THOUSANDS of gallons of heavy-duty oil were pouring from a grounded cargo ship off the Alaska coast last night in a disaster that appears to have claimed six lives and threatens an environmental catastrophe.

The 40,000-tonne Malaysian-registered Selendang Ayu, carrying 480,000 gallons of heavy fuel oil and 21,000 gallons of diesel, yesterday split in two off the coast of Unalaska island, a region near a wildlife refuge that is home to sea lions, seals, otters, halibut fishing stocks and several endangered species.

A US Coast Guard helicopter, sent to rescue crew members from the stricken vessel in howling gales, crashed into the near-freezing Bering Sea with ten people on board on Wednesday evening.

Four of those on board, including the three-man Coast Guard crew, were later rescued, but six crewmen from the stricken ship remained missing in water so cold that survival is considered impossible beyond three hours.

The 738ft ship, which was transporting soybeans from Tacoma, Washington State, to Xiamen, China, lost power on Tuesday and started drifting. It ran aground off Unalaska island, about 800 miles south west of Anchorage. The freighter’s captain and a rescue swimmer who remained with the vessel were rescued shortly before it broke up. Eighteen other crew members had been rescued earlier.

Officials expressed concern last night about the amount of oil pouring from the broken freighter, a sight that evoked memories of the 1989 Exxon Valdez tanker disaster.

In the largest spill in US history, the Exxon Valdez hit a reef east of Prince William Sound, about 860 miles west of the current spill, causing massive environmental damage.

Animals in the Unalaska area, part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, include Steller’s sea lions, an endangered species, Steller’s eiders, another threatened species, and western Alaska sea otters, the population of which has dropped to dangerously low levels.

With resources scarce in the remote and harsh area, the search for the missing men was taking precedence over the environmental threat.

“There are only so many boats and so many planes, and they have been directed to the search for life,” Kurt Fredriksson, acting commissioner for the state department of environmental conservation, said.

Chief Petty Officer Roger Wetherell, of the Coast Guard in Anchorage, said that there were no aircraft searching in the dark, but that at least one cutter was at the scene of the helicopter crash. It went down at about 6.15pm on Wednesday.

No sign of the missing crew had been found, a Coast Guard spokesman said.

Last night the Selendang Ayu was cleaved in two, both pieces grounded about 200ft from the shore near Skan Bay on the western side of the island, spewing heavy bunker oil.

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