54 Dead, 9 Injured After Polish Ferry Capsizes in Baltic Sea

Battered by hurricane-force winds and towering waves, rescuers tried in vain Thursday to board a capsized Polish ferry on the slim chance that survivors might still be trapped after a Baltic Sea disaster that left 54 people dead and nine injured.

But German police casualty figures released late Thursday appeared to account for all the passengers, meaning the search would not have to be resumed this morning.

The first rescuers reported watching helplessly as victims waved for help in the icy, storm-tossed waters about 15 miles from the northern German island of Ruegen.

“It is a very, very difficult and dangerous situation,” said Andreas Lubkowitz, spokesman for the German maritime agency coordinating rescue operations from Bremen. The operations involved divers, boats and helicopters from Germany, Denmark and Poland.

The 410-foot Jan Heweliusz was en route from Swinoujscie, Poland, to Ystad, Sweden, with 63 people aboard when the Mayday went out at 4:57 a.m. “It was just a few words,” Lubkowitz said. “They said: ‘We’re having big problems. The boat is tipping over and it’s very stormy--a hurricane. Help us.’ The first rescue boat was on its way within 15 minutes.”

By the time help arrived about an hour later, he said, the ferry had capsized and the cold, roiling sea was filled with bodies and a handful of freezing survivors. “We found life rafts, but there was no one inside,” he said, indicating that the disaster struck too quickly and the seas were too heavy for people to clamber aboard.

The cause of the accident was not immediately known, but maritime authorities speculated that the fierce storm caused one or more of the trucks or rail cars being carried by the ferry to tear loose from its couplings and roll around, causing the ferry to list dangerously and eventually flip over.

In Stockholm, the Swedish news agency TT reported that the same ferry had capsized at least twice before--once in 1977, just a year after it was built, because of faulty valves regulating the ballast tanks, and again in 1982 while it was loading trucks and rail cars in Ystad.

Those aboard Thursday included 29 crew members and 34 passengers, most of them truck drivers of various nationalities--Norwegian, Swedish, Polish, Hungarian, Czech and Austrian.

The German news agency Deutsche Presse-Agentur quoted a crewman from the first helicopter on the scene as saying that rescuers had to watch helplessly while people fought for their lives in the freezing sea. “That will always be on my conscience,” Lt. Carsten Oehne was quoted as saying. “We saw people waving for help, for their lives--and we couldn’t help.”

Waves of up to 16 feet slammed against the upside-down ferry and, along with the howling wind, made it too dangerous for divers to reach the vessel, authorities said.