Accident in Avacha Bay

A sunken ship in Kamchatka nearly sank a container ship

The cause of a major shipwreck in Avacha Bay, which occurred on the night of January 15, could have been a collision with a sunken object that literally littered the bottom of the bay. The accident was reported by the transport prosecutor of the Kamchatka region, Mikhail Simakhin. The container ship "Captain Artyukh", which was traveling from Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky to its home port of Vladivostok, transmitted a distress signal literally an hour after it unmoored.

The accident occurred when the huge ship - 148 meters in length, with a displacement of 14 thousand tons - was passing through the so-called “gate”, a narrow strait connecting Avachinskaya Bay with the Pacific Ocean. At about two o'clock in the morning a stream of sea water poured into the engine room. As a result, “Captain Artyukh” was de-energized, stopped, and its stern began to slowly sink under the water.

According to the head of the Main Directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations of Russia for the Kamchatka Region, Anatoly Plevako, rescue boats and several tugboats were immediately sent to the crash site. Of the 28 crew members, 16 were removed from the damaged container ship. Another 12 sailors remained on board in distress to continue the fight for the survivability of the ship.

To reduce the list, the loaded container ship had to be supported by two tugs “Cyclone” and “Dobrynya”. By the morning of January 15, a powerful icebreaker brought the ship “Captain Artyukh” to one of the piers of the commercial port of Petropavlovsk. Here, as Sergei Adamov, director of the Kamchatka division of the Sakhalin Basin Emergency Rescue Department, said, divers examined the bottom of the vessel and made underwater video footage to clarify the order of the necessary repair work.

It turned out that there was a seven-meter hole in the hull near the engine room. So far it has been repaired with a temporary plaster. To reduce the roll and somehow balance the hull and stern, 70 containers had to be removed. The damaged vessel does not pose an environmental threat to Avacha Bay. Tanks with more than 600 tons of petroleum products survived.

The Transport Prosecutor's Office is conducting an investigation. The course taken by “Captain Artyukh” out of the bay into the open sea is being checked. Several versions are being pursued, including the one that the crew members were not entirely sober. And yet, the option of an accidental collision with an underwater object remains the most likely. As Vyacheslav Fadeev, head of the security service of the Petropavlovsk fishing port, noted, the bottom of Avachinskaya Bay is literally littered with sunken boats and barges. There are even dry cargo ships. The shipowner is obliged to dispose of used or sunken ships. But since most of the ships approach the Kamchatka shores under the flags of third countries, and the condition of this fleet, to put it mildly, leaves much to be desired, it is almost impossible to find and force the owner of the lost schooner to raise it to the surface.

Ilya SERGEEV, Kamchatka