Four injured crew members on a Marshall Islands-registered cargo ship that caught fire off Pingtung County on Saturday evening have been airlifted to safety, while the other 17 crew members were still on board as of early yesterday afternoon, the Coast Guard Administration (CGA) said.
CGA official Huang Liang-wei (黃亮圍) yesterday said that preparations were being made to tow the disabled ship into the Port of Kaohsiung by noon today with the 17 crew members on board.
On Saturday, the four airlifted crew members sustained burns after a fire broke out in the engine room of the cargo ship Panoria, causing it to lose power.
Photo courtesy of the Coast Guard Administration.
The fire was extinguished by the crew, but one crew member had serious burns and three others had minor burns, and all needed to be treated urgently, the coast guard said, which first received reports of the incident at 5pm on Saturday.
Despite bad weather and choppy seas, the injured crew members were airlifted from the ship at about 7pm on Saturday and taken to the Kaohsiung International Airport before being rushed to a local hospital for treatment.
The difficult sea conditions made it impossible to rescue the other crew workers, Huang said, adding that at about 8am yesterday the tugboat Salvage Rigger sailing under the flag of Saint Vincent and the Grenadines headed to the scene escorted by coast guard vessels.
The cargo ship was expected to arrive in the Port of Kaohsiung before noon today, Huang said.
The coast guard said in a statement on Saturday that it received a report at about 5pm that day that the cargo ship had sent a distress signal via radio 23 nautical miles (42.6km) southwest of Oluanpi (鵝鑾鼻), Taiwan’s southernmost point.
The message said a fire had broken out in the engine room and a total of 21 crew members were waiting to be rescued, it added.
It then dispatched five ships, including an Anping-class vessel, to the scene to carry out the rescue operation.
At around 6pm, the Anping-class vessel was the first to reach the area where the incident had occurred, and contacted the cargo ship via radio.
The rescue effort was complicated by waves reaching 3m to 4m in height in the area and problems in bringing the rescue ship near to the cargo ship.
The Ministry of National Defense’s search-and-rescue aircraft did not arrive at the scene until about 7pm on Saturday when it brought the four injured crew members to Kaohsiung.
The coast guard said it continued to monitor the situation at the site and contacted the Maritime and Port Bureau’s Southern Maritime Affairs Center, which agreed to dispatch a tugboat to the site, the statement said.
Death row inmate Huang Lin-kai (黃麟凱), who was convicted for the double murder of his former girlfriend and her mother, is to be executed at the Taipei Detention Center tonight, the Ministry of Justice announced. Huang, who was a military conscript at the time, was convicted for the rape and murder of his ex-girlfriend, surnamed Wang (王), and the murder of her mother, after breaking into their home on Oct. 1, 2013. Prosecutors cited anger over the breakup and a dispute about money as the motives behind the double homicide. This is the first time that Minister of Justice Cheng Ming-chien (鄭銘謙) has
BITTERLY COLD: The inauguration ceremony for US president-elect Donald Trump has been moved indoors due to cold weather, with the new venue lacking capacity A delegation of cross-party lawmakers from Taiwan, led by Legislative Speaker Han Kuo-yu (韓國瑜), for the inauguration of US president-elect Donald Trump, would not be able to attend the ceremony, as it is being moved indoors due to forecasts of intense cold weather in Washington tomorrow. The inauguration ceremony for Trump and US vice president-elect JD Vance is to be held inside the Capitol Rotunda, which has a capacity of about 2,000 people. A person familiar with the issue yesterday said although the outdoor inauguration ceremony has been relocated, Taiwan’s legislative delegation has decided to head off to Washington as scheduled. The delegation
TRANSPORT CONVENIENCE: The new ticket gates would accept a variety of mobile payment methods, and buses would be installed with QR code readers for ease of use New ticketing gates for the Taipei metro system are expected to begin service in October, allowing users to swipe with cellphones and select credit cards partnered with Taipei Rapid Transit Corp (TRTC), the company said on Tuesday. TRTC said its gates in use are experiencing difficulty due to their age, as they were first installed in 2007. Maintenance is increasingly expensive and challenging as the manufacturing of components is halted or becoming harder to find, the company said. Currently, the gates only accept EasyCard, iPass and electronic icash tickets, or one-time-use tickets purchased at kiosks, the company said. Since 2023, the company said it
A tourist who was struck and injured by a train in a scenic area of New Taipei City’s Pingsi District (平溪) on Monday might be fined for trespassing on the tracks, the Railway Police Bureau said yesterday. The New Taipei City Fire Department said it received a call at 4:37pm on Monday about an incident in Shifen (十分), a tourist destination on the Pingsi Railway Line. After arriving on the scene, paramedics treated a woman in her 30s for a 3cm to 5cm laceration on her head, the department said. She was taken to a hospital in Keelung, it said. Surveillance footage from a
RSS