The British-flagged yacht
Eleonora E was shipwrecked this Friday in the port of Tarragona after being rammed by the
Punta Mayor
Maritime Salvage tugboat
, which had made an erratic maneuver to try to leave the dock.
The luxury boat - renting it is worth 70,000 euros a week - was moored at the jetty when she received the impact of the rescue ship.
There is an open investigation to clarify the event, but the main hypothesis is that a possible fault in the engines of the
Punta Mayor
caused the loss of control of the tugboat.
The accident forced the activation of the maritime interior emergency plan (PIM).
The five crew members of the yacht managed to evacuate the ship without suffering injuries.
Firefighters and port personnel tried to stabilize the hit boat, but the huge hole in its hull accelerated the sinking in just half an hour.
It was a few minutes past eight in the morning when the crew of the
Eleonora E
realized that the patrol boat
Punta Mayor
was dangerously approaching the pier.
The robust ship painted in bright orange color has a length of 60 meters and was moving backwards, visibly out of control, towards the point where the luxurious sailboat, 50 meters in length and which was manufactured in the year 2000 in the Netherlands, was moored.
A spokesman for the port of Tarragona reported that the tugboat, with 14 crew members on board, suffered an incident in the engines when performing the reverse gear maneuver and, without power, its own inertia led the
Punta
Mayor to the
Eleonora E
.
The Salvamento Marítimo crew tried to drop anchors to stop the displacement, but the maneuver did not have the expected result.
The blow opened a large hole in the hull of the yacht, and the entry of water caused a rapid shipwreck.
The moment of impact could even be recorded by the crew of boats that were moored at the same pier, and the images quickly went viral on social networks.
The luxurious sailboat had been moored for days at the Marina de Port Tarraco, an area of the port of Tarragona that is reserved for large yachts and leisure boats of considerable length.
Two months ago, very close to the place where the
Eleonora E was sunk, the
Crescent
megayacht
, whose property the State Security Forces attribute to the Russian oligarch Igor Ivanovich Sechin, a close friend of President Vladimir Putin and head of Rosneft, was intervened.
state oil company.
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