The shipwreck this Tuesday of the Galician fishing Villa de Pitanxo Shortly before six in the morning in the waters of Newfoundland, an island off the northeast coast of Canada, it leaves four dead and 17 missing at the moment, sources from Maritime Rescue have confirmed to EL PAÍS. on the ship, Based in Marín (Pontevedra) and owned by the Galician shipowner Manuel Nores —owner of Grupo Nores—, 24 sailors were travelling, 16 Spanish, five Peruvians and three Ghanaians. Sources from the Cooperative of Fisheries Owners of the Port of Vigo (ARVI), to which the Nores Group belongs, have not yet given a death toll from the sinking of the ship, built in 2004, and whose crew is from various towns in Galicia, like Marín and Bueu, both in the region of O Morrazo (Pontevedra). The relatives of the sailors have begun to arrive early this afternoon at the headquarters of the Nores Group, in Marín, to request explanations about the state of their relatives from the owners of the company.
The sub-delegate of the Government in Pontevedra, Maica Larriba, announced the news shortly after noon. Larriba has reported that the rescue teams had sighted four life rafts and accessed two of them. “In a [había] only three survivors in a state of shock hypothermic because the temperature of the water at this moment is terrible, very low”, assured Larriba, who added: “We have been informed that there are corpses”. Canadian authorities are now tracking the other two rafts, but at the moment they have not yet been located. “The situation in the waters of Newfoundland was very bad”, underlined the sub-delegate, who pointed out that in addition in the area “it is still dawn”, so the boats and helicopters of the Canadian rescue service “until very recently They had no information.”
Sources from the National Maritime Rescue Coordination Center have confirmed that the Villa de Pitanxo issued two alerts at 5:24 a.m., but despite the authorities trying to contact them on several occasions, no one responded. The signal from the ship’s blue box – the positioning system, which communicates with the station that tracks the ship, much like the black box used by planes – was lost shortly before six in the morning, according to the Subdelegation of the Government of Pontevedra. The authorities then mobilized several nearby ships to approach the area and check the status of the ship.
A spokeswoman for the Marin City Council has confirmed the shipwreck and has assured that two fishing boats are helping in the search for survivors, including one from Portugal and another from Marin. “I don’t remember a tragedy of such magnitude,” said the mayor of the municipality, María Ramallo. The Villa de Pitanxowhich is 50 meters long and 10 meters wide, was fishing in the fishing grounds of the Northwest Atlantic Fisheries Organization (NAFO), where they fish mainly Greenland halibut, skate , redfish, northern shrimp and cod.
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The Government spokesperson and Minister of Territorial Policy, Isabel Rodríguez, has also referred to the shipwreck in the press conference after the Council of Ministers: “I want to tell you that the Government is following with concern and concern the search and rescue tasks of the crew . We are in permanent contact with the rescue teams. I can confirm that three crew members have been rescued, but I cannot add any other information, and I ask you to be especially careful in your communications, because their relatives are also closely following these events.”
It has been common for years that on Galician deep-sea fishing boats not all the crew are Spanish. In many of them it is common for some of the sailors and engineer officers —especially those of low rank— to be African, Latin American or Asian. However, the officers of the ships are usually Galician. Since they began to retire baby boomersthe generation that was created in Spain as a result of some 650,000 annual births between the end of the 1950s and the 1970s, the shipowners of this community are having many problems finding a generational replacement due to the harsh living conditions in high sea.
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