At least 8 people died after the fire of a ship in California | Chronic

The fire and sinking of a dive boat have left at least 8 dead and 26 missing Monday near the island of Santa Cruz (California, USA), and authorities have launched a vast search operation.

Most of the ship's crew, called Conception, slept under the deck of the boat when the fire was declared early in the morning, they said from the Long Beach Coast Guard area. Los Angeles.

"For now, we have recovered only four bodies, but we have located four more dead at the bottom of the sea", sheriff of Santa Barbara County explained at a press conference, Bill Brown, reported the agency EFE.

"Five other people were saved alive and the remaining 26 are missing," clarified.

In this way, Brown updated the figures provided by the Coast Guard a few hours earlier, which gave a record of four deaths, five survivors and at least 29 missing persons, at a time when the authorities were not able to report. were unclear as to the number of people on board. of the ship

At the end of the day, the Coast Guard confirmed that 39 people were traveling, including six crew members and 33 pbadengers.

The boat, 23 meters long, has a capacity of 46 people and usually settles in the port of Santa Barbara for recreational diving.

The County of Ventura Fire Department reportedly responded to an emergency call at 3:28 am in the morning (7.28 from Argentina), while it was on vacation in the USA.

"I can not breathe", One of the ship's crew members at distress call, whose jerky recordings were released by several local TV stations.

"Do not you have any type of firefighting equipment on board? Not even a fire extinguisher?", the Coast Guard official who responded to the call questioned his interlocutor aboard the vessel, without receiving an audible response, according to CNN.

"When the call arrived, the ship was already completely engulfed by the flames," the captain said Monica Rochester, commander of the Los Angeles Coast Guard – Long Beach area, at a press conference.

The reasons for the Design Fire, a boat from the Truth Aquatics diving company that left Santa Barbara Saturday for a dive excursion and who had planned to return to the coast on Monday, are unknown.

Authorities have no reason to suspect an act "criminal" but they have not thrown it either, and have also investigated the possibility that propane tanks on board the ship are causing inflammation, according to Brown.

Design had been in circulation for almost four decades since 1981, and had pbaded its last safety inspections in February and August 2018, according to Coast Guard reports quoted by the local NBC.

An inspection conducted in 2016 revealed a problem in the heat detector in the kitchen and another in 2014 found leaks in the pipe, but the documents indicate that these problems have been solved.