The South Korean icebreaker Araon finally arrived on Monday, and repairs to the hole were completed by Wednesday morning, New Zealand’s Rescue Coordination Center said. The Araon then began escorting the Sparta through the ice and toward the open ocean.

Both ships are expected to clear the ice pack within 12 hours of moving, rescue center spokesman Chris Henshaw said.

“The inside (of the hull hole) has been all fixed up — they used a cement box to fill it in,” Henshaw told New Zealand’s National Radio. A cement box provides a temporary fix to the torn steel plating to make the vessel seaworthy.

The crew had not been able to weld a steel plate over the hole because of safety concerns, he said.

The Araon, a polar research ship, will guide the Sparta to ice-free open ocean about 100 miles (160 kilometers) away, where it will be joined by its sister ship for the 2,200-mile (3,700 kilometer) journey to the New Zealand port of Lyttelton. It will dry dock there for permanent repairs, Henshaw said.

The arrival was a relief to the crew, which had been desperately pumping out near-frozen sea water while awaiting rescue. At one point, more than half of those on board were forced onto life rafts.

The crew is made up of 15 Russians, 16 Indonesians and one Ukrainian.

A New Zealand air force cargo plane had previously made two parachute drops of pumps and hull patching gear that had helped keep the single-hulled Sparta from sinking.

Search and rescue coordinator Mike Roberts said the South Korean vessel was alongside Sparta transferring fuel to it to change its trim — or how it’s sitting in the water — so the bow rises clear of the sea, exposing the damaged area of hull.

Roberts said crew from both ships will attempt to weld a “doubler plate” over the hole — one external and a second inside. If successful, the repair is expected to make Sparta seaworthy, and should enable it to be escorted by Araon out of the sea ice to open water, he said in a statement. Roberts did not say how long the repair attempt was expected to take.

Weather in the area was calm, which should help the repair operation, he said.

The survival drama on the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf is taking place about 2,200 miles (3,700 kilometers) southeast of New Zealand.

The arrival was a relief to the crew, which had been desperately pumping out near-frozen sea water while awaiting rescue. At one point, more than half of those on board were forced onto life rafts.

The crew is made up of 15 Russians, 16 Indonesians and one Ukrainian.

A New Zealand air force cargo plane had previously made two parachute drops of pumps and hull patching gear that had helped keep the single-hulled Sparta from sinking.

Search and rescue coordinator Mike Roberts said the South Korean vessel was alongside Sparta transferring fuel to it to change its trim — or how it’s sitting in the water — so the bow rises clear of the sea, exposing the damaged area of hull.

Roberts said crew from both ships will attempt to weld a “doubler plate” over the hole — one external and a second inside. If successful, the repair is expected to make Sparta seaworthy, and should enable it to be escorted by Araon out of the sea ice to open water, he said in a statement. Roberts did not say how long the repair attempt was expected to take.

Weather in the area was calm, which should help the repair operation, he said.

The survival drama on the edge of the Antarctic ice shelf is taking place about 2,200 miles (3,700 kilometers) southeast of New Zealand.

“There was another massive explosion underground, and based on that explosion no one would have survived,” said police superintendent Gary Knowles, in charge of the rescue operation. “The blast was prolific, just as severe as the first blast.”

It was one of New Zealand’s worst mining disasters. The country’s industry is relatively small compared to other nations and considered generally safe, with 210 deaths in 114 years after the most recent tragedy.

It also devastated families who — buoyed by the survival tale of Chile’s 33 buried miners — had clung to hope for more than five days that their relatives could emerge alive.

“New Zealand has been devastated by the news that we have all been dreading,” New Zealand Prime Minister John Key said in a nationally televised news conference. “This is a national tragedy.”

He said flags would fly at half staff on Thursday and Parliament would adjourn its session in respect for the dead men.

Officials said only investigations still to come would confirm the exact cause of Wednesday’s explosion.

Pike River Coal chief executive Peter Whittall said rescue teams were not doing anything that could have set it off, and conditions inside the mine were such it could have happened at any time.

“It was a natural eventuation, it could have happened on the second day, it could have happened on the third day,” he told reporters.

Family members who gathered for a regular daily briefing on the rescue operation’s progress were instead told of the second blast and that no one could survive. Whittal said he began by telling them a team had been getting ready to go underground.

Some people — thinking a rescue was about to start — broke into applause before he could finish telling them about the latest blast. “I had to wait till they stopped clapping to tell them … that the second explosion occurred,” he said.

Tony Kokshoorn, the mayor of Greymouth town near the mine, who was at the meeting, said some of the relatives collapsed. Others shouted at police in anger. “It is our darkest day,” Kokshoorn told reporters later.

Laurie Drew, father of 21-year-old miner Zen, said rescuers should have gone into the mine on Friday, saying he believed that explosion would have burned off most of the dangerous gases.

“They had their window of opportunity that Friday night, and now the truth can’t come out because no one alive will be able to come out and tell the truth about what went on down there,” Drew said. “The only thing that’s going to make matters worse is if we find … out that people were alive after that first blast.”

Knowles said at all times after the initial blast, entering the mine was simply too risky because of high gas levels and evidence of a smoldering coal fire underground that could be an ignition source.

Energy Minister Gerry Brownlee said a range of official inquiries would probe the cause of the disaster and whether it could have been prevented.

Whittall said no decision had been made yet on whether the mine would be sealed or what the next step would be.

“We can’t still go in to an unsafe mine. It’s just as unsafe now as it was two hours ago, the gas will still be coming out of the coal, there’s still an ignition source, there’s no doubt burning methane from that explosion,” he told reporters. “But we want our boys back and we want to get them out.”

The second blast came hours after the first progress in days for the rescue attempt, when a drilling team broke a narrow shaft through to the section of the mine where the missing workers were believed to have been. And two robots crawled their way into the tunnel, giving authorities their first view of the inside of the mine.

But officials had become increasingly pessimistic about the chances of pulling the men alive from the mine. Nothing had been heard from the missing miners since the initial blast.

New Zealand’s mines have been safe historically. The worst disaster was in 1896, when 65 died in a gas explosion at a mine on the same coal seam as the latest tragedy. The most recent was in 1967, when an explosion killed 19 miners in a mine near the Pike River site.

While conditions were different, the New Zealand disaster drew initial comparisons with the rescue last month of 33 workers trapped 69 days in a gold and copper mine in Chile.

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Lilley reported from Wellington, New Zealand.