ENGINE ROOM FLOODED

Evening Star, Issue 19892, 14 June 1928, Page 3

ENGINE ROOM FLOODED

POOP AND FORECASTLE ISOLATED ISLANDS PHOSPHATE STEAMER IN STORM (P» Univkd Pbiss Assocuuoa.l AUCKLAND, June U. The steamer Aymeric arrived - this morning. Fourteen days from Nauru she encountered the storm.which the Pacific airmen experienced in the latter port of their trip, and for four days she pitched and rolled in heavy seas. The Aymeric, loaded with crushed phosphate rock, was swept by mountainous seas from Sunday’ until. Tuesday. She was practically hove, to. North of New Zealand she encountered furious squalls, accompanied by drenching rain, and she pitched and strained in the raging seas. On Tuesday, at midnight, in the height of the storm, a sea swept right across the deck, carrying away the ventilators. It broke away the heavy railing on i.,e bridge deck, and the water poured dongt through the engine room skylight and flooded the engine room. The lifeboat on the bridge deck, 25ft above the water line, was filled, and both the poop and the forecastle were isolat'd islands for the time being, with the well decks submerged beneath. While the officers on tho bridge nursed tho vessel tenderly, the engineers crawled round tho heavy steel platforms, and tho firemen in the stokehold had an uneasy footing, but the furnaces were regularly fed.