General News Ghost Ship Lyubov Orlova may make landfall with hold full of starving rats

I'll post two articles since LA Times is (probably) a more reputable news source than Gawker. Anyway, I'm too lazy to quote the article but the gist is that this old 1970s USSR cruise liner the Lyubov Orlova was seized in 2010 by Canadian authorities from its private owners due to debt. It sat anchored off St. John's, Newfoundland for two years. It was sold for scrap and was being relocated to the Dominican Republic via tugboats. The get a mile or so off shore, tow-lines break, ship is lost.

In 2013, Canada finds and re-captures the liner and takes it out to international waters and just....cuts it loose. Now the problem is(although the two articles I post don't really get much confirmation) that during the two years it sat off St. John's, crew-less, apparently wharf rats got aboard. A lot of them. And now they're just on the ship.

In March 2013, a storm shook two of the ghost ship's lifeboats off and they're emergency transmitters put the ship approx. 700 miles off the Irish coast. Well, this seems like a fiasco waiting to happen. WTF, if you just planned to cut it loose why not just torpedo the thing and sink it?

Anyway, links to articles below:

Ghost ship Lyubov Orlova and starving rats headed for land? - latimes.com

Abandoned Cruise Ship Full of Starving Rats Headed For Land

What do you guys think about this?

 

Yeah I think it's an older story, I personally only heard about it yesterday. I've done some more reading actually since I posted it and I've got conflicting reports. Some outlets accuse the Canadian government of releasing the ship into international waters and then basically stating that since it was unlikely the vessel would re-enter Canadian waters they didn't give a shit. Others say a private, corporate vessel was the one hauling the liner in international waters and the tow-line got separated a second time. Due to stormy conditions, Canada declined to send out their Coast Guard to help wrangle the Lyubov Orlova and it was lost. To be honest, the latter sounds more plausible because the former seems like such a dick move. As far as I've read, their were no beacons in the ship proper, only the lifeboats. The rats though. I guess if it was declared scrap metal they wouldn't have fumigated the hulk before leaving St. John's. Still, just letting the ship drift? I'm no expert on maritime law but it seems like a bad idea. Besides running aground, what if the hulk struck another vessel?