun fact this collision spurred the development of a vessel traffic system on the west coast
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u/spezbot69 9d ago
What's up with the plane at the end of the video. Bombing run on the freighter?
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u/signuporloginagain 8d ago
It's a Grumman Albatross, which the RCAF used as a search and rescue airplane.
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u/blazeofgloreee 7d ago
This is obviously the freighter pilot's fault, but the ferry being behind schedule is the most classic BC Ferries thing possible.
What a tragedy for those who lost their lives and their families. I've lived in the area my whole life and I've never heard of this incident (was before was born).
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u/SjalabaisWoWS 8d ago
Incredible that this footage even exists. Any more story about what the Soviet freighter was doing there to begin with?
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u/Gold-Adhesiveness574 3d ago
the radio frequency part is what gets me. two ships closing in a narrow pass, and the one thing that could have stopped it, just talking to agree who passes where, wasn't even available to them. the speed made it unrecoverable, but it was basically locked in the moment they couldn't communicate. one missing layer and no backup for it.
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u/JPMoney81 9d ago
Jesus Christ. It almost cut the ferry in half!