The Stellar Daisy accident shocked the shipping industry back in 2017 as only two crewmembers managed to survive. Now, the International Stellar Daisy Network is demanding from the South Korean Government to retrieve the second Voyage Data Recorder (VDR) from the sunken bulk carrier.
In February, the survey and ocean exploration company, Ocean Infinity, discovered the vessel; The VDR discovered in the scene showed partial voyage information.
Specifically, according to Ohmynews, the results do not include voices of crew members at the last moments before the carrier sank. Stellar Daisy’s VDR has two data chips.
One of them is damaged with cracks, which made data extraction impossible. From the other data chip, only 7% of the data has been recovered, according to the International Stellar Daisy Network.
The Network now questions if everything was done properly in the process, noting that ‘Ocean Infinity has no previous experience of recovering VDRs. Mismanagement during three weeks from VDR retrieval and data extraction could cause damage to the VDR data chip.’
The Network continued that it’s not a common thing to discover a cracked VDR, given that VDR is a tamper-proof device designed to withstand the extreme shock, impact, pressure and heat which could be associated with a marine incident (fire, explosion, collision, sinking, etc.).
Overall, the Stellar Daisy sank on 31 March 2017, while transporting iron ore from Brazil to China. As a result, 22 of the 24 crew died. The search operation deployed four Autonomous Underwater Vehicles (AUVs), which in a course of 72 search hours, explored about 1,300 km2 of seabed. Representatives of South Korea, who gave Ocean Infinity the contract to carry out the search, and the families of Stellar Daisy’s crew, were present during the operation.
