A Soviet ocean liner with more than 950 people aboard rammed an iceberg in arctic seas and took on water Tuesday, but all passengers were evacuated. Some crew members stayed aboard to try to keep the ship afloat.
A Norwegian coast guard vessel and helicopters rescued passengers from the 630-foot Maxim Gorky and others who already had fled to lifeboats and ice floes. Most of the passengers are Western European vacationers.The cruise ship radioed northern Norway's Rescue Coordination Center at 12:27 a.m. that it was listing after hitting an iceberg about 300 miles east of northern Greenland, a coast guard spokesman said.
The Soviet news agency Tass said the accident, which occurred in heavy fog, left two jagged holes, one 7 1/2 feet by 2 feet and the other narrower but nearly 20 feet long.
Norwegian and Soviet officials reported no injuries in the collision. Finn B. Hansen of the Rescue Coordination Center said the coast guard vessel arrived at 4:15 a.m. and all passengers were rescued by about 7:30 a.m.
Passengers said the evacuation was orderly.
"There was no panic at all," said West German passenger Winfried Prince. "The Russian crew has worked perfectly in disembarking passengers into lifeboats, and also the Norwegians who picked us up . . . have done a wonderful job, so nobody has been hurt or even worse," Prince told NBC's "Today" show in a radio-telephone interview from a rescue ship.
Hansen said the ship was apparently saved from sinking by new pumps brought by a Soviet tugboat and a Norwegian helicopter after others broke down. "It looks like there is enough new pumping equipment aboard to keep it afloat," he said.
The commander of the coast guard boat Senja, Sigurd Kleiven, said 253 crewmen were being kept on board the Maxim Gorky. About 120 crewmen were rescued.
The Senja reached the stricken ship early today and picked up hundreds of passengers who had jumped into lifeboats or scrambled onto ice floes in near-freezing temperatures and light rain, said Kjell Larssen of the north Norway Rescue Center at Bodoe. Others were rescued by helicopter from the ship or ice floes.
Norwegian officials and the Lloyds insurance company of London said none of the passengers were missing or injured.
The German travel agency Phoenix Flugrei-sen of Bonn, which managed the cruise, said 551 Germans and 16 other Western Europeans were aboard.
The Norwegian news agency said the passengers were from West Germany, the Netherlands, Austria, Britain, Italy, Switzerland and Sweden.
Tass quoted Vladimir Nekhoro-shev, chief inspector for the Ministry of the Sea Fleet, as saying 575 tourists and 377 crew members were on board.
The rescue center said it had received conflicting figures, but said there were 379 crew members.
The liner was 185 miles west of the Norway's Spitsbergen archipelago.
Rescue efforts were aided by the 24-hour summer daylight of the arctic.
Several other Soviet and Norwegian boats were within 300 miles of the cruise liner.
Norwegian helicopters ferried rescued passengers from the Senja's deck to Longyearbyen, the administrative center on Svalbard island, the largest in the Spitsbergen archipelago. Airplanes were picking them up and taking them on to the Norwegian mainland.
The liner had originated in Bremerhaven, West Germany. It cruised to Iceland and was to pass the Spitsbergen islands before making its way south along the Norwegian coast on its way home, the Norwegian news agency NTB said.
The Maxim Gorky was built in 1969 and sold to the Soviet Union in 1974. In recent summers, it has carried mostly West Germans on tours from Hamburg arranged by German tour operator NUR.
The ship was crippled a few hundred miles north of where a Soviet nuclear submarine caught fire and sank on April 7. More than 40 sailors died in that accident.
There have been a series of recent accidents on Soviet cruise ships.
In February 1986, the liner Mik-hail Lermontov sank off of New Zealand after striking a reef. Of the 739 passengers and crew aboard, all but one crew member were rescued.
In August of that year the cruise ship Admiral Nakhimov collided with a freighter in the Black Sea and sank, killing several hundred Soviet tourists.
A fire aboard the cruise ship Pria-murye while it was docked in Osaka, Japan, in May 1988 claimed the lives of 11 Soviet tourists.