Ship death toll nears 400
YANGTZE FATALITIES JUMP BY MORE THAN 200 AFTER VESSEL HOISTED FROM WATER
JIANLI: A total of 396 people have been confirmed dead after a cruise ship capsized in China, state media said, making it the country’s worst shipping disaster in nearly 70 years.
Only 14 people have been confirmed alive out of the 456 — mostly tourists aged over 60 — on board when the Eastern Star rapidly sank on the Yangtze River in a storm on Monday.
The number of dead jumped by more than 200 after rescuers hoisted the battered ship out of the Yangtze on Friday and began recovering bodies trapped inside.
The official Xinhua news agency put the number of dead at 396 as of noon local time yesterday (11am Thai time).
That would make it China’s worst shipping disaster since 1948, when up to 4,000 on board the SS Kiangya were killed when it sank near the city of Shanghai.
As images showed the blue and white vessel’s caved-in roof, state-broadcaster CCTV said rescuers’ torches were visible inside the ship overnight.
Online images showed workers in surgical suits handling body bags in the vessel’s dark cabins, while others slept on a nearby floating platform, exhausted by their grim work.
At a nearby funeral parlour, reporters saw men also in white suits driving a convoy of about 20 mini-vans adapted to carry coffins towards the disaster site.
A total of 46 people remain missing, but a government spokesman said on Thursday that no new survivors are expected to be found.
Rescuers used massive cranes to lift the ship at the site of the disaster in Hubei province’s Jianli county on Friday.
Reports citing witnesses said the 76.5m and 2,200 tonne ship overturned in under a minute.
Weather officials said a freak tornado hit the area at the time.
The vessel was cited for safety infractions two years ago, according to a notice issued by the Nanjing Maritime Bureau, but so far no additional details have been given about the condition of the Eastern Star vessel.
Investigators will probe the ship’s structure for flaws, CCTV said, after the ruling Communist party’s all-powerful Politburo Standing Committee vowed to leave “no doubts remaining” about the disaster.
Information about the sinking and media access to the site have been tightly controlled and online criticism of the search operation quickly deleted.
Relatives of those on board clashed with police earlier this week and an angry woman berated officials at a news conference in Jianli on Friday.
A group of relatives from Nanjing, the city in the eastern province of Jiangsu where the boat began its journey, argued with officials from their home town at a meeting in Jianli yesterday morning.
A city official refused to make clear commitments to families about them receiving the bodies, showing “impatience”, a woman at the meeting with the family name Zhang said.
He responded to questions by telling relatives they should do his job if they were not satisfied, she added.
Family members who emerged from the meeting looked visibly upset as they hugged each other and walked away arm in arm, shaking their heads.
Other relatives who had arrived in Jianli were growing impatient at the lack of information and the lack of access to the disaster zone.
“We have come all this way but all we are doing is waiting,” said Jin Weifeng, who travelled from Shanghai to seek news of his mother-in-law Wang Shuisheng.
Among the rescue effort were more than 3,400 soldiers and 1,700 paramilitary police and 149 vessels, Xinhua said.
On the main Chinese state television network on Thursday night, a news anchor read out pronouncements that President Xi Jinping and the Communist Party’s other six leaders had made at a meeting that day. Efforts to rescue any survivors among the 440 or so people still missing from a capsized cruise ship on the Yangtze River in central China were to proceed with “urgency”. Officials were to “empathise with the suffering of family members” and “do a good job of placating them” to “maintain social stability”.
Though the leaders were seeking to project empathy, the words were typical stilted party talk, and the broadcast did not even show footage of the meeting. And other images, ones from the shipwreck site near the town of Jianli, revealed just as little — there was no sign of the more than 200 divers who officials say are searching for survivors, heavy machinery being put into place or experts testing the hull.
China’s economic boom has propelled the nation into the global spotlight. But crises like the one on the Yangtze this week reveal the party’s abiding reluctance to embrace transparency, even with people’s emotions at a fever pitch, and amid growing international scrutiny of one of Asia’s worst maritime disasters in decades.
At news conferences in Jianli on Thursday, officials said little about the odds of finding survivors more than three days after the Eastern Star capsized, or why the ship’s captain decided to push forward into heavy winds and rain on Monday night when other boats had dropped anchor. (The captain and chief engineer survived and have been detained.) There is no talk of exactly where bodies have been found, and neither the government nor the cruise ship company has released a passenger list.
In Jianli, Chinese reporters have had as hard a time getting relevant information as foreign journalists.
In the middle of this information vacuum, about 1,200 family members seeking answers have converged on the remote town of Jianli in Hubei province, according to an official count. It is this kind of massing that has led to trouble for the Communist Party before, during other disasters — an inflection point when those with a stake in the outcome and ordinary Chinese who sympathise with them begin to doubt how the nation’s leaders are handling the situation.
“There’s still no word about my parents,” a woman in her twenties from Jiangsu province said on Thursday. The woman, who gave only her surname, Zhao, said that she arrived late on Tuesday in Jianli and that she and the relatives of other missing passengers had to go to the riverbank the next day on their own — first by taxi, then by hitchhiking from police checkpoint to police checkpoint on the heavily guarded road to the main rescue site.
“I finally got in touch today with people from the government,” she said, after having had no contact with authorities since the ship capsized.
Families have expressed anger and frustration with the slow response from the government, the ship operator and the travel agencies involved, with people like Ms Zhao saying they had not been formally contacted or informed about the investigation that the official Xinhua news agency said the leadership had ordered.
Most of the passengers lived in eastern provinces, and some of their relatives have made the long journey to Jianli, travelling by cars or chartered buses. Others have organised support groups online and shared photographs of friends and family members, as well as pictures of the journey that passengers had posted online before the accident.
In news briefings, officials have not been forthcoming with an assessment about whether people can even survive this long. But state news media reports on Thursday indicated that hope for finding more survivors was waning, and that the rescue efforts would soon turn to the recovery of bodies.
By Friday, that switch in focus had already become a reality, as rescuers successfully righted the ship and began efforts to recover the dead. The confirmed death toll stood at 97 when Spec
trum went to press on Friday, although that was expected to climb significantly.
Emergency responders had been reluctant to cut into the ship earlier because of fears that the release of trapped air could cause the Eastern
Star to sink further, endangering any survivors inside. Foreign experts said the rescue operation was a delicate one. Unless the ship is in shallow waters, rescuers have to take care not to release air accidentally and cause the ship to lose buoyancy. Also, any significant movement of the ship could shift the air pockets or the survivors themselves, potentially killing them. Chinese officials say the divers have had to work slowly because of the dark, muddy waters and because they have had to search the four-storey ship room by room.
In Jianli, officials began lining up special coffins, decorated with flowers, in anticipation of the huge numbers of bodies that are expected to be found. Authorities are aware of the potential for excruciating scenes — many of the bodies may have decomposed after being underwater for days.
When news of the disaster spread on Tuesday, families in Shanghai descended on a travel agency that had put tourists on the Eastern Star. After the police directed the frustrated relatives to a local government petition bureau, the family members confronted officials, crying, yelling and pleading for answers. One group tore down a government barricade.
“We have a right to tell our story,” said a woman with the surname Wang, after government officers asked her to stop giving interviews. “This is our freedom. We’ve lost our relatives.”
Each family had its own story to tell. The cruise along the Yangtze was supposed to have been a special one for Yang Yunlou and his wife, Chen Cailian, who were travelling with their seven-year-old granddaughter, Chenlin, visiting historic sites along a route that was carrying them west, toward the enormous Three Gorges Dam.
The couple, both in their sixties, had paid for a first-class cabin on the Eastern Star, which set off from Nanjing with 456 people. At 9.05pm on Monday, the couple spoke by phone with relatives back home in Shanghai. Everything seemed fine. Nothing was said about any high winds or rainstorms.
But less than 25 minutes later, a violent storm capsized the ship. Only 14 of those onboard are believed to have survived. One of the survivors said he swam until dawn.
The 442 people now presumed dead include Yang, Chen and their granddaughter, one of the youngest passengers on a ship that was filled predominately with retirees in their sixties and seventies.
“Yesterday was children’s day, and today, I have no idea whether my child is alive or not,” said Tang Xia, the girl’s mother, sobbing on Tuesday afternoon at the government bureau in Shanghai.
“I’m waiting desperately for any updates, or any official who can talk with me.”