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Tugboat headed to Guyana goes down… 3 rescued, 11 feared dead
Three crew members from a tugboat that issued a distress call on Thursday in waters dangerously close to Hurricane Lorenzo were found safe in a lifeboat Saturday.
Sank: The Bourbon Rhode tugboat went down with only three of 14 survivors found
Three crewmembers in this drifting lifeboat were rescued, leaving 11 still missing, it has been reported.
The French Maritime Rescue Coordination Center confirmed the rescue to weather.com early Saturday afternoon.
“We have found a life raft with three persons on board,” MRCC manager Philippe Bricquer said in a phone interview. “Two of them are a little bit tired but the last one is in very good condition.”
The tugboat was headed to Guyana to lend support to the offshore oil activities.
There was no word on the 11 other crew members still missing from the tug Bourbon Rhode.
“We know that there were four life rafts on this ship. We found one,” Bricquer said. “I’m not sure that the three others left the ship.”
Bricquer said the survivors were found by a French search plane about 9 a.m. UTC on Saturday. They reported that the boat had sunk Thursday, around midday UTC.
An emergency beacon indicated the Bourbon Rhode was in the centre of the hurricane.
“They were a little bit north of the eye,” Bricquer said.
At that point in time, Lorenzo was a Category 4 hurricane with sustained winds up to 130 mph, according to the National Hurricane Center. Waves reached more than 20 feet, with the possibility of considerably higher surf at times. It was also one of the furthest east major hurricanes ever recorded in the Atlantic Ocean.
Bricquer said it was not yet known why or how the tugboat got caught up in the storm.
A NOAA hurricane research plane was assisting in the search Saturday. On Friday, a NOAA plane heading out to collect data on the record-breaking storm in the eastern Atlantic Ocean was diverted to the search.
“At the request of the U.S Coast Guard, NOAA 43 … was asked to investigate the last known positions of search and rescue satellite hits for the vessel,” Jonathan Shannon, a spokesman for NOAA’s Office of Marine and Aviation Operations, told weather.com Friday afternoon.
Bricquer expressed thanks to the U.S. for helping, and said the search would continue with more ships and aircraft headed to the scene.
The Bourbon Rhode was a tugboat designed for terminal assistance, oil prevention and anchor handling functions, according to the company that owns it. It was en route from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands to Georgetown, Guyana.
A press release from the company that operates the tugboat said it was taking in water when the distress call was made.
The NOAA plane’s involvement came to light during the search and rescue mission, when a satellite photo of the plane’s odd zig-zagging and circling path caught the attention of a watcher on Twitter, who theorised that something must have gone wrong with the flight.
Shannon said he didn’t know how often Hurricane Hunter planes were called on to assist in such missions.
“This was a research mission, so it was not an operation mission for helping to assist the forecast, so I believe we had a little more flexibility” to divert the plane, he said.
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