Fire victims paddle 20km for help

Press, 12 June 1978, Page 1

Fire victims paddle 20km for help

Exhausted sailors bring news to Canterbury coast

Using bits of timber as oars, three survivors paddled 20 kilometres to shore for help after fire raged through the Tongan freighter Kemphaan off Banks Peninsula yesterday.

Missing, believed dead, is Samisolia Palu, aged 19, of Haveluloto, Tonga; and another man, Vili Vafafisi, of Kolorai. badly burned in a waterlogged liferaft for 13 hours before help finally came. No distress message was picked up from the stricken 500-tonne vessel, and the first news of the disaster came when the three exhausted seamen reached a farmer at Ducksfoot Bay, adjacent to Le Bons Bay, on Banks Peninsula. It had taken them almost eight hours to paddle from the burning ship to shore, reaching land about 11 a.m. The eight remaining survivors in the liferaft were picked up by an R.N.Z.A.F. Iroquois helicopter soon after 1 p.m.

Mr Valafisi was reported to be in a serious

condition in the Burwood

Hospital late last evening, but the rest of the crew — “very tired but in good spirits” — were recovering at a Christchurch hotel. . The three survivors were in a small aluminium dinghy. The liferaft carrying the eight was found drifting. The skipper is Captain Esi Tonga. Late last evening, a big police squad was still trying to piece together details of the fire by interviewing the survivors. For several hours after the rescue, a tight security

screen was kept round the survivors.

Mr W. Cole, of Auckland, a representative of the ship’s owner, successfully obstructed attempts to interview the captain and crew further, confiscating a reporter’s notes and threatening to confiscate a press camera.

Captain Tonga said last evening that the fire had started in the crew’s quarters while only three or four of the crew were awake. The man who died had been asleep in his cabin with the door locked. The fire is believed to have been caused by an electrical fault.

The blaze spread rapidly through the Kemphaan’s aft-mounted superstructure, which was reduced to a blackened ruin by dawn. The crew abandoned ship minutes after the fire broke out.

The body of the dead man was left aboard.

The drifting vessel was still well ablaze when the Lyttelton Harbour Board’s tug Canterbury and the two Sumner lifeboats reached the scene about mid-aftemoon.

A specially equipped fire-fighting squad was able to control the blaze enough for the Canterbury to take the burning ship in tow, but the flames flared again a few hours later. The Kemphaan was towed into Port Levy, where firemen boarded her. They were still trying early this morning to

put out the last pockets of fire in the No. 2 hold. Earlier, a fisherman tried to claim salvage rights, but he was ordered off the vessel. The Kemphaan had left Timaru for Nukualofa on Saturday with a full cargo of frozen lamb for the Islands. She was 20km north-north-west of Le Bons Bay when the fire broke out. By dawn, a pall of smoke from the burning ship was clearly visible from Banks Peninsula. It is believed that the ship’s radio was one of the first casualties of the fire, and that there was no time to send a Mayday call. The three men who set out for shore in the tiny aluminium dinghy included the first mate, one of the two aboard able to speak English. One of the first to speak to the three survivors

when they reached land was the Aka.oa policeman. Constable G. Williamson. "It was hard to believe that they had come so far in that boat, without even proper oars, but they knew they were the only way the rest of the crew was going to get help,” said Constable Williamson. The story of the ship’s plight was confused, and rescuers had no idea what they might find. Several small boats, including one from the Volunteer Coast Guard Service, set out for the Kemphaan, and an Air Force

Iroquois helicopter from Wigram sighted the drifting liferaft about 1 p.m. A crewman was lowered from the helicopter, flown by Flight Lieutenant F. Parker, and the eight survivors were winched aboard one by one. “The whole thing went smoothly,” said an R.N.Z.A.F. spokesman. “There was some low cloud and drizzle, but luckily the sea was very flat.” The survivors were cold and wet when they were rescued, and some were later treated for shock. The Kemphaan will be towed to Lyttelton today, where she is expected to be handed over to the Receiver of Wrecks. The small Islands trader had been on the Nuku’-alofa-Timaru run for about 18 months, the Press Association reports. She was one of three ships owned by the Warner Pacific Line trading between New Zealand and the Islands. She arrived at Timarv last Sunday to discharge 3000 cases of bananas, and took on a full load of 11,500 cartons of frozen lambs for the Islands. She. was also carrying four big parcels of clothing for mission stations on Baba’u, in the Tongan group. Some of the survivors are expected to be flown to Tonga today or tomorrow. A full inquiry into the incident would begin today, the police said.