About 50 commercial vessels were trapped in Baltic Sea ice Thursday, among them six large passenger ferries carrying roughly 1,840 people on routes between Sweden, Finland, and Estonia.
Officials at the Swedish Maritime Administration said ships became stuck in two areas: the Bay of Bothnia, where ice is thicker, and just outside the Stockholm archipelago, where shifting ice made navigation hazardous. One official said the scale of the disruption was unlike anything since the mid-1980s.
Two icebreakers were already working in the area. A third was heading south after assisting commercial vessels in the northern Bay of Bothnia but would not arrive until midnight at the earliest, leaving some ferries stuck until the following morning.
The Amorella and the Regal Star, which had been icebound since around midnight Wednesday, were still held fast by afternoon. The Isabella, one of the two largest ferries, had been freed. Viking Line's chief executive said all passengers aboard its vessels were safe.
Sweden's winter had been unusually severe, with sub-freezing temperatures across the country since December and strong winds in the preceding week creating ice conditions heavy enough to defeat ships designed to handle normal Baltic ice.
Historical summary. TurkishPress restated this wire report, first published in March 2010, in its own words.