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Two acft, one 'copter, two sea-going boats to join in search Wed

Directly at sea, the search is being conducted by the icebreaker Magadan of the Far Eastern shipping company

VLADIVOSTOK, December 21 (Itar-Tass) — Two aircraft, one helicopter and two sea-going boats join in the search for people from the sunken drilling platform in the Sea of Okhotsk on Wednesday.

According to the Far Eastern regional center of the Russian Ministry for Emergencies (RME), air surveillance in the central area of the Sea of Okhotsk -- where the tragedy occurred on December 18 -- will be carried out by a Mi-8 helicopter of the Sakhalin-based air company Aviashelf and an An-74 plane of the RME. An IL-38 plane of the Pacific Fleet, which was conducting air surveillance of the sea area on the first day of the search-and-rescue operation, is also at the ready at Nikolayevka airfield in Primorsky (maritime) Territory.

Directly at sea, the search is being conducted by the icebreaker Magadan of the Far Eastern shipping company. The rescue boat Atlas of the Sakhalin emergency rescue center will join the icebreaker in the search on Wednesday afternoon.

According to the RME regional center, 36 people out of 67 members of the crew aboard the Kolskaya platform were from Murmansk Region. Fourteen people have been rescued since the beginning of the rescue operation. Fourteen dead bodies were found in the water. Eleven of them were lifted from the water by the crew of the ship SMIT Sakhalin.

The offshore drilling platform Kolskaya sank while being piloted by the icebreaker Magadan and the tugboat Neftegaz-55 from the western coast of the Kamchatka Peninsula to Sakhalin Island. The drllling platform capsized during a heavy storm 200 km from Sakhalin and sank to a depth of more than one kilometer.

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