Search ends for missing crew members of sunken ship near Antarctica

2010-12-14 06:50:21 GMT+7 (ICT)

SEOUL (BNO NEWS) -- A search operation for seventeen missing crew members of a South Korean fishing boat which sank in the waters off Antarctica was suspended on Tuesday, leaving those missing presumed dead.

The 614-tonnes vessel called the No. 1 Insung was near Antarctica when it began to sink at around 4.30 a.m. South Korean time on Monday. A total of 42 people, among them South Koreans, Chinese and Indonesian crew members, were on board.

As of early Tuesday, five bodies and twenty survivors were recovered from the water. They were all found soon after the accident happened as another fishing vessel, the No. 707 Hongjin, was only several miles (kilometers) away.

"With the sea temperatures around 2 degrees Celsius (50 degrees Fahrenheit), survival times for crew members in the water would be very short," said Dave Wilson, who coordinated the search and rescue mission on behalf of the Rescue Coordination Centre New Zealand (RCCNZ). "The medical advice is that those who did not suffer cardiac arrest on entering the water would likely be unconscious after one hour, and unable to be resuscitated after two hours."

Wilson said given that more than 30 hours had elapsed since the vessel sank, there was no reasonable expectation that any further survivors would be found. "Unfortunately the Southern Ocean is an extremely unforgiving environment," he added.

It is still unknown what caused the vessel to sink and why no distress communication was received prior to it sinking. "We understand the vessel sank very quickly and the crew had to abandon ship without time to put on adequate emergency gear," Wilson said.

Throughout Monday and throughout the night, vessels continued to search for survivors or bodies, with no results. And while weather conditions were mild on Monday, search efforts were being hampered by blizzard and fog on early Tuesday.

Of the forty-two crew members, eight were South Korean, eight were Chinese, eleven were Indonesian, eleven were Vietnamese, three were Filipinos, and one was Russian.

-- © BNO News All rights reserved 2010-12-14

Hmmm, 2 degrees Celcius equals a balmy 50 degrees Fahrenheit... not bloody likely. Lets see, by my conversion, it would be 35.6 degrees F.