China's coast guard revealed Friday that it has rescued three foreigners from a stranded boat that had ran aground in the disputed Nansha island chain in the South China Sea, Xinhua reports.
The grateful crew, composed of Polish, Swiss and French sailors, was stranded for 27 hours before a Chinese patrol boat responding to a distress signal came to their rescue.
Initial attempts to tow and refloat the 28-metre long sailboat failed, with the hapless crew and their belongings finally being transferred to a coast guard vessel.
The incident, and its thankfully happy ending, comes in the midst of an otherwise disastrous week for maritime accidents in China’s coastal waters. Ten crew members are still missing after a cargo ship loaded with steel collided with a freighter close to midnight on Thursday and sunk just off of Shanghai’s Wusongkou Dock, an anchorage popular with cruise ships.
Meanwhile, a monumental disaster has occurred in the same fog-plagued estuary over the weekend, involving an Iranian oil tanker that exploded into an uncontrolled blaze after colliding with another vessel.
Thirty-two crew members are still missing while the ship’s cargo – USD60 million worth of crude – goes up in enormous plumes of thick black smoke. The disaster has the potential to be one of the top 10 worst oil spills of all time, the BBC reports.
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