A cruise liner that ran into trouble in stormy seas off Norway reached port under its own steam on Sunday after hundreds of passengers were winched to safety by helicopter in a spectacular rescue operation.
Escorted by tugboats, the Viking Sky arrived at the port of Molde at about 4:15pm, TV images showed.
Nearly one-third of its 1,373 passengers and crew had already been airlifted off the ship.
Photo: AFP
The cruise liner lost power and started drifting on Saturday afternoon 2km off a stretch of Norwegian coastline notorious for shipwrecks.
The captain sent out a Mayday, prompting authorities to launch the airlift in difficult conditions rather than run the risk of leaving people on board.
About 460 of the 1,373 people on the ship had been taken off by five helicopters before the airlift was halted.
Police said 17 people had been taken to hospital. One person more than 90 years old and two 70-year-olds suffered serious fractures.
With three of four engines restarted on Sunday, two tugs towed the vessel away from dangerous reefs before it set sail for Molde, 500km northwest of Oslo, under its own power.
Dramatic footage of the passengers’ ordeal showed furniture and plants sliding around the lurching vessel as parts of the ceiling came down.
Passenger Rodney Horgan said he had been reminded of the **Titanic.
“The best word, I guess, is surreal,” he said.
“Sea water six-seven feet [about 2m] high just came rushing in, hit the tables, chairs, broken glass and 20-30 people just ... went right in front of me,” Horgan said.
“I was standing, my wife was sitting in front of me and all of a sudden, she was gone. And I thought this was the end,” he said.
However, it all ended well for Ryan Flynn.
“Here’s my 83-year-old dad being airlifted from the #vikingsky,” he said. “We are all off the ship safely!”
A reception center was set up in a gym on shore for the evacuees, many of whom were elderly and from the US and the UK.
A fire caused by a burst gas pipe yesterday spread to several homes and sent a fireball soaring into the sky outside Malaysia’s largest city, injuring more than 100 people. The towering inferno near a gas station in Putra Heights outside Kuala Lumpur was visible for kilometers and lasted for several hours. It happened during a public holiday as Muslims, who are the majority in Malaysia, celebrate the second day of Eid al-Fitr. National oil company Petronas said the fire started at one of its gas pipelines at 8:10am and the affected pipeline was later isolated. Disaster management officials said shutting the
US Vice President J.D. Vance on Friday accused Denmark of not having done enough to protect Greenland, when he visited the strategically placed and resource-rich Danish territory coveted by US President Donald Trump. Vance made his comment during a trip to the Pituffik Space Base in northwestern Greenland, a visit viewed by Copenhagen and Nuuk as a provocation. “Our message to Denmark is very simple: You have not done a good job by the people of Greenland,” Vance told a news conference. “You have under-invested in the people of Greenland, and you have under-invested in the security architecture of this
UNREST: The authorities in Turkey arrested 13 Turkish journalists in five days, deported a BBC correspondent and on Thursday arrested a reporter from Sweden Waving flags and chanting slogans, many hundreds of thousands of anti-government demonstrators on Saturday rallied in Istanbul, Turkey, in defence of democracy after the arrest of Istanbul Mayor Ekrem Imamoglu which sparked Turkey’s worst street unrest in more than a decade. Under a cloudless blue sky, vast crowds gathered in Maltepe on the Asian side of Turkey’s biggest city on the eve of the Eid al-Fitr celebration which started yesterday, marking the end of Ramadan. Ozgur Ozel, chairman of the main opposition Republican People’s Party (CHP), which organized the rally, said there were 2.2 million people in the crowd, but
JOINT EFFORTS: The three countries have been strengthening an alliance and pressing efforts to bolster deterrence against Beijing’s assertiveness in the South China Sea The US, Japan and the Philippines on Friday staged joint naval drills to boost crisis readiness off a disputed South China Sea shoal as a Chinese military ship kept watch from a distance. The Chinese frigate attempted to get closer to the waters, where the warships and aircraft from the three allied countries were undertaking maneuvers off the Scarborough Shoal — also known as Huangyan Island (黃岩島) and claimed by Taiwan and China — in an unsettling moment but it was warned by a Philippine frigate by radio and kept away. “There was a time when they attempted to maneuver