NEW ORLEANS (AP) — A tanker in New Orleans that apparently lost its steering slammed into a docked river cruise boat with 180 people aboard Friday, the mayor said. All aboard survived after the crash prompted a massive rescue operation for passengers and crew who plunged into the Mississippi River as the ship took on water and began to topple over.
Video from the scene showed the much larger Atlantic Asphalt tanker hit the American Heritage cruise boat while it was docked as metal and glass crashed and crunched.
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Tugboat operators, nearby workers, police and other rescuers rushed to help.
“We have zero people unaccounted for, which truly is a miracle on the Mississippi,” New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno said at a news conference as rescuers and others cheered.
The mayor said 32 people were taken to the hospital, but none of them had critical injuries.
Ship started listing within minutes
The boat started listing within minutes and flipped while emergency workers were still trying to get everyone off the ship.
Dozens of people on board and at least two police officers were dragged from the 66-degree Fahrenheit (19-degree Celsius) river onto nearby ships.
Devon Flanagan was at his job nearby at the Port of New Orleans when workers rushed down the dock. He got out of his truck and saw the ship on its side and passengers in the water.
“It was just chaos,” he said. “You had all types of ships, like other barges and other companies down there trying to help out, which also was a little convoluted because you had people still in the water.”
It appeared the tanker seemed to have “some type of loss of steering,” but the exact cause of the crash was unknown, Coast Guard Capt. Melanie Burnham said.
The National Transportation Safety Board planned to investigate the crash, but members were initially unable to make it to New Orleans because all flights nationwide were grounded due to communications problems at regional air traffic control centers.
Cruise line did a roll call to make sure all were accounted for
The people who weren’t injured were brought to a nearby auditorium, and cruise officials did a roll call to make sure everyone was accounted for, Moreno said.
Many people lost their IDs and even car keys in the disaster. Most were from out of town, the mayor said.
“They needed chargers for their phones. Some people didn’t have phones,” Moreno said. “This has now made national news. They need to contact their families to let them know they’re OK. Food, hotel rooms, transportation.”
The cruise ship was built in 2015 and operated by American Cruise Lines. It is five stories and can hold up to 150 passengers.
The American Heritage was finishing an eight-day cruise to several Mississippi River destinations in Louisiana and Mississippi.
The 520-foot-long (160-meter-long) vessel had a final destination in New Orleans, according to MarineTraffic, and was sailing under a flag for the Marshall Islands.
Expert says catastrophic failure of systems on boat
It’s too early to tell what might have caused the crash, but videos indicate some kind of catastrophic system failure on the vessel and “super bad luck” that it struck the boat as passengers were departing, said Martin Davies, a maritime law expert at Tulane University.
The tanker was traveling upriver, going slowly against the current, Davies said.
“For something like this to happen for an upbound ship indicates that something must have gone really badly wrong,” Davies said.
Tankers have local pilots on board for guidance because they know the waters and the ship very well, and the ship had already made the difficult Algiers Point turn on the Mississippi River before it crashed, Davies said.
Tanker owned by subsidiary of Chinese shipbuilder
The ship is owned by a company called Nave Shipping SA, which is registered in Monrovia, Liberia, according to the International Maritime Organization.
It is a subsidiary of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, a sprawling Chinese state-owned conglomerate, according to the live shipping tracker MarineTraffic.
The Chinese company overseeing the asphalt tanker in 2022 accounted for nearly a quarter of the global commercial shipbuilding market, according to a report by the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It was also the largest military shipbuilder in the world at the time.
China State Shipbuilding Corp. didn’t respond to an emailed request for comment Friday afternoon.
The tanker involved in the crash specializes in carrying large quantities of asphalt and bitumen, a semi-solid substance that is often used for road construction and roofing, according to MarineTraffic.
Jeffrey Collins reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Ed White in Detroit, Safiyah Riddle in Los Angeles, M Reo in Washington, D.C., Anna Wilder in Austin, Texas, and Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed to this report.
