Twenty-one people have drowned after their cargo ship sank in icy waters near the eastern province of Newfoundland, Canada.

Lt Cmdr Glen Chamberlain of the Nova Scotia Rescue Service describes the rescue of four survivors (1' 37")

Officials said rescuers lifted four crew members to safety after finding them clinging to an overturned life-boat in sub-zero temperatures.

Fifteen bodies have so far been recovered. The six people still missing are presumed dead. The cause of the accident is not clear.

The first clue of the disaster came in a faint distress call picked up in Newfoundland. From Halifax a rescue team mounted an immediate search of a 50-kilometre span of water.

Survivors said they were jolted awake by what seemed to be a big impact.

"Everything happened very quickly," one sailor told Halifax emergency services officials. He said the 25 year-old vessel may have cracked under extreme stress from the rough seas.

The ship was registered in Cyprus. Its crew was mostly from the Philippines, Romania and the former Yugoslavia.

Ice storms paralysed much of eastern Canada

It had been on its way to pick up a load of grain from Montreal, where business opened for the first time in a week after the devastating ice storms that have paralysed much of eastern Canada.

At least 10 people are known to have died in the provinces of Quebec and Ontario, where nearly a million people remain without electricity.

Utility crews working in sub-freezing temperatures are making slow progress in their attempts to restore electricity supplies.

At the peak of the outage, about 3 million people lost power when heavy coats of ice toppled utility poles and transmission towers.

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