[John Rogers]

I remembered an early news cast said the container ship had changed course without any broadcast over marine channels of what they were going to do. If both ships were going parallel and the larger ship changed course, by the time the DDG62 caught it, the collision was unavoidable! In the 20+ years I was in the Navy, every ship I was on hit something or another ship/boat. The USS Enterprise CVN65 ran aground in the channel coming into Pearl Harbor because a large freighter moved into the middle of the waterway when they said they were going somewhere else. Fortunately the torpedo belt on the Big E just scraped heavily on the bottom! The USS Bainbridge CGN25, USS Truxtun CGN35 and USS Texas CGN39 all bumped/scraped into small freighters in the Singapore harbor when approaching anchor position!

One great item in this case was the fact the super structure was made of steel and not like earlier ships made of aluminum. It did hit right where the starboard radar array is located so there is not a lot of reinforcement steel in that area.