The Mercury 2 ferry sank in the Caspian Sea.

#Shipwreck #FerrySink #Mercury
The ferry Mercury-2 sank in the Caspian Sea.
The Mercury II was a cargo-passenger ferry built in Brodogradilište "Uljanik" (Pula, Croatia) in 1984. It was registered in Baku. The ship's owner was the Azerbaijan State Caspian Shipping Company. It sank on October 22, 2002.
On October 21, at 3:00 AM, the Mercury-2, a scheduled voyage, left the Kazakh port of Aktau and headed for its home port of Baku. The Mercury-2 was not fully loaded—instead of its intended 35 railcars, it took on 16 oil tankers, one railcar with consumer cargo, and eight passengers. There was also a slight storm, but the weather forecast did not predict any serious problems.
The 8,800-ton ferry, 155 meters long and 18.3 meters wide, had "coped" with even more challenging weather. One way or another, the ship's captain, Jafaraga Imanov, decided to set sail. A couple of hours later, a hurricane-force wind blew in. As the weather service would later confirm, by morning it was blowing at 27 meters per second, with waves reaching 6.5 meters.
Electrician Elchin Ismailov, who slept soundly until morning, wasn't bothered by the raging wind—in his many years of working at sea, he'd encountered storms even worse. At 8:00 a.m., after breakfast, he reported for duty. Around 9:00 a.m., a call came from the passenger compartment—the lights had gone out in one of the cabins. He'd just fixed the problem when he suddenly felt the deck give way beneath him. The ship tilted sharply. Before it could right itself, a wave engulfed it. A terrible clang rumbled somewhere below, and Elchin was thrown painfully against the opposite wall. The ferry shook and shuddered, preventing him from rising. Crawling to the door, he struggled out of his cabin. He managed to hear the radio command for the crew and passengers to don their personal life jackets.
As the newspaper "Kazakhstan Segodnya" later explained, citing Aktau port officials, the ferry captain was forced to abruptly change course in the storm winds to avoid colliding with the drilling rig it was being washed toward. However, the change in course on a large wave caused a large list, and the vessel capsized. The tanks, torn from their moorings by the wave impact, rolled toward the starboard side, finally capsizing the ferry. Ten to fifteen minutes later, the "Mercury-2" sank. Elchin, who had managed to pull on a life jacket, was already in the water by then. In the first few minutes, as the oncoming wave tossed him onto the very crest, he could still see the side of the boat lying on its side. And then it, too, disappeared. People—crew and passengers—were floundering around in the raging sea. He tried to stay close to one another, but it was impossible. Wave after wave, rolling in, scattered everyone. At some point, Elchin realized there was no one nearby; only faint cries for help could still be heard from somewhere in the distance, through the roar and moan of the wind and waves. And then even those disappeared.
By then, he had been in the water, which at the time was 14-15 degrees Celsius, for almost six hours.
"Another 15-20 minutes," Elchin Ismailov said in the hospital. "I probably wouldn't have lasted any longer." He, like the other eight who managed to survive the extreme situation, was picked up by vessels from the Dede Gorgud drilling rig, located 10 miles (19 kilometers) from the site of the tragedy. All those rescued—including three women—were taken to hospitals, thoroughly examined, and provided with qualified medical care; all nine are out of danger.
As for the remaining crew members and passengers, the declaration of mourning is, in essence, an official acknowledgement of the deaths of all those previously listed as missing.
However, according to Azerbaijani Deputy Prime Minister Abid Sharifov, there are neither the funds nor the technical capabilities to extract the victims from beneath 150 meters of water—the depth of the sea where the Mercury-2 sank. Once the rescue operation is completed, specialists will focus their efforts on the second crucial aspect of the tragedy: the environmental consequences of the oil spill. So far, the scale of the disaster, according to Minister of Natural Resources and Environment Huseyn Bagirov, who visited the site with experts from his department, does not raise serious concerns. Preventing a possible fuel leak from the sunken tanks requires raising at least the railcars, which, according to Sharifov, is much more realistic than retrieving the entire ferry from the seabed.

Of the 42 crew members and 8 passengers, only nine were rescued. The bodies of four victims have been recovered. After five days of nearly round-the-clock surveillance of the site of the tragedy from the air and sea, a specially created government commission has called off the search operations. October 28 has been declared a day of national mourning for the victims.
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