Oil tanker sinks 'with no hope of saving the crew'

AFP

The stricken Iranian oil tanker off the coast of Shanghai burst into flames from end to end and sank yesterday, eight days after it caught fire following a collision with a cargo ship.

Earlier, a Tehran official said there was no hope of saving some 30 missing crewmen before the ship sank, amid concern over an oil spill.

The Sanchi, carrying 136,000 tons of light crude oil from Iran, had been burning since colliding with the CF Crystal, a Hong Kong-registered bulk freighter, about 300 kilometers east of the Yangtze River estuary on January 6.

At around midday yesterday the ship “suddenly ignited,” with the entire vessel burning fiercely and a pall of smoke between 800 and 1,000 meters high, China’s transport ministry said, releasing dramatic pictures of the entire vessel obscured by thick black smoke.

China’s State Oceanic Administration said that it had detected fires and dense black smoke in a large area around the Panama-registered oil tanker at around 10am yesterday and the entire ship sunk at around 3pm.

A large amount of spilled oil is still burning on the surface around the site, the administration said, adding it will monitor the oil spills and evaluate the accident’s impact on the marine environment.

“There is no hope of finding survivors among the members of the crew,” Mohammad Rastad, spokesman for the Iranian rescue team dispatched to Shanghai, told Iran’s state broadcaster in Tehran before the tanker went down.

Rastad said information from members of the Crystal crew suggested all the personnel on the Sanchi died in the first hour of the accident “due to the explosion and the release of gas.”

“Despite our efforts, it has not been possible to extinguish the fire and recover the bodies due to repeated explosions and gas leaks,” Rastad said.

The Sanchi, which had been headed to South Korea to deliver its cargo, had a crew of 32, all Iranians except for two Bangladeshis. Only three bodies have been recovered.

Scenes of anger and grief erupted in Tehran as news of the deaths reached dozens of family, friends and colleagues of the crew, who were waiting desperately for information about their loved ones at the National Iranian Tanker Company headquarters.

Chinese rescuers on Saturday recovered the tanker’s “black box,” China’s transport ministry said, without specifying exactly what had been retrieved.

A reporter with China’s state television CCTV aboard a plane from the State Oceanic Administration reported seeing wreckage from the Sanchi, oil on fire, and spilled fuel covering a 10-square-kilometer area. 

“The oil spill situation is very serious,” CCTV quoted the reporter as saying on social media.

But the television channel earlier also cited Zhang Yong, a senior engineer with the State Oceanic Administration, as playing down fears of a spill.

“Because this is a light crude oil spill, relatively speaking it has a much smaller impact than other oil spills, because this kind of oil is especially volatile — most of it has entered the atmosphere, so it’s had less impact on the ocean,” Zhang was quoted as saying.

“This area should be considered the open sea, very far from places where people live, so the human impact should be minimal,” Zhang aded.

Rescue efforts had been difficult because at 89 degrees Celsius, the vessel’s compartments were too hot for workers to withstand for long, CCTV quoted He Wang, an expert from Chinese oil company Huade Petrochemical, as saying.