Stormy sea hampers rescue after liner fire

Press, 6 October 1980, Page 1

Stormy sea hampers rescue after liner fire

NZPA-Reuter Juneau, Alaska An oil tanker yesterday completed the rescue of 500 people, many of them elderly .Americans, who were forced to abandon a burning cruise ship in the Gulf of Alaska. Some of the passengers from the Holland-America Cruises liner Prinsendam, spent 13 hours in lifeboats whipped by 25 to 30 knot winds and five-metre seas. The last lifeboat-load was taken aboard the tanker just as darkness fell and the weather deteriorated further.

A United States Coast Guard spokesman, Mr Ray Massey, said it was not known how many passengers were brought aboard the tanker, which planned to begin steaming immediately for Valdez, a port city just east of Anchorage. He said it was the biggest single-ship rescue in modern history.

After the passengers had been removed, the Prinsendam continued to burn. Commander Rich Schoel, chief of the Coast Guard’s search and rescue branch in Juneau, said that flames from the fire, which began in the engine-room, were shooting through the deck of

the ship by Saturday evening. Commander Schoel said the ship was equipped with adequate fire-fighting systems.

One passenger, Eleanor Farnsworth, aged 68, from Arizona, said that she and her fellow passengers were roused from their cabins about 11 a.m. yesterday They spent five hours “just milling around” before the order to abandon ship was i.-sued about dawn. She spent seven hours in a lifeboat.

“Nobody panicked.” she said. “Everybody was cool, and very , cold.”

Most of " the rescued passengers were taken to the 300-metre oil tanker .Williamsburgh. the first rescue ship to arrive at the scene.

But the last passengers plucked from lifeboats were flown by helicopter to Yakutat, then transferred to fixed-wing planes and flown to Sitka.

The Coast Guard also said that the cutter Boutwell was on its way to Sitka with 40 crew members from the Prinsendam aboard. They were the last people to abandon ship, having remained aboard to fight the fire until it blazed out of control.