Nine fishermen were rescued after their vessel capsized due to having allided with a half-sunken cargo ship in the Bay of Bengal off India on Monday, October 26.
The trawler Maa Mini was sailing in the waters five kilometres off Paradip when it inadvertently struck the Mongolian-flagged bulk carrier Black Rose, which has been lying on its side in the same location for over eleven years.
The trawler immediately capsized following the impact, forcing the crew to abandon the vessel.
The crews of some Good Samaritan fishing boats came to the aid of the distressed sailors and pulled all of them out of the water. The rescued fishermen were later brought to hospital as some had suffered minor injuries from the incident.
The capsizing of Maa Mini is the latest in a series of marine accidents that had occurred in the waters near Paradip due to the presence of the half-sunken wreck.
Black Rose capsized five kilometres off the coast as a result of an onboard mechanical failure that had manifest while the ship was transporting over 23,000 tonnes of iron ore on September 9, 2009.
All but one of the 27-strong crew, which had included Bangladeshi, Russian, and Ukrainian nationals, were eventually rescued. The lone fatality was the vessel's chief engineer, whose body was only found a week after the capsizing.
Local officials have intentionally left the wreckage untouched since then due to the estimated high costs of dismantling it as well as its purported scrap value having been deemed too low for the effort to be economical.
