Soviet liner in ice pack collision was 'going too fast'

THE skipper of a Norwegian coastguard ship which rescued hundreds of

passengers from a stricken Soviet cruise liner said today that the

Maksim Gorkiy was travelling much too fast when it smashed into a belt

of Arctic ice.

''I don't know the exact speed but I was told by crew on board that it

had a speed of between 14 and 17 knots at the time of the accident,''

Sigurd Kleiven, commander of the coastguard vessel Senja, told a news

conference aboard his ship.

Asked how fast he would have been going in such foggy conditions with

drifting ice around, he replied: ''Between two and three knots.''

None of the 990 people aboard the 25,000-ton Soviet liner was hurt in

the accident in the early hours of yesterday. The 611 passengers, most

of them elderly West Germans, were flown home today.

Kleiven said that contrary to earlier reports, the Maksim Gorkiy had

not hit an iceberg but had blundered into a huge belt of drift ice about

eight feet thick, two nautical miles wide and 12 to 15 miles long.

''We saw no icebergs in the area,'' he said.

The Senja had to plough through the same barrier of ice to reach the

damaged ship and rescue passengers, hundreds of whom had taken refuge in

lifeboats or on ice floes.

Crew still aboard the Maksim Gorkiy succeeded in stabilising the ship

and patching up the two gashes in its bow opened by the ice.

The liner was sailing slowly today under its own power towards the

Soviet settlement of Barentsburg on the Arctic island of Spitzbergen

with about half its crew aboard.

0 In Duesseldorf, a West German tourist today described how passengers

and crew members from the liner used poles to nudge away drifting ice

floes that could have splintered their lifeboat like a twig.

''After we were lowered to the sea with about 100 other passengers and

crew and moved away from the ship, we found ourselves in the middle of

pack ice with no other boats in sight,'' recalled Ludwig Pfeilschifter.

''The fear was just palpable in the boat: you could see it in our

pallor, and some of us thought we were looking death in the eyes,'' said

Pfeilschifter, who spent five-and-a-half hours in the open lifeboat

before being rescued by the Norwegian coast guard vessel Senja.

''If the Senja hadn't happened so close by, if the sea hadn't been so

calm and if it hadn't been for the (Arctic) midnight sun, our situation

would have become a catastrophe,'' said his wife Maria.

More than 570 cruise passengers were emotionally reunited with

relatives in West Germany after flying in from Spitzbergen.

Some of the passengers who arrived on a chartered jet in Duesseldorf

assembled with the tour group's priest in the airport lounge to say the

Lord's Prayer, while others fought off exhaustion to tell their stories.

Maria Pfeilschifter described how after they had drifted in the ice

for hours, Soviet crew members ordered her group to climb onto a large

ice floe because they felt it would be safer there until help came.

''We thought it was all over then,'' she said, adding that blankets

and planks from deckchairs were placed on the floe to reduce the chances

of slipping and breaking through the ice.

The group was saved shortly afterward by the coast guard ship.

Other passengers said there was no panic after the Maksim Gorkiy

rammed the ice pack and that the evacuation mounted by Soviet crew

members was generally efficient and professional.

But they complained of what followed -- terrifying hours spent in

freezing fog aboard lifeboats ringed by shifting pack ice without any

sign of rescuers.

Dozens of people in one lifeboat had to endure an experience almost as

harrowing as fending off the pack ice.

''For some reason, our lifeboat was not lowered all the way to the

water surface. We just hung from the cables for four hours, banging

against the ship's hull like a roller coaster,'' said passenger Werner

Jahn, 76.--Reuter.