Hundreds Missing After Cruise Ship Capsizes

02 Jun, 2015

Rescuers fought bad weather on Tuesday as they searched for more than 400 people, many of them elderly Chinese tourists, missing after a cruise boat was buffeted by a freak tornado and capsized on the Yangtze River.

The accident on Monday night is likely to end up as China’s worst shipping disaster in almost 70 years.

Divers and other rescue workers pulled five people they found trapped in the upturned hull of the four-deck Eastern Star, a fraction of the 458 people state media reported were on board when the ship capsized.

Dozens of rescue boats battled wind and rain to reach the ship, which lay upturned in water about 15 meters (50 feet) deep.

The Xinhua news agency said rescuers could hear people calling for help from inside the ship’s hull and television showed rescuers cutting through it with an angle grinder.

China’s weather bureau said a tornado hit the area where the boat was, a freak occurrence in a country where tornados do happen but are not common.

The disaster could bring a bigger toll than the sinking of a ferry in South Korea in April 2014 that killed 304 people, most of them children on a school trip.

The People’s Daily, which published a passenger manifest on its microblog, said those on board the Eastern Star ranged in age from three to more than 80.

President Xi Jinping had ordered that no efforts be spared in the rescue and Premier Li Keqiang went to the scene of the accident in central Hubei province, Xinhua said.

About 60 family members gathered outside a travel agency in Shanghai and demanded information.

The ship’s captain and the chief engineer, who were among the few to be rescued, had been detained by police for questioning, Xinhua said.

Xinhua reported that initial investigations had found the ship was not overloaded and it had enough life vests on board for its passengers. Those rescued were wearing life vests, Xinhua said.

Among those on board were 406 tourists, many of them elderly, along with 47 crew members and five tour guides, the People’s Daily said.

Reuters 

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