2 Are Found Dead on Ship That Burned

U.S. Coast Guard firefighters found two bodies--believed to be the missing captain and first steward--aboard a fire-damaged cargo ship Sunday, while 28 other crew members rescued from the ship arrived safely at the Port of Long Beach.

“There were two people missing and two bodies found,” said Petty Officer Jamie Devitt, a Coast Guard spokeswoman in Long Beach. “It is only an assumption right now (that they are the same people), but it is a pretty good one.”

Authorities said the bodies were burned beyond recognition, and they declined to release the names or nationalities of either missing man. All 34 crew members aboard the 600-foot Sea Architect are from Hong Kong and Burma, the Coast Guard said.

Four crew members waited aboard the drifting vessel Sunday for a commercial tugboat to tow the ship to an undetermined Bay Area port.

The 28 rescued crew members, tired but in good health, arrived in Long Beach about 3 a.m. Sunday aboard a Greek-registered container ship. The vessel, the Zim Livorno, reported the fire to authorities early Saturday after spotting distress signals from the Sea Architect, which had lost all power and was drifting about 140 miles off the Central California coast.

The rescued crew members, many of whom had no identification, were questioned by officials from U.S. Customs and the Immigration and Naturalization Service, Devitt said, before being turned over to the ship’s agent in Long Beach.

“We hoisted them off the ship with helicopters, and they didn’t have time to take anything with them,” Devitt said.

A Coast Guard cutter with firefighting equipment reached the burning Panamanian-registered vessel Saturday night and extinguished the fire by 10 a.m. Sunday, Devitt said. Firefighters found one body on the ship’s bridge and the other near the galley, she said.

The bodies will remain aboard the Sea Architect until the vessel reaches port, where they will be turned over to the local coroner for examination and official identification, Devitt said.

The cause of the fire was under investigation, but crew members told Coast Guard inspectors that the blaze may have been started by an electrical short-circuit in a dressing room in the vessel’s living quarters, said Chief Petty Officer Russ Burress.