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February 27, 2016

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Australian 鈥榚xplorers鈥 rescued from boat

EXPEDITIONERS stranded on Australia’s flagship icebreaker, which ran aground in Antarctica, were yesterday rescued by barge, ahead of attempts to refloat the ship.

The Aurora Australis has been stuck since breaking its mooring and being swept onto rocks on Wednesday during a blizzard while on a resupply mission to Australia’s Mawson Station.

“Expeditioners on board the Aurora Australis have been successfully transferred by barge to Mawson station,” the Australian Antarctic Division (AAD) said in a statement yesterday.

The barge made three trips to extract the expeditioners who were now at Mawson station. Of the 68 people onboard, 37 were expeditioners, it said.

The crew remained on the ship and will attempt to move it off the rocks. The icebreaker’s hull has been damaged but only “in a space that is usually flooded with ballast water” and there has been no fuel spill.

The ship’s owners, P&O Maritime Services, said that once the Aurora Australis was successfully refloated, it would be taken out of Horseshoe Harbor to a sheltered area close by for a fuller assessment of any damage.

The boat’s grounding means it will not be able to pick up 30 people waiting for it at another Australian research base, Davis, who were due to join the ship for the voyage back to Australia.

Instead, the US Antarctic program will fly in a LC130 aircraft today to get them to Australia’s Casey Station, where another plane will land in the coming days to transport them out.

The AAD said it was consulting with other national Antarctic programs to ship the expeditioners on Mawson back to Australia.


 

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