Damaged 'Pamela Gold' crew rescued

All of the crew members of Pamela Gold, a dry cargo ship in distress, have been successfully rescued. The accident occurred in the Tatar Strait separating continental Russia from the Island of Sakhalin.

As the Vladivostok rescue coordination center reported, the original distress message from the ship came Wednesday night (the time difference between Moscow and Vladivostok is around 7 hours). The dry cargo ship proceeding from Japan to the port of Vanino (Russia's Khabarovsk Territory, West Bank of the Tatar Strait), got split among floating ice and started sinking.

At present, the half-immersed Pamela Gold is drifting 27 miles south-east of Vanino. Its current lurch is 17 degrees, but it is steadily growing. The ship has 62 tons of petroleum products aboard. The Rubin rescue ship from the south Sakhalin port of Korsakov will approach it around 6:00 pm local time (11-00 am, January 22 Moscow time).

The operator of Pamela Gold, a dry cargo ship with a 4.5 thousand ton displacement built in the 1970s, is Vladivostok-based Pamela Corporation. It navigates under the Cambodia flag, steered by a Russian crew.