“That ship also looked awfully topheavy with all those shipping containers stacked.”
More than likely. She wasn’t a celled containership as far as I know. More like a big floating multi level parking lot as she was a RO RO vessel. Those containers on deck would have been fine under normal circumstances, but in such a storm I believe they contributed to the list when some of the lashings broke, and the stacks of locked together containers laid over to the opposite side the waves were approaching, and hitting the vessel. It most definitely would have been a contributing factor.
Since the thinking is that power was lost so that the ship would have been wallowing in troughs, then any stacked up ship would have been in severe danger. Any major company that is stacking them up faces this risk. I wonder how Lloyds charges for those things. Better have very good power. What is a celled containership, and how does that affect safety?