Ship accident highlights Antarctic tourism dangers

An ABC report by Barbara Miller says that while all 154 passengers and crew of a cruise ship that sank in Antarctic waters have now been flown to safety in mainland Chile after the MS Explorer went down after hitting an iceberg and the passengers spent several hours in lifeboats in sub-zero temperatures, with the tourism industry in Antarctica is booming, this incident highlights the potential dangers.

The iceberg collision on Friday near the Antarctic Peninsula left the passengers and crew with little time to get out. “The water was already this high in our cabin in a matter of minutes,” one passenger said.

“We grabbed our thermals before we left and that was it.” “The rest is gone,” another said.

The group of 154 people, including 10 Australians, spent several hours in lifeboats before help came.

“The worst moment was being in the lifeboats,” a passenger said. “We were there for four or five hours and it was very cold and we were very exposed.”

Another passenger says the water was about minus three degrees Celsius and the air was probably at about zero.

Arnvid Hansen is the captain of the Norwegian ship that went to the rescue. “The operation went very smoothly.” “In about one hour we had picked all the 154 passengers and the crew members from the Explorer, so the operation went very smoothly,” he said.

There’s relief that all passengers and crew are now safe and have been flown to mainland Chile.

“We are very glad that we are alive and that’s all,” one said.

But Sue Werner, the ship’s operation manager at the Australian company Aurora Expeditions, says the loss of MS Explorer will be felt deeply by those working in the Antarctic tourist industry. “She was a pioneer ship that started Antarctic tourism and a lot of people within the industry have worked on her, and myself, I worked on her in ’96-’97, and she was a lovely ship,” she said.

“It’s really sad to think that she’s at the bottom of the Bransfield Strait in 500 metres of water. It’s a bit of a shock.”

The accident has highlighted the growing tourist industry in the Antarctic.

Dr Marcus Haward is the policy program leader at the Antarctic Climate and Ecosystems Cooperative Research Centre in Hobart.

He says if a similar incident were to happen off the Australian Antarctic Territory, help would not necessarily be so close at hand.

“We have a small and developing industry that visits mostly the sub-Antarctic islands of Macquarie Island, but the distances to the Antarctic from Australia are much higher and longer and the waters are much rougher,” he said.

“So in a sense the ship-borne tourism in what we call east Antarctica is much less than that off the Antarctic Peninsula.” “And because of those distances and the extreme conditions that can be faced there, the management of tourism in east Antarctica is actually even more problematic.”

But Sarina Bratton, the founder and managing director of the Australian company Orion Expedition Cruises, which operates in east Antarctica, is confident disaster would be avoided.

“We have the sonar that is forward-looking and downward-looking sonar,” she said. “Obviously the crew are also very highly trained in all of this.

“I think you may have seen images of lifeboats that were not covered; we have fully covered lifeboats.” “We have rations for days on end.”

“It could take a couple of days, at worst, to get another ship to the area.” “But the response time is purely speculative as in the summer period there’s a number of ships that are operating out in the peninsula.”

“In fact just last summer in the east Antarctica there were some emergencies with both the fishing fleets and the Sea Shepherd, and support was just hours, not days away.”

A Report by The Mole from the ABC