KHABAROVSK, April 2. /TASS/. Total of nineteen ships continue search in the area of wreckage of the Dalny Vostok trawler in the Sea of Okhotsk, the Far-Eastern regional center of the Ministry for Emergency Situations and Civil Defence said on Thursday.

"A search for seamen from the wrecked ship continues in the Sea of Okhotsk," a spokesperson for the regional center said. "At 10:00 p.m. Khabarovsk time (3:00 p.m. Moscow time or 12:00 a.m. UTC), as many as nineteen ships were engaged in the search actively and the operation embraced an overall area of 8,500 square kilometers."

A Mi-8 helicopter of the Emergencies Ministry was expected to leave the city of Magadan with a group of rescuers and medics aboard on Friday morning. Its goal is to evacuate the injured seamen from the ship The Andromeda to hospitals.

A representative of the Emergencies Ministry for the Kamchatka territory told TASS preliminary information indicated a total of ten seamen stood in need of emergency assistance. Their condition was assessed as "poor".

Artur Rets, the chief of the rescue and coordination sub-center of Russia’s Federal Agency of Maritime and Inland Waterway transport said earlier the captain of The Mlechny Put ship, who was coordinating the operation right in the disaster area had taken a decision to suspend the operation as dusk had set in.

The active phase of the search was to resume in the early morning of Friday, April 3.

The list of the dead has fifty-six names at the moment and the list of survivors, sixty-three names. The total number of The Dalny Vostok crewmembers who have been retrieved from water dead or alive is 119. The plight of thirteen people was still unclear at the time of reporting.

The trawler with 132 crewmembers aboard, some of them foreign nationals, wrecked in the small hours of April 1 about 330 km to the west of the township of Krutogorovsky in the Kamchatka territory and 250 kilometers to the south of Magadan.

It belonged to the Russian fishery company OOO Magellan and was registered in the port of Nevelsk on the island of Sakhalin.