China says 430 missing after ship sinking; tornado blamed
BEIJING —More than 430 Chinese tourists, many of them thought to be elderly, still were missing early today, more than a day after their tour boat sank in the Yangtze River after being hit by a strong storm, possibly a tornado.
Thousands of rescuers worked to find survivors, with some managing to extract three people trapped alive in the overturned boat. But about 30 hours after the disaster, only 14 people had been rescued, according to Hubei province officials and the state-run Xinhua news service.
Only seven were confirmed dead, but the death toll seemed certain to rise significantly amid predictions that the sinking would become China’s worst maritime disaster since the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949.
Chinese officials kept tight control over news coverage of the disaster. Numerous journalists were stopped at roadblocks in Hubei and prevented from getting near riverbanks to observe the rescue operations.
According to China Digital Times, a website that tracks the Chinese Internet, governmentpropaganda officials issued orders to local state media instructing them not to dispatch reporters to the scene and instead to rely on Xinhua and state broadcaster CCTV.
“Reporters already there must be immediately recalled. All coverage must use information released by authoritative media as the standard,” the website quoted the order as saying.
On Tuesday morning, state media quickly reported that Chinese President Xi Jinping had called for “all-out efforts in rescue work.”
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang quickly arrived at the site and was photographed all day instructing rescue crews on operations. CCTV reported that Li specifically instructed crews to cut into the hull of the overturned boat to find survivors.
The boat, the 251-foot-long Eastern Star, was carrying 456 people when it went down — 405 Chinese passengers, five travel agency employees and 46 crew members, according to Xinhua. Xinhua had said 458 people were aboard, but it revised those numbers late Tuesday.
Those rescued included the boat’s captain and chief engineer, who were taken into custody, according to CCTV, for reasons not immediately clear.
Cruising the Yangtze is a popular pastime for foreign and Chinese tourists, with many wanting to see China’s massive Three Gorges Dam and what is left of the gorges that were flooded when the dam was constructed.
The Eastern Star had started its trip on Thursday from the eastern city of Nanjing and was traveling to the southwestern city of Chongqing. It sank about 9:30 p.m. on Monday near Jingzhou in Hubei province.
The boat’s captain and its chief engineer reportedly told authorities the ship had been hit by a tornado and had sunk quickly.
“It capsized within a minute,” tour guide Zhang Zhui told Xinhua from a hospital bed. Zhang said he survived by jumping through a window of the boat and holding onto debris in the water for several hours.
After initially hedging on whether a tornado had struck the area, China’s Meteorological Administration confirmed that a force-12 storm had passed through the area when the ship went down. On the Beaufort scale, force 12 is effectively hurricane force, with huge waves and winds over 72 mph.
According to state media, there was no sign the tour boat was overloaded or had any record of trouble.