Rescuers pull 48 from sunken Vietnamese cargo ship
Chinese rescue forces had recovered 47 Vietnamese nationals from the sunken general cargo ship Khoi Nguyen 18 by Monday morning, with one further survivor picked up by Vietnamese units. That brings the total to 48 of the 62 people aboard and leaves 14 unaccounted for. The Vietnamese-flagged vessel sank in severe weather near Fiery Cross Reef in the South China Sea, in an area where the surrounding states maintain competing claims and separate coast guard presences.
The two most recent survivors were found by the China Coast Guard ships Xuande and Nansha at 22:38 and 23:32 on Sunday, both with normal vital signs. The first large group had been located on Saturday evening after the Chinese rescue vessel Nanhai Jiu 115 detected a distress signal and approached a life raft, recovering 29 people from it. Further survivors were subsequently taken from a second raft, from a fishing vessel, by helicopter and by coast guard ships, a spread that suggests the crew abandoned in more than one group and drifted apart.
Vietnamese authorities deployed their own rescue forces and coordinated the operation with Chinese vessels, helicopters and other ships near the casualty position. Forty-one of the rescued were transferred on Sunday evening from Nanhai Jiu 115 to the Vietnamese naval vessel Truong Sa-01, with further transfers scheduled for Monday. The Philippine Coast Guard deployed the patrol vessel BRP Malapascua and an aircraft from Palawan, working with its Vietnamese counterpart and using its search and rescue planning system to direct the assets involved.
Accounts of when the ship went down differ. Chinese maritime authorities placed the casualty on the night of Friday 24 July, while the Philippine Coast Guard put it on the evening of Saturday 25 July. Both located the sinking near the same feature, which is known as Fiery Cross Reef internationally, as Yongshu Reef in China and as Kagitingan Reef in the Philippines. The discrepancy matters chiefly for reconstructing how long survivors spent in the water, which in these conditions bears directly on the prospects for those still missing.
The Khoi Nguyen 18 was a small ship for the waters she was lost in. Built in 2017, she measured 69.9 metres with a beam of 10.8 metres, a gross tonnage of 999 and a deadweight of roughly 1,911 tonnes, and was carrying a complement far larger than such a vessel would normally require. Coastal cargo ships of this size operate throughout the region on short regional voyages, and are exposed when weather deteriorates offshore. The response drew units from three states whose relations in these waters are frequently adversarial, and which nonetheless coordinated closely enough to recover most of those aboard.
