An oil tanker and a cargo ship collided off the coast of eastern England Monday, setting each vessels on fire and triggering a significant rescue operation, emergency services said.
Not less than 32 casualties were brought ashore, but their condition was not immediately clear.
Martyn Boyers, chief executive of the Port of Grimsby East, said 13 casualties were brought in on a Windcat 33 vessel, followed by one other 19 on a harbor pilot boat.
Britain’s Maritime and Coastguard Agency said several lifeboats and a coast guard rescue helicopter were dispatched to the scene within the North Sea, together with a coast guard plane and nearby vessels with firefighting capability.
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The RNLI life boat agency said “there have been reports that a lot of people had abandoned the vessels following a collision and there have been fires on each ships.” It said three lifeboats were working on search and rescue on the scene alongside the coast guard.
Video footage aired by the BBC and apparently filmed from a close-by vessel showed thick black smoke pouring from each ships.
Boyers, the port chief, said he had been told there was “a large fireball.”
“It’s too far out for us to see – about 10 miles – but we’ve got seen the vessels bringing them in,” he said.
The tanker, believed to be the U.S.-flagged chemical and oil products carrier MV Stena Immaculate, was at anchor on the time after sailing from Greece, in keeping with ship-tracking site VesselFinder. The cargo vessel, Portugal-flagged container ship Solong, was sailing from Grangemouth in Scotland to Rotterdam within the Netherlands.
Coast guards said the alarm was raised at 9:48 a.m. (0948 GMT). The location of the collision is off the coast of Hull, about 155 miles (250 kilometers) north of London.
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