Bulk carrier split apart

Russian ship could not withstand the Black Sea storm

The Russian river-sea class cargo ship Strelets sank yesterday morning in the Bosporus Strait in the Black Sea. There were 14 crew members on board the ship, which was traveling from the Turkish port of Yarinjar to Taganrog. According to the Russian Ministry of Transport, seven sailors were killed, two were rescued, the fate of five is unknown. Despite the strong storm, their search continued throughout the night.

According to the State Maritime Coordination and Rescue Center of the Ministry of Transport, the dry cargo ship Strelets left Yarinjar with empty holds on Sunday at about 20.00 and was supposed to arrive in Taganrog on Tuesday afternoon. But on Monday night, when the ship was in the open sea about 150 miles from the Bosphorus Strait, a strong storm began. Around two o'clock in the morning, as it turned out, a powerful wave simply split the bow of the cargo ship. Captain Valery Ageev gave a distress signal and ordered the crew to evacuate on life rafts, and already at 3.58 the cargo ship went under water and sank at a depth of more than a kilometer.

The first to arrive in the area of ​​the disaster at about 6.00 was a Bulgarian ship, whose sailors found only two members of the Strelets crew alive - chief engineer Sergei Lukyanenko and sailor Sergei Barchukov. Soon, seven ships from Russia, Turkey, Bulgaria and Ukraine, a helicopter of the Turkish coast guard and an An-26 aircraft of the Russian border service were already involved in the search and rescue operation. However, during the day they discovered the bodies of only seven dead sailors. The fate of the remaining five people from the Strelets remained unknown yesterday, but rescuers believed that there was little chance of finding them alive. During the day, at sea, not far from the crash site, all seven empty rafts on the Strelets and the broken bow of the cargo ship were found. It is impossible for a person to survive in icy water in a force six storm.

The dry cargo ship Strelets (displacement 4.5 thousand tons) belonged to the Moscow River Shipping Company (MRS). It was built in 1990 at one of the shipyards in St. Petersburg and, in principle, due to its class, had the right to enter the open sea, but with restrictions due to weather conditions. In this regard, experts from the rescue service of the Ministry of Transport have already put forward a version that the cause of the tragedy could have been the wrong decision of the captain of the Strelets. Knowing about the unfavorable weather forecast, he had to wait out the storm in port.

Alexander RASKIN