Frigid folly … crew and passengers are loaded into rescue boats.
Photo: AP
A Titanic tale of survival (click here)
Manuel Mitternacht and AFPNovember 25, 2007
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A CRUISE ship said to be dogged by maintenance woes has slammed into an iceberg off Antarctica, forcing 154 people - including 10 Australians - to scramble into lifeboats.
Passing ships rushed to the rescue, plucking frightened passengers from the icy seas.
"They are in good condition," said Arnvid Hansen, captain of the Norwegian ship that carried out the rescue. "There is no hypothermia; they all have food and clothes. Everything is OK."
The 100 passengers - including the Australians and people from Britain, Canada, the Netherlands and the US - and most of the crew from the stricken Explorer were picked up safely after the Titanic-style accident in frigid seas near the South Shetland Islands yesterday.
The captain and another senior officer stayed on board the Liberian-registered ship but escaped before the ship went down a few hours after it struck the iceberg. Problems with the ship's safety record were immediately highlighted....
It appears to have been struck by a rapidly moving iceberg and then drifted into the pack ice. There is one photo that shows the ladders the people on board used to leave the ship. Scary stuff. They must have been very upset the entire time.
150 abandon cruise ship in Antarctica (+photos) (click here)
5:00AM Saturday November 24, 2007
By Cesar Illiano
The M/S Explorer cruise ship sinks, hours after hitting an ice floe off the coast of the Antarctic.
More than 150 passengers and crew escaped unhurt after their cruise ship hit ice in the Antarctic and started sinking on Friday, the ship's owner and coast guard officials said.
A Norwegian passenger boat in the area safely picked up all the occupants of the Explorer from the lifeboats they used to flee the ship when it ran into problems off King George Island in Antarctica at 12:24 a.m. EST, the Explorer's owners said.
A spokesman for G.A.P Adventures, the Canadian travel company that owns the vessel, said 154 passengers and crew had been on board the ship. He had told Reuters earlier the number was 100.
"We were passing through ice as usual... we do that every day... But this time something hit the hold and we got a little leakage downstairs," the Explorer's first officer Peter Svensson told Reuters Television by satellite phone from the Norwegian ship, the Nordnorge.
He said the rescue had gone smoothly. "No one was hysterical, they were just sitting there nice and quiet, because we knew there were ships coming."...
