On May 2, 1993, an unfortunate accident occurred in the waters of the East China Sea. At 5:05 a.m., a loud noise woke up the sleeping crew of Xiangyanghong 16 expedition ship. Moments later, they found that Xiangyanghong 16 had been hit by a 38,000-ton giant ship. To make matters worse, the giant ship immediately chose to reverse after the impact, and as a result, the sea immediately poured in from the hull breach, so that the research ship sank in just thirty minutes. Afterwards, after carrying our crew, the ship that caused the accident once tried to ignore our negotiations and leave in the northeast direction, but finally returned our personnel.
Xiangyanghong No. 16 research vessel
Xiangyanghong No. 16 research vessel is a vessel built in China and 1981 for performing various maritime scientific research and expedition tasks, its full load displacement is 4400 tons, the maximum speed is 19 knots, and the endurance reaches 10,000 nautical miles, which is the backbone ship of China's State Oceanic Administration. The ship has carried out many scientific expeditions for China and has traveled several times to the Pacific Ocean to investigate metal resources. Of the more than 100 members of the ship, the vast majority left the shipwreck and boarded the silver horn, but the three people located at the site of the direct impact were still tragically killed.
The impact of ships with tens of thousands of tons is terrifying
Although a large ship weighing tens of thousands of tons like the Silver Horn does not seem to be fast, if it collides with the object in front of it during the voyage, the damage caused by it is quite terrifying. The bulbous bow design commonly found by tanker freighters obviously makes ship-to-ship collisions more lethal. At present, the main role of the bulbous bow is to reduce resistance, but its structural shape is actually the collision angle with the ancient warship. Because it is located below the waterline, when the bow collision occurs, the hit ship will have a hole in the abdomen and a large amount of water, in fact, the effect is no different from ancient naval warfare.
Xiangyanghong No. 16 was sunk by the Silver Horn
After the impact, due to the power outage, the alarm actually only sounded twice before it stopped. Soon, after confirming that the ship was irretrievable, the captain ordered the ship to be abandoned, because the hull sank too quickly, and the crew actually only had time to drop two lifeboats. But the vast majority of the crew was eventually rescued and boarded the ship that caused the accident, the Silver Horn. After receiving the crew, however, the Silver Horn behaved less honestly: when we sent the German-Italian ship to meet the crew, it refused the request to change course and still headed northeast. It was only after several representations that it was agreed to transfer our crew at sea.
Ocean rescue tugboat German-Italian
Regarding this accident, our side and the party responsible for the accident also had a lot of lawsuits. Considering that the Silver Horn violated the rules of foggy navigation first, its responsibility is obviously not small. However, during the litigation, the Silver Horn used a lot of media power to defend itself, and at one point slandered our crew for trying to occupy the freighter and force it to sail to Shanghai. This undoubtedly provoked the wrath of our survivors, but the final claim did not go well because of the rules of the small boats on the sea that let the big ships go.