Russian fishing trawler capsizes in freezing Barents Sea, 17 feared dead

The Onega fishing trawler capsized and sank in the Barents Sea on Monday

Credit: Alexander Kokorin/AP

A Russian fishing trawler capsized and sunk in the middle of a storm in the Barents Sea on Monday, with 17 of its 19-member crew feared dead.

The Onega ship sank off the coast of the Novaya Zemlya archipelago early Monday morning , Russia’s Emergency Situations Ministry said.

Two men wearing wet suits were rescued by a ship which was in the area when it received their mayday call four minutes before Onega went off the radar. 

Seventeen other people are missing but their chances of survival are considered slim due to adverse weather conditions. The trawler was fishing in freezing waters in a storm with temperatures around -30C.

Officials initially blamed the sinking on a heavy build-up of ice on the trawler, but later said that the ship got into trouble only when the crew started to pull up a net full of fish.

“Most likely, the ship tilted, got hit by water and began to sink,” said Alexander Bakhtin, head of the emergency services in the Arkhangelsk region, adding that authorities were also looking into other possible theories.

The storm was reportedly so bad that the crew did not have time to use lifeboats.

Russia’s Investigative Committee said in a statement on Monday that it would investigate whether the incident was linked to violations of maritime safety regulations.

A rescue operation involving several vessels and a military plane stretched well into Monday evening but the search for the missing men was complicated by darkness and waves up to four metres high.

Andrei Zaika, director of the fish farm which owns the trawler, blamed the deaths on a fatal combination of weather conditions but said that it is not unusual for fishing vessels like Onega to work during a storm.

“They were only doing their job, nothing extraordinary about it,” he told Rossiya 24 television channel.

Russia’s Fisheries Agency said that there were no irregularities on the vessels when it was last checked in October.