Raging Waters, Abandoned Cars, Layers of Mud: More Than 150 Killed in Spanish Floods
When some of the worst flash floods in decades in eastern Spain hit, Diego Hernandez was passing the city of Valencia on his way to his mother’s funeral.
As he and his wife drove on Tuesday night, a thin stream of muddy water started to appear under their tires. Soon, it was almost three feet high and nearing the top of their seats. Within seconds, another car had piled on top of theirs.
The couple fled their vehicle, initially hanging onto a tree as trash cans, car wheels, sofas and chairs streamed by in the raging floodwaters.
“It was like an apocalypse,” he said.
They were hardly alone. Thousands of people found themselves trapped — in cars, in trucks and in homes — as heavy rainfall pounded southern Spain this week.
The death toll jumped to at least 158 people on Thursday. Others are still missing, and rescuers feared finding more bodies, said Margarita Robles, Spain’s defense minister, as teams dug into the mud.
Some areas in eastern and southern Spain received anywhere from a month’s to a year’s worth of rain in a single day, or even in eight hours. Rain fell into Thursday morning as cities and towns surveyed the damage.
Some districts of Valencia and Catalonia, on Spain’s eastern coast, remained on high alert, with more rain expected during the day, the national weather agency said.
Thousands of households were without electricity or a phone connection, the authorities said. More than a dozen municipalities reported having no clean drinking water, emergency services in Valencia said.
Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez traveled to Valencia and visited some of the worst-affected areas after the government declared three days of national mourning. The leader of the main opposition party, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, also visited the areas.
“We are not going to leave the people of Valencia on their own,” Mr. Sánchez said after visiting an emergency coordination center there. He also urged people to stay home, “because in that way we will be saving lives.”
Members of the Emergency Military Unit, civil guards and police officers were participating in the search-and-rescue operation, Mr. Sánchez said.
King Felipe VI of Spain also instructed the Royal Guard to join the search-and-rescue operation. “All of us join this shared pain,” the king said.
At least 155 people had been confirmed dead in the Valencia region alone, the emergency coordination center in Valencia said in a statement. Regional governments in Castilla-La Mancha and Andalusia said three people had died in those regions.
In and around the city of Valencia, the regional capital, water had gushed into ground-floor apartments, trapping some people. It flooded shopping centers, dog shelters and even a nursing home, killing some of its residents. Other victims died in places where it did not rain, swept away by water that came roaring through.
On Wednesday, as coroners worked to identify the bodies, some of the hardest-hit villages remained cut off, with roads and bridges broken or inundated by the flash floods.
Dozens of roads remain closed, including major highways, the Civil Guard said. Three of Valencia’s subway lines have collapsed, and train service, including a high-speed link to Madrid, may be suspended for as long as three weeks, said Óscar Puente, the transport minister.
Assessing the damage in Valencia, Mr. Puente said “the entire regional road network is seriously damaged.”
The authorities have deployed security forces to guard against looting. The national police said they had arrested 39 people in one operation and recovered “a multitude of stolen items.”
Thousands of trucks and cars were abandoned on streets and highways, buried in thick layers of mud. Their owners were housed in makeshift shelters, unable to make it home. Dead bodies were trapped in some vehicles, the Transport Ministry said.
Toni Zamorano, 59, sat on the ground outside a basketball hall in Valencia that had been turned into a dormitory. He was driving home when his car filled with water on Tuesday night. He pushed his door open and jumped into the water. Within a few minutes, he saw that his car had been completely covered in water and was floating away.
“I started swimming, walking, swimming,” he said. He was alone on a stretch of flooded highway, with the water up to his chest, as sofas, computers and cars floated by.
“Cars were like boats,” he said. “I honestly thought it was all over.”
Mr. Zamorano lives in the village of Sedavi, a few kilometers south of Valencia. He has not been able to make it home yet.
“I don’t know what I’m going to find,” he said. “My whole town must be devastated, and I don’t know what my home is like.”
Victims of the flooding in Valencia will receive a minimum of 6,000 euros, about $6,500, as part of a €250 million aid package announced by Carlos Mazon, the leader of the Valencia region.
Mr. Hernandez, 56, did not make it to his mother’s funeral. His wife eventually managed to cling onto a lamppost, but he did not, and was carried away. He tried to grab floating tires and poles until he managed to enter a bus that was stuck in the stream. The upper part of the bus was still dry, and he took off his wet clothes and wrapped himself in its curtains.
At about 4 a.m. on Wednesday, rescuers came for him. For hours, he had no idea what had happened to his wife.
He did not have his cellphone, and none of the emergency workers he spoke to had any information. Mr. Hernandez and his wife have known each other since they were both children, and they had been married nearly 30 years.
Finally, on Wednesday morning, he called his brother, and got the news he was waiting for: She was alive. She also blamed him for not holding onto the lamppost as she did, his brother said.
If she was complaining about him, “it’s a sign she is doing well,” Mr. Hernandez said with a laugh, as he stood smoking outside a sports hall while wearing a sweater from the local basketball team that the rescuers had given him.
Inside, the eight courts had been turned into a dormitory, with dozens of mattresses laid geometrically below the backboards.
In Madrid, Ana de la Cuadra frantically exchanged text messages with members of her family, who were trapped in Catarroja, a town in southern Valencia.
“They’ve warned that another wave of water may come,” Cristina de la Cuadra, her sister, said via text messages, accompanied by videos of rivers water gushing down the street. “We are in bad shape, without water or electricity.”
Soon after, she switched off her phone to conserve its battery.
Mark A. Walsh contributed reporting.
What Sank the Tech Tycoon’s ‘Unsinkable’ Yacht?
The seas were calm when the Bayesian, the $40 million superyacht of the British tech mogul Michael Lynch, dropped anchor off Sicily.
It was a celebratory voyage. But before dawn, a storm blew in.
Lightning crackled. Winds neared hurricane strength. The sky dumped a blinding torrent. The yacht drifted out of control. Then it was gone.
A New York Times investigation discovered that the Bayesian’s most striking feature — its extra-tall mast and the engineering to accommodate it — made the yacht vulnerable to capsizing.
The Bayesian was an outlier. All the other boats in the same series, from the same Italian manufacturer, had two masts instead of one.
Technical documents obtained by The Times and computer models show the yacht was susceptible to being knocked over in a storm and would sink quickly.
Fifteen survivors, bloodied and broken, made it to a life raft. But seven died as the Bayesian plunged to the bottom, where divers have searched for answers.
It all happened so fast.
Karsten Borner was planted on the halfdeck of his sailboat in the slanting rain. A grizzled mariner who had survived many storms, he was anchored in the same cove as Mr. Lynch’s yacht, at the same time, as the squall blew in during the early hours of Aug. 19.
Luckily, he was already awake. As the wind picked up, he and his crew scurried around closing hatches, clearing the decks and firing up the engines to keep his boat steady.
He couldn’t see much, but in flashes of lightning, he kept catching glimpses of Mr. Lynch’s long, sleek sloop bobbing behind him. It was only a few hundred feet away and its super-tall aluminum mast — one of the tallest ever made — was lit up with bright white lights, swaying in the wind.
Then he lost sight of it. The rain fell like gravel, drawing a curtain around his boat. When he looked up again, he was stunned. The Bayesian was disappearing, at a very odd angle, into the sea.
In the weeks since, Mr. Borner, who has sailed for more than half a century, still can’t believe the yacht sank in front of him. There weren’t any big waves that night, he said. Both boats were close to shore. His own sailboat — a converted tugboat built in East Germany 66 years ago — weathered the same squall just fine. And that other craft was a superyacht of the superrich, gleaming blue, 184 feet long and drawing stares wherever it went.
“It’s a mystery,” Mr. Borner said.
That mystery has rippled around the globe as several investigations into the tragedy unfold. It has vexed maritime experts and compounded the grief of family and friends of the seven people who perished, including Mr. Lynch and his teenage daughter, Hannah, whose bodies were found trapped below deck.
The investigations turn on three central questions: Why did the Bayesian, which now lies 160 feet at the bottom of the Mediterranean, sink so fast? Did the yacht have any design flaws? Did the captain or crew make any fatal mistakes?
The Bayesian was a one-of-a-kind sailboat, built by Perini Navi, a famous Italian yacht maker. The company says the group of 10 superyachts that the Bayesian belonged to was “the most successful series of large sailing yachts ever conceived.”
But the Bayesian was different. Its original buyer — a Dutch businessman, not the Lynches — insisted on a single, striking mast that would be taller than just about any other mast in the world, according to the Italian yacht maker and three people with detailed knowledge of how this boat was built.
That decision resulted in major engineering consequences that ultimately left the boat significantly more vulnerable than many comparable superyachts, The Times investigation has found.
— More than a dozen naval architects, engineers and other experts consulted by The Times found glaring weaknesses in the Bayesian’s design that they said could have contributed to the disaster.
— Basic design choices, like the two tall doors on the side of the deck, increased the Bayesian’s chances of taking on dangerous amounts of water if high winds pushed the boat over toward its side, several naval architects said.
— Witness and survivor accounts revealed how this deadly sequence unfolded in real time: The yacht fell completely on its side and sank within minutes.
Seemingly small details on any boat — like how close air vents are to the waterline, or where a ship’s ballast is placed in the hull — might not sound decisive on their own. But when taken together, experts said, they appear to have compromised this vessel.
Such built-in vulnerabilities may not have been solely responsible for the yacht’s sinking, of course. The storm’s unexpected ferocity definitely played a part in the calamitous stew of events. Italian investigators are also looking hard at the actions of the Bayesian’s captain and crew.
Giovanni Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, the company that owns Perini Navi, said that when operated properly, the Bayesian was “unsinkable.” He maintains that the yacht was carefully engineered to survive bad storms, and he has put the blame for the tragedy squarely on the crew, accusing them of making a chain of fatal errors.
“I know, all the crew knows, that they did not do what they should have done,” he said. (Crew members have not revealed much, saying they are under a “gag order.”)
Mr. Costantino said the design was not at fault and that the towering mast, which stood 237 feet tall, had not created “any kind of problem.”
“The ship was an unsinkable ship,” he said. “I say it, I repeat it.”
The world of superyachts is incredibly opaque, the exclusive realm of some of the richest people on the planet, and exactly how these multimillion dollar boats are designed, approved and owned remain closely guarded secrets.
Making sure a superyacht is fit for the seas is a job left to a network of private companies and public agencies, and the Bayesian’s design was approved by the American Bureau of Shipping and the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
All the attention this tragedy has received could result in a closer look at yachting regulations. Several naval engineers in different countries who have gained access to the Bayesian’s documents say that as yachts have become more elaborate and subject to owners’ whims, others may be in danger as well.
The Bayesian’s technical documents show just how vulnerable it was. Even without major errors by the crew, the ship could have sunk in a storm that other boats survived, engineers say.
“We can look at it in hindsight and say they were in the wrong place at the wrong time. No, that’s not true,” said Tad Roberts, a Canadian naval architect who has nearly 40 years of experience designing boats, including superyachts.
“This boat had definite shortcomings that kind of uniquely made it vulnerable to what happened.”
The Victory Voyages
A cruise on the Bayesian was a voyage into luxury. The days were typically warm, sunny and calm, and finished off with plates of fresh langoustine and sumptuous chocolate. Hours would pass lounging on sun chairs, swimming in the sea or maybe taking out a kayak while the Bayesian crew, in branded polo shirts, watched vigilantly from the deck.
“It felt like a beautiful hotel that was floating on water,” remembers Abbie VanSickle, a New York Times reporter who was invited aboard in July because her husband, Jonathan Baum, was part of Mr. Lynch’s legal defense team.
Mr. Lynch had been acquitted in June in a criminal case in which he was accused of fraudulently inflating the value of his software company when he sold it to Hewlett-Packard for $11 billion. He could have been sent to prison for years. To celebrate his win — and his freedom — he asked friends and lawyers to cruise the Mediterranean with him.
Mr. Lynch seemed proud that his boat had one of the world’s tallest masts — a little booklet in her cabin even said as much, Ms. VanSickle remembered. Whenever they chugged into a harbor, she said, “people would take photos of it constantly because it was so crazy-looking in comparison to other boats.”
Most of the time, though, the Bayesian operated like a motorboat, powered by two enormous diesel engines. During her five-day voyage, Ms. VanSickle said they sailed only once, for just a few hours. But when they did, the boat moved through the water so smoothly, she said, it felt like they were “gliding.”
A few weeks after Ms. VanSickle got off and returned to her life as a reporter in Washington, Mr. Lynch welcomed aboard his next batch of guests. This was the second celebratory voyage, beginning in mid-August, and Mr. Lynch had planned to get back to London, where he lived, around Aug. 20.
Among the 12 passengers were Mr. Lynch; his wife, Angela Bacares; their 18-year-old daughter, Hannah, who was soon off to Oxford; one of his lead lawyers, Chris Morvillo, and his wife, Neda Nassiri, who designed handcrafted jewelry; Jonathan Bloomer, an international banker and trusted adviser, and his wife, Judy, a psychotherapist celebrated for her charity work.
Mr. Lynch also invited some younger colleagues, including a couple who brought a baby on board. The crew was led by James Cutfield, an experienced New Zealand sailor, backed up by a first mate, a ship engineer, several deckhands and hostesses, totaling 10 in all.
Mr. Lynch was on the rebound, fired up about the possibility of starting a nonprofit to help exonerate people wrongly accused of crimes, said Sir David Davis, a friend and prominent conservative British politician.
Mr. Lynch sent Sir David a text message offering the choice of lunch or dinner in London on Aug. 22, when he was back.
An Unanticipated Storm
The Mediterranean Sea was flat on Aug. 18. But bad weather was moving south, from Naples toward Sicily. The Italian Air Force’s Meteomar forecast warned of scattered thunderstorms, gusts of wind and a rough sea. Several yacht captains said the weather warning was far from specific or extraordinary.
Mr. Borner, the captain who for decades has been running cruises and diving excursions on his old sailboat, the Sir Robert Baden Powell, was finishing up his own trip, picking his way west along the Sicilian coast.
The wind was blowing from the northwest and Mr. Borner figured that the curvature of Sicily’s rugged coastline at Porticello, a small fishing village built around a cove, would shelter him. He arrived in the cove that afternoon, went ashore with his guests and grabbed some pizza.
“It was a nice evening,” he remembered.
While they were in town, the Bayesian chugged into the same cove. It dropped anchor at 9:35 p.m., about a third of a mile from land. As Mr. Borner went to sleep around 11, the night was clear. The lights of the Bayesian’s mast glowed behind him.
At midnight on Aug. 19, the Italian Coast Guard put out a warning for a northwesterly Gale Force 8, a serious storm in which winds could reach 46 miles per hour. But the gale was predicted to hit hundreds of miles from Sicily.
Around 3 a.m., Mr. Borner woke up to help some of his passengers catch an early flight from Palermo, Sicily’s biggest city. But as the winds picked up rapidly, whipping the cove into a frothy chop, he scratched his plan to go ashore.
He and his crew shut the portholes and skylights and started the engine, to keep the bow pointed into the wind and prevent the boat from being hit on its side.
On the Bayesian, a young deckhand, Matthew Griffiths, later told the authorities that when the wind hit 20 knots, he woke up the captain, according to a person close to the crew (who said that neither of them was allowed to speak publicly). The captain then gave the order to wake up others, the person said.
At 3:51 a.m., the Bayesian started to drift — first 80 meters one way, then 80 meters another, its data transmitter shows. Maritime experts said this meant it was being blown around and probably dragging its anchor. It’s unclear whether the engines had been started.
At 4:02 a.m., a camera mounted on a boat in Porticello’s cove shows bright blue flashes of lightning. Three minutes later, another at a Porticello cafe captures the wind tearing down deck umbrellas. So much rain hits one of the cameras, it looks as if it’s being blasted with a hose.
Mr. Borner estimated that the wind gusts reached 60 knots, or nearly 70 miles an hour — just below hurricane strength — and said they had pushed his boat onto its side about 15 degrees, a serious lean but nothing close to capsizing.
Reports immediately after the disaster raised the possibility that the Bayesian had been hit by a tornado-like disturbance called a waterspout, but the authorities don’t think that happened. Still, the wind was doing something dangerous: It was changing direction.
According to a nearby weather station, it was blowing west-southwest then southwest, then north-northwest. This increased the chances of getting ambushed by a random gust that could slam into the side of a boat, which can tilt even a big vessel.
A third video shows the Bayesian rocking back and forth and beginning to lean. Then the lights on its giant mast blink out — all but the top one, which was powered by a battery.
By 4:06 a.m., the rain has turned into a blinding cascade. That same minute, the Bayesian’s location signal cuts out. Mr. Borner’s crew squinted through the nearly impenetrable haze of sea spray and rain and spotted a large object in the water. They first thought it was a reef.
“But I knew there was no reef,” Mr. Borner said.
It was the Bayesian, they now believe, knocked onto its side.
“Two Minutes” to Tragedy
At 4:34 a.m., a red emergency flare, bright as a meteor, shot into the sky. The storm had passed, and Mr. Borner and his first mate jumped into a small boat, zooming across the black water.
First they saw cushions floating. Then a flashing light. Then a life raft built for 12 packed with 15 people, bloodied and soaked to the skin, including a baby.
One person had a cut on the head, another on his chest. Some had already been bandaged. They were cold, wet and dazed. They were too shocked, Mr. Borner said, to say what happened.
As he loaded the survivors into his boat and began to head back to the Sir Robert, one woman pleaded with him not to leave.
“Please,” she told him. “Continue searching.”
Some people were still missing.
Mr. Borner decided to unload the survivors onto the Sir Robert, then send his small boat back. His crew gave them blankets and dry clothes. Some survivors were so shaken they needed to be led below deck by hand.
Nobody said much, Mr. Borner remembered.
One man told him: “I was the captain of this.”
Another said the boat had “sunk in two minutes.”
The woman who had begged him to keep searching sat huddled on the deck.
“Are you OK?” Mr. Borner asked her.
“No,” she replied. “I am not OK at all.’’
Mr. Borner said he later realized it was Angela Bacares, wife of Mr. Lynch and mother of Hannah Lynch. Neither had made it onto the life raft. (Salamander Davoudi, a spokeswoman for Lynch family, told The Times that Ms. Bacares was not speaking to the media because she was grieving and wanted privacy.)
A few hours after, a string of ambulances arrived at Palermo’s main hospital. Dr. Domenico Cipolla, the head of pediatric emergency, evaluated the youngest survivor, a 1-year-old girl.
The baby was OK, Dr. Cipolla said, but she had experienced quite an ordeal. She and her mother had been sleeping on a sofa on deck because of the rough sea, Dr. Cipolla said, when the boat suddenly lurched and threw them to the deck.
A moment later the boat turned completely on its side, the baby’s father told the doctor, flipping his hand as he described it. The doctor said the mother told him that she and her baby were hurled into the water and that her baby nearly slipped away. But then she grabbed her and swam to a nearby life raft, which was designed to deploy automatically.
The parents were later identified as Charlotte Golunski, a colleague of Mr. Lynch, and James Emslie. Ms. Golunski did not respond to several messages left for her, and efforts to reach Mr. Emslie were unsuccessful.
Mistakes by the Crew?
The biggest question that investigators are focused on is how the Bayesian filled with water so fast. To many in the yachting world, it doesn’t make sense.
The boat had been built with several watertight compartments under the deck, to prevent water from spreading from one area to others. And it had been approved as safe by the Maritime and Coastguard Agency, part of Britain’s Department for Transport, and by the American Bureau of Shipping, a private company that reviews boat designs.
On top of that, one Italian official and underwater video footage broadcast on Italian television indicated that there were no holes or other structural damage visible in the hull.
Even so, the Bayesian, like many superyachts, had all kinds of openings in which water could theoretically get in: big air vents for the engines; smaller ones for the kitchen, crew quarters and guest cabins; large glass doors at the back and the sides so that people could walk onto the deck; and various hatches for crew and passenger access.
In interviews with Mr. Costantino, the chief executive of the Italian Sea Group, and his spokeswoman, the company accused the crew of leaving hatches open during the storm, including a doorway-size opening on the left rear of the hull, close to the water line. The spokeswoman claimed that hatch was the only place where so much water could have come gushing in.
The company speculated that the crew did not close a watertight door between this hatch and the engine room. A flooded engine room might explain the sudden blackout that killed the mast lights and then, a few minutes later, the location transmitter.
But witnesses, an Italian official familiar with the investigation and the underwater video challenged the company’s versions of events. The footage appeared to show the watertight door to the engine room closed, and the Italian official said the divers had not seen any open hatches on the hull.
Mr. Borner also said that after rescuing the captain, he asked him if he had shut the hatches. The captain said he had. Mr. Borner shared pictures taken by his guests a few moments before the Bayesian sank that appear to show that hull hatches were closed.
A Compromised Design?
The Bayesian’s origins go back to 2000. That year, Perini hired Ron Holland Design, a premier naval architectural firm, to design a series of 56-meter sailboats, said a person with knowledge of the timeline. As the superrich have become even richer, yachts have grown steadily bigger, and Perini was emerging as one of the world’s best-known builders of superyachts, often defined as motor yachts or sailboats longer than 24 meters, or 79 feet.
The Ron Holland firm, based in Ireland at the time, drew up plans for the hull, keel, rudder and, crucially, the placement of the masts — two masts. All other features, like the cabins, decks and vent system, were designed by Perini, according to the person, who did not want to be identified because of the possibility of legal action connected to the sinking.
In 2003, the first yacht in the series hit the water, the Burrasca (which means storm in Italian). Over the next four years, Perini built three more 56-meter superyachts from these blueprints, all with two masts. On Perini’s website, they look nearly identical.
Then came the Bayesian.
Construction on its hull began in 2005 at a shipyard in Tuzla, Turkey, according to the boat’s documents. But the original buyer for this yacht didn’t want the standard two-mast design. Instead, the Italian Sea Group said, he wanted the boat to be built with one large mast for better sailing performance.
That led to a radically different design, said three people with knowledge of what followed, and a cascade of modifications — some to accommodate the gigantic mast, and some apparently for stylistic or other reasons.
The most obvious departure from the previous Perini ships was the mast itself. Beyond being exceptionally tall — more than 40 feet higher than the original foremast — it was also very heavy, at least 24 tons of aluminum, possibly more. This alone would have challenged the boat’s stability, because so much weight was high above deck.
Since then, many yacht makers have switched to lighter, carbon-fiber masts.
“Technology moved on,” Mr. Costantino said.
Naval engineers pointed out that the heavier a yacht is up high, the more ballast it often needs down low — weight at the bottom of the boat to lower its center of gravity and resist its tendency to lean over.
Small notes on hull diagrams in the Bayesian’s documents show that the Turkish shipyard revised the ballast in July 2006, nearly 10 months after the keel was laid, which is one of the first steps of production.
“Values updated as from information by Yildiz,” the notes say in all caps, naming the shipyard.
But where this ballast was placed was curious, maritime experts said. Rather than spreading the ballast evenly across the bottom of the boat — which would have guaranteed the best stability — the builders stacked it toward the rear of the ship’s hull.
“When I first saw this, I couldn’t believe it,” said Mr. Roberts, the naval architect. “It made no sense to me.”
The ballast seems to have been pushed toward the rear of the boat to offset the single, heavy mast closer toward the front, Mr. Roberts concluded. He said he had never seen the main ballast used in such a design tactic before.
That was not the only change, experts said. A single mast would have plunged almost directly through the wheelhouse, an interior station where the ship can be controlled, so that was moved, too. A deck lounge was added, along with two tall doors on the sides. None of the other Perini yachts in the 56-meter series have these design elements.
The Bayesian sat lower in the water than other yachts in the same Perini series, said Stephen Edwards, the Bayesian’s captain from 2015 to 2020. Naval architects said this by itself would make it easier for water to pour through vents and other openings when the boat leans on its side.
Whenever a boat leans too far and water starts gushing in through open doors or vents, it can set off a dangerous downward spiral that is hard to stop and that can sink a boat in minutes.
Such risks are calculated and laid out in a lengthy, proprietary document — kind of a safety bible — for many vessels certified to ply the seas.
The Times has obtained that safety bible, called a stability book, for the Bayesian. Copies of the 88-page book are also sweeping through a global community of experts who are obsessively trying to solve the puzzle of how and why the boat sank. More than a dozen of those experts, including naval architects and engineers, found weaknesses in the Bayesian’s design that they said could have contributed to the disaster.
The stability book obtained by The Times was written before the Lynches bought the boat in 2014, when the yacht was called the Salute and owned by John Groenewoud, a Dutch businessman. In an email, he confirmed signing a contract for “the boat with 1 mast” in 2005, but declined to discuss any safety implications that may have had.
The Times obtained the stability book for another 56-meter Perini yacht, with two masts instead of one. A comparison of the boats showed that the Bayesian was significantly less stable.
Specifically, the data shows that the two-masted ship could lean at least 10 degrees farther onto its side before taking on dangerous amounts of water.
The documents also show that the Bayesian could begin taking on some water at angles that appeared to violate the safety threshold set by the British Maritime and Coastguard Agency.
The Italian Sea Group responded that the boat was in line with regulations and had been approved. When asked how that happened, an agency spokesman refused to clarify, citing the continuing investigations.
The other boat’s documents also showed that the sister yacht sat a little higher in the water than the Bayesian did, as Mr. Edwards emphasized. And under many circumstances, experts said, the sister ship had a better center of gravity and was more resistant to capsizing, two additional factors that would have made it safer.
“The other boat is, at least on paper, a better boat,” Mr. Roberts said.
To make boats safer, naval architects said they religiously ensured that vent openings are far from the water line. When showed a picture of a 56-meter Perini yacht that, like the Bayesian, had vents built into the hull, Philipp Luke, a Dutch naval architect, started violently shaking his head.
“No, no, no,” he said. “You don’t do that.”
In the end, several naval architects said, all these flaws may have come together at the worst time — in a sudden storm.
Two Spanish naval engineers, Guillermo Gefaell and Juan Manuel López, calculated that the sheer size of the Bayesian’s mast and rigging made the yacht a wind catcher, even with the sails down.
Writing for the Association of Naval and Ocean Engineers of Spain, they used a computer model to calculate what would have happened to the Bayesian if a strong gust of roughly 54 knots, around 62 mph, hit its side. Under those conditions, the Spanish engineers estimated, the Bayesian could lean dynamically and take on nearly a ton of water each second through an engine room vent.
In an interview, Mr. Gefaell noted that he, like almost everyone else, did not know everything that happened that night. But if the gusts were as strong as Mr. Borner estimated — 60 knots — the punch would have pushed the boat to an even more severe angle, his calculations showed, very quickly knocking the boat all the way over onto its side, as the witnesses recounted.
At that point, Mr. Gefaell said, “the boat was certainly lost.”
A Watery Maze
Within hours of the sinking, emergency divers plunged in. Their mission: Find survivors.
The Bayesian sat 160 feet below the surface, leaning on its right side on the seabed. The once-gleaming cabins were clogged with chairs, clothes, curtains and the enormous number of seat cushions that Ms. Bacares had brought onboard to make the boat more comfortable. The search was made even more difficult and dangerous, divers said, by the many mirrors installed below deck that now reflected back their lights in a disorienting, watery maze.
On the first day, divers found the body of the yacht’s chef, Recaldo Thomas, floating near the boat. Over the next three days, they found the bodies of Mr. Lynch and four other passengers in a small cabin near the foot of a narrow staircase leading down from the deck to the passenger’s quarters. Finally, divers discovered the body of the last missing person, Hannah Lynch, trapped behind furniture in a nearby cabin.
One Italian official said the six passengers might have been trying to climb the main guest staircase when a surge of water poured down the stairs and knocked them back into the cabins. With the boat flipped on its side, water gushing in, and total darkness, it would have been nearly impossible for anyone below deck to escape, experts said.
The Italian authorities plan to raise the wreck to inspect it more closely. That could take months. In the meantime, at least two major investigations are unfolding, one by Italian prosecutors and the other by the British Marine Accident Investigation Branch.
From the first weeks after the accident, Italian prosecutors said that Mr. Cutfield, the captain, and two of his crew were under investigation.
Mr. Cutfield hasn’t said a word publicly and did not respond to messages asking for comment. Several crew members, when approached at a hotel in Sicily in August, said they had all been put under a gag order. When asked who imposed it, they responded: “No comment.”
In the yachting world, Mr. Cutfield has some solid references. Turgay Ciner, a Turkish industrial magnate and sailing enthusiast, employed him to run his yacht for 12 years.
“He never made any mistakes,” Mr. Ciner said.
Mr. Ciner, speaking by phone from Istanbul, recounted a bad storm near Capri about 10 years ago that Mr. Cutfield handled. They were sailing on another 56-meter Perini yacht, the Melek, a two-masted boat in the same series as the Bayesian. He said that Mr. Cutfield performed very well and was “one out of a hundred.”
Why Mr. Cutfield left in a lifeboat with the other survivors when a half dozen passengers were still missing is a matter Italian prosecutors are looking into.
But several yacht captains have defended Mr. Cutfield, saying that whatever happened that night, it happened very quickly.
When a boat sinks fast, said Adam Hauck, an American yacht captain, there’s not much hope for anyone still onboard. The adage of the captain going down with the ship, he said, is antiquated and unrealistic.
“It’s not like a Titanic movie where you’re going through the water and you can just look in the rooms,” Mr. Hauck said. “At some point, you can’t go back for people.”
Top U.S. Officials Are in the Middle East to Try to Jumpstart Cease-Fire Talks
Top Biden administration negotiators visited the Middle East on Thursday for a last diplomatic drive before the American election, though hopes were not high for quick agreements to pause the fighting.
With Israel battling Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon, William J. Burns, the C.I.A. director and a top American negotiator, met with officials in Cairo on Thursday, including the Egyptian president, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi. At the same time, President Biden’s Middle East coordinator, Brett McGurk, and his de facto envoy on the conflict with Hezbollah, Amos Hochstein, held talks in Israel with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and with Yoav Gallant, the Israeli defense minister.
The purpose of the meetings was to de-escalate the wars in Gaza and Lebanon, according to statements by some of the governments involved. But progress in cease-fire talks seems unlikely in the coming days, with the election looming on Tuesday in the United States, and the various sides expressing a reluctance to compromise.
Officials briefed on Israel’s internal thinking, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss sensitive diplomacy, have said that Mr. Netanyahu is waiting to see the election results before committing to a diplomatic trajectory. And Hamas has rejected proposals for a temporary truce in Gaza, saying it will only consider a permanent end to the fighting.
In Cairo, Mr. Burns and Mr. el-Sisi discussed “ways to push negotiations forward” toward a cease-fire and the exchange of hostages held in Gaza for Palestinian prisoners held in Israel, a statement from the Egyptian leader’s office said. About 100 hostages captured in the Hamas attack in Israel last October remain in Gaza, and Israeli officials believe about two-thirds are still alive.
Earlier in the week, during talks among envoys from Israel, the United States and the two countries that mediate for Hamas, Egypt and Qatar, possible proposals emerged for an initial, temporary cease-fire in Gaza that would lead to the return of a small group of hostages.
Mr. Burns’s discussions in Cairo were expected to focus on refinements to those scaled-down proposals, which American officials hope could prod both Israel and Hamas to at least soften their positions and allow bargaining to resume in earnest after months of false starts.
Multiple versions of a potential Gaza proposal are still under discussion. One would release female hostages along with male captives over 50 in return for a set number of Palestinian prisoners, according to a person briefed on the discussions, who also spoke on the condition of anonymity. In that version, the fighting in Gaza would pause for some time, but likely less than the six weeks envisioned in a previous deal negotiators had been pushing.
In another proposed deal, Hamas would release four hostages over roughly 10 days, according to a second official briefed on the negotiations.
Mr. Gallant’s office said he and the U.S. envoys had discussed the conflict with Hezbollah in Lebanon and the efforts to free the hostages.
Mr. Burns, Mr. Hochstein and Mr. McGurk departed the region after the meetings, and a U.S. official said that the discussions in Israel focused on not only on reaching a cease-fire in Lebanon but also Iran, Gaza and efforts to secure the release of hostages.
But officials in Washington and the Middle East remain pessimistic that Hamas would accept any of the new deals. Hamas officials have repeatedly said they would only consider a deal that permanently ends the war — a stance that Taher el-Nunu, a Hamas spokesman, reiterated on Thursday.
“Hamas supports a permanent end to the war, not a temporary one,” he said in an interview with Agence France-Presse.
Some U.S. officials believe that Hamas leaders, like some Israeli officials, see waiting as advantageous. Israel’s longstanding conflict with Hezbollah, which reignited when the Lebanon-based armed group began firing on Israeli positions last October in solidarity with Hamas in Gaza, has ballooned from a regular but relatively restrained exchange of fire into Israeli ground operations and airstrikes inside Lebanon.
The war there has steadily expanded over the last month. Israel has hit the capital, Beirut, and cities like Baalbek far from its border, and said on Thursday that it hit Hezbollah targets in southern Lebanon. Lebanon’s health ministry said had killed and injured paramedics on Thursday, and with four civil defense dead.
Hezbollah, too, has continued attacks. On Thursday, local officials in Metula, in northern Israel, said that projectiles fired from Lebanon had struck an agricultural area, killing four foreign workers and an Israeli farmer.
A separate rocket strike killed two people in an olive grove, according to Israel’s emergency service. The attacks across the border have forced tens of thousands of people in Israel and more than a million in Lebanon to evacuate their homes.
After Mr. Netanyahu’s meeting with the U.S. officials, his office released a statement focused on the conflict with Hezbollah, emphasizing Israel’s need to “thwart any threat to its security from Lebanon, in a way that will return our residents safely to their homes.” The statement did not mention Gaza.
On Wednesday, a draft cease-fire proposal to address the fighting with Hezbollah was published by Israeli news media, prompting a U.S. National Security Council spokesman, Sean Savett, to warn that such reports should be viewed with skepticism.
“There are many reports and drafts circulating,” he said in a statement. “They do not reflect the current state of negotiations.”
The draft suggested that Hezbollah would withdraw from the Israel-Lebanon border in accordance with a United Nations Security Council resolution enacted in 2006 that was never implemented. It also suggested that the Lebanese military, which has been sidelined by Hezbollah in southern Lebanon in recent decades, would fill the void, preventing Hezbollah from rearming.
Analysts said that Hezbollah would balk at that arrangement, suggesting that it would be unlikely to gain traction.
“It’s too early to discuss these points, and I think it won’t be accepted by Hezbollah,” said Kassem Kassir, an analyst close to Hezbollah.
Myra Noveck and Hwaida Saad contributed reporting.
Iranian Officials Threaten Retaliation for Israeli Strikes
Two top Iranian officials on Thursday said Iran planned to respond to Israel’s recent attacks, according to Iranian media, threatening to continue a cycle of retaliation between the countries.
“Iran’s response to the Zionist aggression is definite,” said Gen. Ali Fadavi, the deputy commander of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards Corps, according to Iranian media. “We have never left an aggression unanswered in 40 years. We are capable of destroying all that the Zionists possess with one operation.”
General Fadavi’s remarks, made to Lebanon’s Al Mayadeen television station, were the first statement from an Iranian official indicating that Iran intended to retaliate to Israel’s Oct. 26 strikes on its soil. The escalating tit-for-tat cycle of direct attacks between Iran and Israel over the last six months has taken the region to the brink of an all-out war, but neither side appears to be standing down.
The second Iranian official, the head of the supreme leader’s office, Gholamhossein Mohammadi Golpayegani, also said on Thursday that Iran planned to deliver “a fierce, tooth-breaking response” to Israel’s “desperate action,” according to Tasnim, a semiofficial news agency affiliated with the Revolutionary Guards.
It remains unclear how and when Iran plans to respond, whether it could still be persuaded not to, whether the remarks could be bluster to gain leverage in negotiations, or whether Iran would wait until after the American elections next week to take action.
In deciding whether to respond, Iran’s leaders face a gamble: A military response meant to deter Israeli attacks could backfire, inviting even more destructive attacks that could harm its economy and infrastructure.
That scenario played out this month, when Iran launched about 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, calling it retaliation for Israeli assassinations of top leaders of Hamas, Hezbollah and its own military commanders. In turn, Israel hit air defenses around several critical oil and petrochemical refineries and a major port in Iran, as well as giant fuel mixers that make propellant for Iran’s missile fleet.
Iranian officials and state media have publicly downplayed the severity of Israel’s attacks, saying that Iran’s air defenses successfully thwarted most of Israel’s missiles and drones.
But analysts say that Israel had effectively taken out some of the important air defense systems around Tehran and the energy sites, making Iran particularly vulnerable to future attacks. Israel’s strikes on missile plants targeted Iran’s missile production capacity not its arsenal of missiles, which could still be placed on mobile launchers to attack Israel.
“They are willing to take this risk to not appear weak and prove they have a grip on power for both domestic and international credibility,” said Sina Azodi, an expert on Iran’s military and an adjunct professor at George Washington University.
Mr. Azodi added that despite the rhetoric emerging from Iran, it was currently at a draw with Israel in terms of two direct attacks against the other. Another strike, he said, “would come across as Iran escalating but they do not see this as an existential threat.”
Three Iranian officials familiar with the war planning said Iran’s supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, had instructed the Supreme National Security Council on Monday to prepare for attacking Israel. The officials said Mr. Khamenei made the decision after he reviewed a detailed report from senior military commanders on the extent of damage to Iran’s missile production capabilities and air defense systems around Tehran, critical energy infrastructure and a main port in the south.
Mr. Khamenei said the scope of Israel’s attack as well as the number of casualties — at least four soldiers from the military were killed — were too large to ignore, and that not responding would mean admitting defeat, according to the three officials.
The officials spoke on condition of anonymity because they were not authorized to speak publicly. They said that military commanders were preparing a list of dozens of military targets inside Israel, but that the attacks would very likely happen after the American election because Iran was concerned that another spike of tension and chaos in the region could benefit former President Donald J. Trump in his re-election campaign.
The commander in chief of the Quds Forces, the external branch of the Guards responsible for supporting and training the regional proxy militant groups, Gen. Ismail Ghaani, said in a statement on Thursday that Iran would stand with its ally Hezbollah, which is locked in a war with Israel in Lebanon and has come under heavy attacks on its leadership and arsenal.
Israeli leaders have also indicated they are ready to make more direct attacks on Iran, if necessary.
Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said on Thursday that the recent attacks on Iran had made it so Israel could inflict even more damage in a second round of strikes.
“We hit its underbelly. The boastful talk by the Iranian regime’s heads cannot conceal and compensate for the fact that Israel now has greater freedom to operate in Iran than ever before,” Mr. Netanyahu said in a speech to Israeli military personnel.
Germany Shuts 3 Iranian Consulates Over Execution of German-Iranian Man
The German government said on Thursday that it was closing three Iranian consulates in response to Iran’s execution this week of a German-Iranian dual citizen, which Germany’s foreign minister called an “assassination,” as tensions grow between the West and Tehran.
“We have repeatedly made it unmistakably clear to Tehran that the execution of a German national will have serious consequences,” Annalena Baerbock, Germany’s foreign minister, said as she announced the closing of the consulates in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Munich. Ms. Baerbock, speaking in New York, noted that she recently discussed the case directly with Abbas Araghchi, Iran’s foreign minister.
The execution of Jamshid Sharmahd, 69, came as war rages between Israel and Iran-backed forces Hezbollah and Hamas, conflicts that have led Iran and Israel to launch the most serious strikes against each other in a long history of hostility. Western countries have tried to keep the conflict from escalating into a full-fledged war between Iran and Israel.
“The fact that the assassination has now taken place in light of the latest developments in the Middle East shows that a dictatorial regime of injustice like that of the mullahs does not act following normal diplomatic logic,” Ms. Baerbock added.
Shutting down multiple consulates is rare and shows how seriously Germany has taken the execution. The only other time Germany has closed so many consulates of a single country was last year, when it shut five of Russia’s six consulates after Russia expelled several German diplomatic staff members.
On Monday, the Iranian government announced that it had executed Mr. Sharmahd, who it claimed helped orchestrate a deadly terrorist bombing in the Iranian city of Shiraz in 2008. Mr. Sharmahd, who had been living in the United States, was abducted while visiting Dubai in 2020 and taken to Tehran, according to his family. There he was convicted in what human rights organizations and the German government called a show trial.
Chancellor Olaf Scholz of Germany expressed outrage on Monday that Mr. Sharmahd had never been able to defend himself in court. “The execution of Jamshid Sharmahd by the Iranian regime is a scandal that I condemn in the strongest possible terms,” he said in a statement on Monday.
Born in Tehran, Mr. Sharmahd moved to Germany with his father at the age of 7 and received German citizenship in 1995. Germany’s foreign ministry, which has in the past negotiated prisoner swaps with Iran, tried to help free Mr. Sharmahd for years but failed. When the death sentence was announced in 2023, the German government sent two Iranian diplomats home in protest.
After the execution on Monday, the German foreign ministry announced that it had summoned a top official in the Iranian embassy in Berlin to protest, and had directed its ambassador in Tehran to lodge a formal complaint directly with the Iranian foreign minister.
Gazelle Sharmahd, Mr. Sharmahd’s daughter, lambasted the failed efforts of both the German foreign ministry and the U.S. State Department to free her father. She also demanded proof of her father’s death. Posting on social media early on Tuesday, she wrote: “Did they once again take the word of the lying jihadists? We deserve proof!”
From California, where he lived at the time he was seized and taken to Iran, Mr. Sharmahd ran the website of a little-known group known as Tondar. He recorded videos claiming that the group was arming people to fight against Iran. The group, which has taken responsibility for attacks in Iran, is committed to overthrowing the government in Tehran and restoring the monarchy.
The estimated 300,000 Iranian nationals living in Germany will now have to be served by the Iranian Embassy in Berlin, which remains open.
Leily Nikounazar contributed reporting.
A Catastrophic Deluge Leaves Parts of Spain in Ruins
Flash flooding across Spain killed at least 158 people this week after torrential rain left towns and villages submerged and turned streets into rivers in the eastern and southern parts of the country. In some areas, several months’ worth of rain fell in a single day.
Since Monday, when the deluge began, residents in affected areas have struggled to clear mud- and tree-covered streets. Cars and trucks were swept away and dumped in piles, blocking roads. Rescuers have carried out evacuations by helicopter and boat, and wide swaths of the country have been left without electricity.
Most of the deaths occurred in the region of Valencia, on Spain’s eastern coast. With roads impassable and bridges broken, some communities were completely cut off.
The death toll is expected to rise as some people are still missing, and more rain is forecast.
Thursday
Malaga
A man awaits rescue at the Guadalhorce River railway bridge near the town of Alora.
Valencia
A supermarket ravaged by the floods.
Valencia
Debris along a mud-covered street in Paiporta on Thursday.
Valencia
Heavily damaged houses in the flood-ravaged municipality of Chiva.
Madrid
Donations for flood victims include shovels, buckets, water, nonperishable food and clothes.
Valencia
A boat lying in field affected by heavy rains and flooding.
Valencia
Lining up to collect water from a broken pipe. The floods left widespread damage to infrastructure.
Valencia
Rescuers conducting search operations via helicopter.
Valencia
Cleaning up a store covered in mud.
Wednesday
Valencia
A mudslide on a flooded street.
Albacete
Rescuing an injured person from the debris.
Valencia
Preparing to spend the night in a restaurant converted into an emergency shelter.
Teruel
A resident washing a broom after cleaning his flood-damaged home.
Valencia
Soldiers examining a van that was tossed into a building by floodwaters.
Malaga
Cleaning out mud and water from an inundated home.
Valencia
Rail tracks undermined and littered with debris after the flood.
Valencia
Checking messages after alerts were sent out to avoid travel.
Tuesday
Valencia
Raging floodwaters carrying off cars and gutting buildings.
North Korea, in the Spotlight Over Ukraine, Launches a Long-Range Missile
North Korea launched an intercontinental ballistic missile off its east coast on Thursday, shortly after the United States and South Korea condemned the country for deploying troops near Ukraine to join Russia’s war effort.
The missile was fired from Pyongyang, the North Korean capital, at a deliberately steep angle so that it reached an unusually high altitude but did not fly over Japan, the South Korean military said in a brief statement. The missile landed in waters between North Korea and Japan.
The military said it was analyzing data to learn more about the missile, but that it believed it was an ICBM. North Korea last tested a long-range missile in December, when it test-fired its solid-fueled Hwasong-18 ICBM.
North Korea confirmed later Thursday that its military had launched an ICBM, saying that its leader, Kim Jong-un, had been present. North Korea “will never change its line of bolstering up its nuclear forces,” Mr. Kim was quoted as saying by the North’s official Korean Central News Agency.
The launch on Thursday was the North’s first major weapons test since September, when it fired a new type of Hwasong-11 short-range ballistic missile, which it said could carry a “super-large” conventional warhead weighing 4.5 tons.
On Wednesday, South Korean defense intelligence officials told lawmakers that North Korea might conduct long-range missile tests before the American presidential election next week. They also said that the North was preparing to conduct its seventh underground nuclear test, in a bid to raise tensions and gain diplomatic leverage with the next U.S. president. North Korea conducted its last nuclear test in 2017.
In recent weeks, North Korea has posed a fresh security challenge to Washington and its allies by sending an estimated 11,000 troops to Russia to fight in its war against Ukraine. Thousands of them, outfitted with Russian uniforms and equipment, have moved closer to the front lines, preparing themselves for possible battle against Ukrainian troops, South Korean and American officials said.
The U.S. secretary of defense, Lloyd J. Austin III, and Defense Minister Kim Yong-hyun of South Korea met in Washington on Wednesday for annual defense talks between the allies. They said they “condemned in the strongest terms with one voice” the cooperation between Russia and North Korea that “has expanded beyond transfers of military supplies to actual deployment of forces.”
Mr. Austin said he was increasingly concerned that President Vladimir V. Putin planned to use the North Korean soldiers to support Russia’s combat operations in its Kursk region, where Ukraine has held territory since invading in August.
“Putin has gone tin-cupping to get weapons” from North Korea and Iran, Mr. Austin said. “Turning to a pariah state like North Korea for troops just underscores how much trouble he is in.”
Besides the troops, North Korea has sent 16,000 shipping containers full of artillery shells, rockets and missiles to Russia since the summer of last year, according to Washington and Seoul. When Mr. Putin met with Mr. Kim, the North’s leader, in Pyongyang in June, they restored a Cold War-era treaty of mutual defense and military cooperation between their countries.
That agreement raised fears in Washington and Seoul that Mr. Kim was forming an alliance with Russia to counter the one between South Korea and the United States, which also features a mutual defense treaty. In return for providing weapons and troops to Russia, North Korea was also seeking to get advanced technologies from Moscow to improve its missiles and satellite-launch programs, U.S. and South Korean analysts said.
Days after Mr. Putin’s visit to Pyongyang, North Korea said for the first time that it had tested technology for launching several nuclear warheads with a single missile.
South Korean defense officials said that the launch appeared to indicate some improvement in North Korea’s ICBM capabilities. The missile fired may have been a new solid-fuel ICBM, said Lee Sung-joon, a spokesman for the South Korean military. When North Korea’s leader visited a munitions factory in September, state media released photos showing what looked like a new and bigger ICBM.
Thursday’s ICBM flew for a longer time than any previous one North Korea has launched — approximately 86 minutes, according to Japan’s Defense Ministry.
North Korea has launched several ICBMs in recent years, including ones with solid propellant that are easier to move and hide, and faster to launch, than its old liquid-fuel versions. But all of those missiles were fired at steep angles, rather than being sent across the Pacific.
North Korea has never demonstrated an ability to fire an ICBM on a normal, flatter trajectory. Another technological hurdle the North has yet to show it has cleared is so-called re-entry technology. After soaring into space, an ICBM warhead must endure intense heat and friction as it crashes back into the earth’s atmosphere and toward its target.