BEIJING: Lashing winds, high waves and toxic gases are hindering dozens of rescue boats struggling to locate missing sailors from a stricken oil tanker in the East China Sea and to extinguish a fire that has burned for the past three days on the ship.
The poor conditions, with strong winds, rain and waves as high as 3 meters (10 feet), frustrated efforts to tame the fire and search for the 31 remaining tanker crewmen, the Ministry of Transport said in a statement on Tuesday.
The flames were forcing the South Korean Coast Guard’s search and rescue team to stay as far as 3 miles (4.8 km) away from the tanker, two South Korean officials told Reuters.
The body of a crewman was found on Monday in the water near the tanker, China’s Transport Ministry said. It had been handed over to the civil affairs bureau.
Concerns were growing that the tanker may explode and sink while a flotilla of 13 search and rescue vessels comb a 900-square-nautical-mile (3,100 sq. km) area around the ship for the crew. The tanker hit a freight ship on Saturday night in the East China Sea, burst into flames and has been spilling oil.
The tanker Sanchi, run by Iran’s top oil shipping operator, National Iranian Tanker Co., collided with the CF Crystal, carrying grain from the US, about 160 nautical miles (300 km) off China’s coast near Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze River Delta.
The Sanchi was carrying 136,000 tons of condensate, an ultra-light crude oil that becomes highly volatile when exposed to air and water, to South Korea.
The size of the oil spill from the ship and the extent of the environmental harm were not known, but the disaster has the potential to be the worst since 1991 when 260,000 tons of oil leaked off the Angolan coast.
“We can’t grasp the level of oil contamination at this moment. The cargo is still on fire, so it is hard to figure out if oil is being spilled,” Park Sung-dong, an official from South Korea’s Ministry of Oceans and Fisheries, told Reuters.
Chinese state media CCTV showed footage on Monday of boats dousing the flames with water as plumes of thick dark smoke continued to billow from the tanker.
The crew of the Sanchi are all Iranian nationals except for two Bangladeshi citizens. The CF Crystal suffered limited damage and the 21 crewmen, all Chinese nationals, were rescued.
The freighter has been taken to a port near Shanghai where investigators will start work on assessing the cause of the disaster.
China’s Transport Ministry warned that toxic gas from the tanker was harmful to the rescue workers and that protective clothing and gas testing equipment was being dispatched to the emergency teams.
When condensate meets water, it evaporates quickly and can cause a large-scale explosion as it reacts with air and turns into a flammable gas, the ministry said on Monday.
Trying to contain a spill of condensate, which is extremely low in density, highly toxic and much more explosive than normal crude oil, may be difficult.
Iranian oil tanker burns for 3rd day as winds, high waves lash rescuers
Iranian oil tanker burns for 3rd day as winds, high waves lash rescuers
Rubio says new governance bodies for Gaza will be in place soon
- Rubio said progress had been made recently in identifying Palestinians to join the technocratic group and that Washington aimed to get the governance bodies in place “very soon,” without offering a specific timeline.
WASHINGTON: US Secretary of State Marco Rubio said that a new governance structure for Gaza — made up of an international board and a group of Palestinian technocrats — would be in place soon, followed by the deployment of foreign troops, as the US hopes to cement a fragile ceasefire in Israel’s war in the Palestinian enclave.
Rubio, speaking at a year-end news conference, said the status quo was not sustainable in Gaza, where Israel has continued to strike Hamas targets while the group has reasserted its control since the October peace agreement brokered by the US.
“That’s why we have a sense of urgency about bringing phase one to its full completion, which is the establishment of the Board of Peace, and the establishment of the Palestinian technocratic authority or organization that’s going to be on the ground, and then the stabilization force comes closely thereafter,” Rubio said.
Rubio said progress had been made recently in identifying Palestinians to join the technocratic group and that Washington aimed to get the governance bodies in place “very soon,” without offering a specific timeline. Rubio was speaking after the US Central Command hosted a conference in Doha this week with partner nations to plan the International Stabilization Force for Gaza.
Two US officials said last week that international troops could be deployed in the strip as early as next month, following the UN Security Council’s November vote to authorize the force.
It remains unclear how Hamas will be disarmed, and countries considering contributing troops to the ISF are wary that Hamas will engage their soldiers in combat.
Rubio did not specify who would be responsible for disarming Hamas and conceded that countries contributing troops want to know the ISF’s specific mandate and how it will be funded.
“I think we owe them a few more answers before we can ask anybody to commit firmly, but I feel very confident that we have a number of nation states acceptable to all sides in this who are willing to step forward and be a part of that stabilization force,” Rubio said, noting that Pakistan was among the countries that had expressed interest.
Establishing security and governance was key to securing donor funding for reconstruction in Gaza, Rubio added.
“Who’s going to pledge billions of dollars to build things that are going to get blown up again because a war starts?” Rubio said, discussing the possibility of a donor conference to raise reconstruction funds.
“They want to know who’s in charge, and they want to know that there’s security so and that there’ll be long term stability.”
