The search operation at the site of the flooding of the Kola drilling platform was stopped

On Friday, the operation in the Sea of Okhotsk was curtailed, where the Kola drilling platform, towed by two ships, sank on December 18. According to official data, this was done due to a sharp deterioration in the weather. Unofficially, the participants in the operation say that there is no one to save: 53 people who were on the platform died. The bodies of most of them may not be found at all.

On Friday, the icebreaker Magadan and the rescue ship Atlas, involved in a search operation in the area where the Kola drilling platform was flooded, left the scene of the accident. The press service of the main directorate of the Ministry of Emergency Situations for the Sakhalin region explained this by the difficult weather conditions: “Currently in the search operation area, the wave height is more than 5 m, the wind is up to 30 m/sec, and there is heavy precipitation.” For the same reason, flights of helicopters and airplanes participating in the operation were cancelled. In the future, the weather will only get worse, so the Ministry of Emergency Situations could not say when the search would resume.

According to rescuers, there is no longer any hope of finding any of the Kola crew members and oil workers alive. The search for bodies of the dead on the surface may also not bring results. Most likely, people drowned while in the interior of the platform, which is now located at a kilometer depth. The authorities have not yet decided whether to raise it from the bottom or not.

The Investigative Committee, which is investigating the criminal case into the disaster, reported that during the entire operation, which was carried out since December 18, the bodies of 17 dead were raised from the water. 11 of them were identified. According to preliminary data, the cause of death was asphyxia as a result of water entering the respiratory tract and lungs. That is, oil workers and sailors drowned. This indicates that the platform crew most likely did not even try to escape using rafts adapted for this. Due to a storm, the Kola broke away from the ropes connecting it to the towing vessels, quickly capsized and sank. The survivors were pulled out of the water in the first hours after the platform was flooded. All these 14 people, as it later turned out, were on the platform deck. At the time of the disaster, there were 67 people on the Kola. Thus, 53 people became victims of the disaster.

Nikolay Sergeev

The search for the drowned was hampered by the weather