China conducts dramatic rescues after Typhoon Chaba breaks ship in half
A ship was critically damaged in a typhoon off the coast of China on July 2. The crew abandoned ship while they waited to be rescued.
Chinese search and rescue officials recovered 12 bodies and rescued a sailor Monday after Typhoon Chaba snapped an engineering vessel in two over the weekend, authorities reported.
The ship, Fujing001, and its crew of 30 had been at an anti-typhoon anchorage near Yangjiang in South China's coastal providence of Guangdong when the anchor chain snapped, Reuters reported.
The bodies were found in the waters southwest of Hong Kong, about 50 nautical miles from where the ship sank, according to the news source. Only four crew members had been rescued as of Monday, and over a dozen remain missing.
The other three survivors were rescued by Hong Kong's Government Flying Service (GFS) on Saturday.
"The three crew members were holding onto some railings." Air Crewman III Crus Szeto, a member of the GFS who rescued the three men, told RTHK on Monday. "It was already very slanted, almost like a scene from the Titanic movie. If they had lost their grip [and] couldn't hold on, they would have fallen into the water."
Szeto added that in addition to the tilted vessel forcing sailors to cling to the railing, towering waves were crashing up against them and threatening to drag them down into the sea.
"Chaba was a typhoon with the equivalent strength of a Category 1 hurricane in the Atlantic or East Pacific basins prior to making landfall in Maoming, China, on July 2," AccuWeather Meteorologist Renee Duff said. " The typhoon churned up rough and dangerous conditions over the South China Sea before unleashing flooding rainfall and tornadoes across southeastern China as it moved inland."
While it has since dissipated, moisture from the storm will continue to produce scattered rain and thunderstorms across southeastern China into Tuesday, local time, according to AccuWeather Senior Meteorologist Jason Nicholls.
"An upper trough will lift the lingering energy and moisture from Chaba northeastward across east-central and northeastern China into the Korean Peninsula late Tuesday and Wednesday, local time," Nicholls said. "Areas of heavy rain and risk of strong thunderstorms are expected with this feature."
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