Estonia: A ship whose memory lingers on

Kari Lehtola looks back over 14 years

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By Tuomas Kaseva
     
      It is 14 years and one and a half months since the sinking of the passenger ship, the Estonia, but the ship will not leave Kari Lehtola alone.
      Not many weeks have passed in these years that someone has not asked about the disaster. For example Lehtola has to go through the events leading up to the tragedy almost every time that he goes to the dining car of a train.
      The night before this interview was also spent with the Estonia. The car ferry appears again in a new book by Ilkka Remes. Fortunately Lehtola took a speed reading course 45 years ago, so two and a half hours were enough to finish the book
      “A confused book, and in the middle of it he started to go on about how Finnish researchers followed behind the Swedish intelligence service, and that we helped keep matters linked with weapons deliveries a secret.”
      “Bulls**t!”
     
During his career as an investigator into major disasters, Kari Lehtola gave a face to dozens, even hundreds of accidents.
      Whenever anything crashed, burned, or sank, stepping in front of the flash cameras was a man wearing foggy glasses, with his hair combed down with water. He would explain, in minute detail, the sequence of events of whatever accident had taken place.
     
The first time that Lehtola was involved in an accident investigation was in 1978, when ten people were killed in Hanko when a pleasure boat, the Viking, sank. However, that was a mere isolated jump for the Ministry of Justice official.
      Accidents became Lehtola’s main line of work in the 1990s, when the Accident Investigation Board of Finland was set up. There was no shortage of work: an accident with a military armoured vehicle in Taipalsaari, the passenger ferry Tallink running aground, a fire at a home for the elderly in Maaninka, the capsizing of the Finnbaltic, a push-barge ... and the Estonia.
      “Only one case was never conclusively resolved. In the explosion at the Forcit factory, the evidence material blew into the sky. The best that we could do was to put forward a couple of alternate theories of the cause.”
     
Although the list of cases is a long one, Lehtola’s conversation always ends up with the Estonia. The accident, which claimed the lives of 852 people, was overwhelming, both in the destruction that took place, and in the extent of the investigation that followed.
      When Lehtola started his red Mitsubishi van in his front yard in Oulunkylä in the north of Helsinki, he could hardly have known what was coming.
      Two weeks later he drove back from Turku, exhausted, and with the Mitsubishi full of file boxes.
     
But although Lehtola was dealing with a major disaster, he was not especially troubled. He does not boast about it, but Lehtola’s eyes never welled up and he always slept well.
      “I was protected by the fact that an accident usually never managed to hit me on the emotional level. You are probably familiar with the concept of pathological humour. Perhaps something like that has been one way that investigation groups like us have been able to handle the matter.”
     
Nevertheless, the sorrow came close. Lehtola was in the habit of giving his telephone number to next of kin affected by the disasters that he investigated. They were told that they could call day or night. Many calls began with technical questions, but ended with stories that the relatives told.
      Although Lehtola himself never went into therapy, he is pleased that therapy is available to the next of kin nowadays.
      “What is horrible is that grief is a business for some. After the Estonia sinking, money collected by organisations of next of kind were spent on private Estonia investigations. And the final outcome was that the information that the private investigations came out with was complete nonsense.”
     
Lehtola was born in Helsinki, but his childhood was spent in Ähtäri in Ostrobothnia, where his mother took the 11-month-old Kari during the Winter War.
      Lehtola’s childhood was “poor but happy”. His father served on the front and his mother worked in a nearby armoury. Home was a state-owned rented cottage. There was often a shortage of food.
      Lehtola says that he heard later how “my late mother was damn worried” to see signs of malnutrition in her only child. “Mother even traded her national costume for 24 eggs.”
     
After the war, an elementary school was set up in the village of Inha. Lehtola did well in social studies and mathematics. “I might have succeeded in languages, if I hadn’t been so damn lazy.”
      English was not taught at all in Ähtäri at the time, and it is a language that could have been useful in his career.
      “My knowledge of English is limited to 100 words. When someone else opens his mouth, I don’t understand anything.”
      “Sometimes I would attend international conferences, but their usefulness was rather questionable, I suppose.”
     
Lehtola has been retired for seven years. He has been involved in politics. Previously he served on the Helsinki City Council as a Social Democrat. In the recent elections he got a seat on the local council of the municipality of Karjalohja, where he currently lives.
      His new home in Karjalohja will be completed soon. It is in the same area as the house where author Mika Waltari spent the summers of his childhood, which Lehtola has been busy restoring to its original state, using what he admits to being somewhat limited carpentry skills. “It is a long project. There was a three-year gap because of the Estonia alone.”
     
And so the conversation turns back to the ship.
      Lehtola has been in the papers again this autumn, shooting down the theories of the accident put forward in Ilkka Remes’s book..
      “Over the years, it has been claimed that the Estonia was carrying drugs, nuclear weapons, weapons prototypes, explosives, a ship’s container full of Kurdish refugees... And weaponry had actually been transported in the ship.”
      “But I have been comforted by the knowledge that even if a van packed full of dynamite had been driven onto the car deck and detonated, it would still not explain why the locking mechanism of the bow door visor broke through so-called slow fatigue.”
      Lehtola sighs. He has had to explain the impossibilities of these theories for more than 14 years, on the streets, and in dining cars.
      So how many open questions does Lehtola himself have about the Estonia?
      “Significant ones, you mean? None at all.”
     
Helsingin Sanomat / First published in print 12.11.2008


Previously in HS International Edition:
  Estonia investigator refuses to cooperate on new dive (7.9.2000)
  Estonia dives over: One Eagle heads south (30.8.2000)
  Estonia disaster commemorated in three Baltic countries (29.9.2004)
  New M/S Estonia report: military technology carried on doomed ship (20.12.2006)
  Finnish investigators angered by new report on Estonia sinking (7.4.2006)

Links:
  Accident Investigation Board

TUOMAS KASEVA / Helsingin Sanomat
tuomas.kaseva@hs.fi