Rescue workers are combing the Gulf of Thailand in a crucial second day of searching for 30 sailors missing after a warship sank.
Officials said survivors were found after swimming for hours, some of them unconscious.
HTMAS Sukhoi carrying 105 crew sank during a storm late Sunday night.
Rescuers have so far rescued 75 people, operating in rough seas using boats and helicopters.
On Monday night, a Thai navy commander said life jackets and other flotation devices, as well as training for officers, “give us 48 hours to save our lives.”
Vice Admiral Pichai Lorchusakul said, “So, [Tuesday] will be special. We will try our best to save them.”
With a third of the crew still missing, the Thai navy and air force launched a search on Tuesday with hundreds of officers on four ships, as well as several helicopters to scan a 50 square kilometer (30 square mile) area. Resumed work. .
Many sailors have already been found, injured and exhausted, after hours at sea.
“We found the man holding a lifebuoy … he was floating in the water for 10 hours,” Captain Krapich Korawee-Paparwit of HTMS Kraburi told JEE News.
“He was still conscious, so we were able to get him out of the water safely. He has a minor cut on his head and his eyes are bruised from exposure to seawater.”
Another unidentified crew member said on Monday that he was in the water for several hours before he was rescued.
“The waves were quite high when the ship sank, about three meters,” he said in a clip shared on local media. “I put on a life jacket and jumped in. I swam for three hours.”
Other sailors were found in life rafts after jumping from the sinking ship.
Photos and footage shared by the Navy on Twitter showed dozens of survivors being wrapped in blankets and being rushed to hospital. Many were also taken off the rescue ships on stretchers.
HTMS Sukhothai, a 76m long corvette, was on the second day of a routine patrol east of southeast Thailand when it got caught in a storm on Sunday night.
The Thai Navy says water flooded her bottom and then flooded the electrical room, causing a power outage.
Dramatic images posted on the navy’s Twitter account showed the ship listing to starboard, before the ship went down at around 11:30pm (04:30 GMT) on Sunday.
Other naval vessels were immediately alerted and sent to help, but only the HTMS Kraburi frigate reached the vessel before it sank, about 32 km east of Bang Span in Prachop Khre Khan province. located in.
It is not yet known what caused the ship to flood and why the sailors were forced to jump into the water. The Thai Navy said it was the first time it had lost a ship under such conditions.
The US Naval Institute said the warship was launched in 1987 and built by a local shipbuilding company in the US.
