Scandinavian Star ferry fire (1990)

The fire

MS Scandinavian Star, a car and passenger ferry built in France in 1971, caught fire at about 02:00 on 7 April 1990 while operating the Oslo, Norway–Frederikshavn, Denmark route for the shipping line DA-NO Linjen. The ferry was carrying 395 passengers and 97 crew. Recently converted from a casino ship, it had a crew trained in only ten days rather than the six to eight weeks considered reasonable, and many crew members did not speak English, Norwegian, or Danish. An insurance inspector had already found the ship's fire preparedness deficient, citing defective fire doors among other problems. Once discovered, the fire spread rapidly from deck 3 through decks 4 and 5; stairwells acted as chimneys, and burning melamine wall panels released toxic hydrogen cyanide and carbon monoxide. Fire doors failed to close automatically, and ventilation fans meant to clear exhaust fumes instead helped draw the fire upward. The captain activated the general alarm, ordered the ship abandoned, and sent a Mayday call, but he and the crew left before all passengers had been evacuated. The vessel was towed to Lysekil, Sweden, where firefighters extinguished the blaze after about ten hours. At least 158 people died aboard the ship, and another died of injuries roughly two weeks later, bringing the toll to 159; 136 of those killed were Norwegian. More than 100 forensic specialists worked to identify the severely burned remains. The ship had a history of undisclosed fires, including two in 1988, one of which knocked out its power and emergency oxygen system.

A disputed investigation

An Oslo police investigation initially attributed the fire to Erik Mørk Andersen, a Danish truck driver with three prior arson convictions who died in the blaze. That conclusion has since been disputed. A 2009 review found evidence of several separate fires that would have required more than one person to set, and a 2013 report by an independent Norwegian research group alleged that as many as nine crew members deliberately started six fires, potentially for insurance fraud, though that report was itself controversial and unproven. In 2014, Norwegian authorities officially reopened the investigation and dropped the case against Andersen. In March 2015, Norway's Parliament removed the statute of limitations for arson so that prosecution would remain possible, and in February 2016 the Danish investigator who had led the original 1990 inquiry stated publicly that he believed the fire had been sabotage carried out by members of the crew.

Continuing scrutiny

In 2020, a six-hour Nordic television documentary revisited the case, presenting further allegations that at least four separate fires had been deliberately set and that Andersen bore no responsibility for any of them. The documentary prompted a majority of the Danish parliament to vote for a government hearing into the disaster later that year. No one has ever been convicted in connection with the fire, and its cause remains officially unresolved. The disaster also led international maritime regulators to comprehensively amend passenger-ship fire-safety rules in 1992.