ANGER, QUESTIONS IN CHINA
Families frantic after cruise ship sinks
As the Eastern Star cruise ship listed heavily amid pounding rain on the Yangtze River, tour guide Zhang Hui told a colleague: “Looks like we’re in trouble.”
The vessel capsized in a storm Monday night with 458 people aboard, touching off a frantic rescue effort. At least 15 people were brought to safety, including three pulled from the overturned hull Tuesday, and five people were confirmed dead, the Xinhua News Agency reported.
The vessel was carrying mostly elderly tourists from Nanjing to the southwestern city of Chongqing when it overturned in China’s Hubei Province.
Divers rescued a 65-year-old woman and, later, two men who had been trapped.
“We’ll do everything we can to rescue everyone trapped in there, no matter if they’re still alive or not, and we will treat them as our own families,” Hubei military region commander Chen Shoumin said at a news conference.
The survivors included the ship’s captain and chief engineer, both of whom were taken into police custody. Relatives who gathered in Shanghai, where many of the tourists started their journey by bus, questioned whether the captain did enough to ensure the passengers’ safety and demanded answers in unruly scenes that drew a heavy police response.
Xinhua quoted the captain and the chief engineer as saying the four-level Eastern Star sank quickly after being caught in what they described as a cyclone. The ship sank within two minutes.
Zhang said from his hospital bed that he grabbed a life-jacket with seconds to spare as the ship listed in the storm, sending bottles rolling off tables and suddenly turned all the way over.
Zhang, 43, said he drifted in the Yangtze all night despite not being able to swim, reaching shore as dawn approached.
“The raindrops hitting my face felt like hailstones,” he said. “‘Just hang in there a little longer,’ I told myself.”
Some survivors swam ashore, but others were rescued after search teams climbed on the upside-down hull and heard people yelling for help from within more than 12 hours after the ship overturned.
The 65-year-old woman was rescued by divers who took a breathing apparatus up into the bowels of the ship and spent about five minutes teaching her how to use it before bringing her out to safety.
“That old woman had a very strong will and learned very fast, and after 20 minutes she surfaced to the water and was rescued,” Chen said.
The overturned ship had drifted about three kilometres downstream before coming to rest close to shore, where fast currents made the rescue difficult. But the fact it drifted meant there was enough air inside to give it buoyancy, and could mean there were enough air pockets for survivors, said Chi-Mo Park, a professor of naval architecture and ocean engineering at South Korea’s Ulsan University.
“It all depends how much space there is inside the vessel,” Park said.
The vessel was carrying 406 Chinese passengers, five travel agency employees and a crew of 47. Most of the passengers were aged 50-80.
Huang Yan, 49, an accountant in Shanghai, wept as she told a reporter that she believes her husband, 49, and his father, who is in his 70s, were aboard.
“Why did the captain leave the ship while the passengers were still missing?” Huang shouted.