All Passengers, Crew Survive New Orleans Paddleboat Accident

NEW ORLEANS (AP) — An oil tanker in New Orleans that apparently lost direction slammed into a docked river cruise ship Friday with 180 people on board, the mayor said. All on board survived after the accident sparked a massive rescue operation for passengers and crew who plunged into the Mississippi River as the ship took on water and began to tip.

Video from the scene showed the much larger Atlantic Asphalt tanker hit the American Heritage cruise ship while it was docked as metal and glass crashed and cracked.

Tugboat operators, nearby workers, police and other rescuers rushed to help.

“We have no missing people, which is truly a miracle on the Mississippi,” New Orleans Mayor Helena Moreno said at a news conference to applause from rescuers and others.

The mayor said 32 people were taken to hospital, but none of them had serious injuries.

The ship started registering within minutes

The boat began to list within minutes and turned over while rescuers were still trying to get everyone off the ship.

Dozens of people on board and at least two police officers were dragged from the 66 degree Fahrenheit (19 degree Celsius) river to nearby vessels.

Devon Flanagan was at his job near the Port of New Orleans when workers rushed to the dock. He got out of his truck and saw the ship on its side and the passengers in the water.

“It was just chaos,” he said. “There were all types of ships, like other barges and other companies there, trying to help us, which was also a little complicated because there were still people in the water.”

It appeared the tanker was suffering “some sort of loss of steering,” but the exact cause of the accident was unknown, Coast Guard Capt. Melanie Burnham said.

The National Transportation Safety Board had planned to investigate the crash, but its members were unable to travel to New Orleans because all flights across the country were nailed to the ground due to communication problems in regional air traffic control centers.

The cruise line conducted a roll call to make sure everyone was accounted for

Those who were not injured were taken to a nearby auditorium and cruise officials conducted a roll call to make sure everyone was present, Moreno said.

Many people lost their identity documents and even their car keys in the disaster. Most came from out of town, the mayor said.

“They needed chargers for their phones. Some people didn’t have phones,” Moreno said. “It’s now national news. They need to contact their families to let them know they’re OK. Food, hotel rooms, transportation.”

The cruise ship was built in 2015 and operated by American Cruise Lines. It has five floors and can accommodate up to 150 passengers.

The American Heritage was completing an eight-day cruise to several Mississippi River destinations in Louisiana and Mississippi.

The 520-foot-long (160-meter-long) vessel had a final destination in New Orleans, according to MarineTraffic, and was sailing under the flag of the Marshall Islands.

Expert speaks of catastrophic failure of boat systems

It’s too early to say what may have caused the accident, but videos indicate some sort of catastrophic system failure on the ship and “a very bad chance” that it struck the boat as passengers were leaving, said Martin Davies, a maritime law expert at Tulane University.

The tanker was moving up the river, moving slowly against the current, Davies said.

“If something like this happens to a ship going uphill, it indicates something must have gone really wrong,” Davies said.

The tankers have local pilots on board to guide them because they are very familiar with the waters and the ship, and the ship had already made the difficult turn from Algiers Point on the Mississippi River before crashing, Davies said.

Tanker belonging to a subsidiary of a Chinese shipbuilder

The ship is owned by a company called Nave Shipping SA, registered in Monrovia, Liberia, according to the International Maritime Organization.

It is a subsidiary of the China State Shipbuilding Corporation, a sprawling Chinese state-owned conglomerate, according to live shipping tracker MarineTraffic.

The Chinese company overseeing asphalt in 2022 accounted for nearly a quarter of the global commercial shipbuilding market, according to a report. report of the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute. It was also the largest military shipbuilder in the world at the time.

China State Shipbuilding Corp. did not respond to an emailed request for comment Friday afternoon.

The tanker truck involved in the accident specializes in transporting large quantities of asphalt and bitumen, a semi-solid substance often used for road and roof construction, according to MarineTraffic.

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Jeffrey Collins reported from Columbia, South Carolina. Ed White in Detroit, Safiyah Riddle in Los Angeles, M Reo in Washington, DC, Anna Wilder in Austin, Texas, and Beatrice Dupuy in New York contributed to this report.