Albany NY - 3 Sailors Remain Missing from Capsized Cargo Ship

ALBANY -- Hope dimmed late Wednesday of finding three sailors who disappeared when a 289-foot Dutch cargo ship capsized in icy waters at the Port of Albany, setting in motion an intensive investigation and recovery effort that U.S. Coast Guard authorities believe will continue for months.

Coast Guard Cmdr. John E. Cameron said there is no indication of foul play or negligence and the ship had cleared inspection earlier this year in Hawaii, but investigators are trying to reconstruct the accident to determine what caused the ship to tip on its port, or left, side as its 18-man crew used the vessel's cranes to load the second of two locomotive-size generators.

"Preliminarily, we have not found that any limits have been exceeded," said Cameron, a Staten Island-based safety operations chief who's coordinating the investigation into one of the worst maritime disasters at the port. Because the ship was holding only about 20 percent of its weight capacity when the accident took place Tuesday afternoon, investigators are checking if the vessel's ballast was properly balanced.

Meanwhile, 22 police scuba divers took turns exploring the Stellamare's submerged hull throughout Wednesday. Overcast skies combined with the inky water of the Hudson River forced them to blindly feel their way through the ship's bowels in 45-minute shifts. Divers said the task is difficult because of underwater debris from the overturned ship.

As darkness fell, the last team left the water without success and authorities said there was little chance the missing sailors -- Russian citizens who range in age from 43 to 48 -- are alive.

"In all probability, it doesn't look good," Mayor Jerry Jennings said during a late afternoon news conference.

Search efforts will resume this morning when divers head back into the water for a third day.

Earlier Tuesday, Jennings and Gov. George Pataki stood at the dock's edge peering at the crippled ship, which brought river traffic to a standstill and dumped thousands of gallons of diesel fuel when it heeled over just after 3 p.m. Tuesday. Both men pledged an all-out effort to recover the sailors, refloat the ship and determine what went wrong.

"You can never anticipate when something like this might happen," Pataki said. "Obviously, our first thoughts ... are with the three people still missing."

While the Coast Guard insisted no one is yet certain what happened, longshoremen and other witnesses offered varying accounts of whether there were warning signs immediately before the disaster.

A group of longshoremen who were on the docks at the time of the accident said the loading appeared normal until the moment the ship tilted slowly away from the dock, its descent into the cold water slowed by mooring lines that kept it tethered to shore. They said they dashed toward the boat with ladders and ropes and helped pluck eight of the crew from the frigid river.

"It looked normal up to the point of no return," a longshoreman said. "I was here. It was a splash, and it was over."

But a crewman aboard the 330-foot Columbia, a channel-dredging ship that was docked just south of the Stellamare, said he noticed that the ship from the Netherlands Antilles appeared top-heavy and was leaning slightly to its side.

Columbia's crew said they were supposed to move their vessel on Tuesday to a spot north of the Stellamare, but they opted to wait because they saw the 308-ton generator being loaded and did not want to disrupt the operation.

The generator that was suspended from the Stellamare's cranes at the time of the accident is now in the Hudson River, helping anchor the ship on its side in less than 30 feet of water. Coast Guard officials said they think the ship will not shift from its position.

Salvage teams that have experience raising sunken ships were en route to Albany late Wednesday from as far away as Sweden.

"Righting the ship is going to be the end result of a long and technical operation," Cameron said. "It will be a methodical process."

One of the ship's two fuel tanks is leaking thousands of gallons of diesel into the river, but booms and pumps are preventing much of it from escaping downstream. As the police divers searched the ship below deck, commercial divers scoured its exterior to gauge the damage and to try to calculate how much fuel is seeping out.

Roughly 10,000 gallons of diesel fuel has been pumped from the river, Cameron said. State Department of Environmental Conservation officials said the spill poses minimal threat to the river's ecosystem.

Two of the ship's crew remained hospitalized Wednesday, including one listed in critical condition at Albany Medical Center Hospital. Other crew members were not available for comment in their rooms at the Crowne Plaza, where private guards and police kept watch.

Their ship was bound for Italy and Romania, where the General Electric generators were destined for use in power plants. The crew members who made it out of the wreckage all submitted blood tests for toxicology screenings, authorities said.

Jumbo Shipping, which owns the vessel, identified the missing as Y.A. Akofin, 48; S.A. Khasenevich, 43; and V. Alexeev, 46. Hometowns were not immediately available, and names of survivors have not been released. "We fear for the lives of the missing crew members as the water temperature is very low," said company spokesman Arnold Van der Heul. "Our prayers and thoughts are with them and their loved ones."

Righting the vessel no simple maneuver

ALBANY -- Representatives of maritime firms from Florida and the Netherlands were en route Wednesday to the Stellamare wreck, preparing to put in bids and offer plans for righting the giant vessel.

Before that can happen though, the ship's Swedish-based insurance underwriters must determine the extent of damage and, with the owners, decide who will do what in the huge and complicated task.

Righting the 289-foot cargo ship is far more than a matter of simply tipping it to the vertical, like one would do with a swamped Adirondack canoe. A mistake in the process could cause more damage or prove dangerous.

"There's a lot more than meets the eye," said Frank van Hoorn, a maritime consultant in Windsor, Calif.

Righting the ship could take weeks. After assigning tasks to a boatload of salvage experts, crane riggers, divers and engineers, measurements and other statistics, such as weights of various ship components, must be made.

Then a plan to right the vessel will be drawn up. All told, the operation will be more like a construction job than a simple ship maneuver.

Underwriters from The Swedish Club will be the first players, explained Dick Fairbanks, president of Titan Maritime Industries, the Dania, Fla., salvage firm that had already sent representatives to the scene. The Swedish Club is similar to a mutual insurance company, backed by a consortium of maritime firms such as Jumbo, the Dutch company that operates the Stellamare. Officials from The Swedish Club and Jumbo will essentially decide who does what to refloat the ship.

Then, armed with schematic diagrams of the ship and data on the cargo, engineers will tabulate the weight distribution throughout the vessel. That is fed into a computer simulation of what would happen when various lifting techniques are used.

"It's very mathematical," said Fairbanks.

Until the calculations are made, it's too early to say precisely how the ship would be righted, explained Claudia van Andel, spokeswoman for another maritime and salvage firm, the Netherlands-based Smits N.V.

"Nothing is certain," at this point, van Andel said.

Righting a ship so close to the dock poses unique problems, noted van Hoorn.

He has not viewed the accident scene but said he is familiar with the Stellamare, which is considered a small ship among the "heavy lift" class of cargo vessels. One option, van Hoorn said, is to bring in a floating crane to help tilt the ship upright as water is pumped out.

But that would pose its own set of problems, including where to attach the crane and how to prevent the ship from plowing into the dock as it is righted.

"You need to get the balance of all the forces," he said.

Probably, van Hoorn said, a system of tethers would be set up and perhaps hooked to an anchored barge or moored to the other side of the river to help stabilize the ship as it rotates to an upright position.

There still will be plenty of unanswered questions, such as whether the purchasers of the generators headed for Italy and Romania would take possession of them and whether the ship would continue to sail under its current name.

Buyers of large sophisticated pieces of gear such as electric generators may be reluctant to take them once they have been in an accident, said van Hoorn. And shippers might hesitate to hire the Stellamare, now that it has tipped over, he said. It might be put back to work under a new name and new owner.

The ship was built in the Netherlands in 1982, according to Dutch news reports, and was originally known as the Valkenswaard before the name was changed in 1987.

While clearing the ship could easily take a few weeks, authorities and the ship owners are likely to try to finish the job as quickly as possible to minimize damage to the electronic and other types of equipment on board and contain the leakage of oil or other materials, said Harold Fleureton, an instructor at the State University of New York's Maritime College in the Bronx.

"The quicker they get this upright the happier they are going to be," Fleureton said.

The possibility that three crewman were trapped and are feared dead somewhere inside the vessel or in the Hudson River complicates matters, and overshadows any of the logistic or economic concerns, said maritime experts.

"The three missing crew members and the search for them, that's much more important," Fairbanks said.

Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.