Capsized Chinese cruise liner righted; rescue turns to recovery
Authorities: All but 14 of 456 passengers on board ship believed to be dead
BEIJING — Chinese authorities on Friday righted an overturned cruise liner that capsized four days ago with 456 people aboard, shifting their efforts to the recovery of bodies as grieving families’ anger boiled over.
The official death toll climbed to 103, as authorities said they have given up hope of finding any more survivors from the ship that overturned on the Yangtze River in a storm Monday night. Only 14 survivors have been found, leaving 339 people, most of them retirement-age tourists, unaccounted for, state media reported.
Righting the capsized ship brought its own watery horrors.
Authorities had to thread a sling “underwater, which hindered the process significantly,” Transport Ministry spokesman Xu Chengguang told a news conference Friday. Bodies were found during the process, he said, and “to show the greatest respect for the bodies of the dead, we readjusted the threading plan.”
Work will now focus on recovering more bodies, pumping water out of the righted ship, refloating it and salvaging it, authorities said.
State media reported earlier that authorities are also searching for bodies downstream, where one was found Friday.
A distraught relative of two of the victims screamed at officials at the news conference, demanding more answers, the Reuters news agency reported.
“Is it necessary to treat the common people, one by one, as if you are facing some kind of formidable foe?” asked a woman Reuters identified as Xia whose sister and brother-in-law were on board the Eastern Star.
Xia, from the eastern city of Qingdao, told reporters she had attended the news conference to hear for herself what the government was saying and that she wanted an honest investigation because relatives doubted that bad weather was the real cause of the disaster, Reuters reported.
“You view the common people as if we are all your enemy,” she was quoted as screaming. “We are taxpayers. We support the government. You had better change your notion of this relationship. You are here to serve us. You need to be humane,” she said, before being escorted out.
Hundreds of relatives of the passengers gathered in a public square in the town of Jianli, a roughly 90-minute drive from the site of the disaster, clutching candles and flowers. Some knelt with tears in their eyes, Reuters reported.
“We just want an early resolution to this tragedy,” one woman told Reuters as she sobbed. “We feel so devastated.”
About 200 divers had been working around the clock to search for survivors, but muddy water, a strong current and debris piled up inside the boat made their job extremely tough.
Other rescue workers cut into the hull Wednesday to find anyone who might have been sheltering in air pockets.
Despite an extensive search and the deployment of sensitive scanning devices, “no sign of life was found,” Xu Chengguang said at the time. Authorities then turned their efforts to righting the boat.
“Turning the boat will make it easier to bring the bodies out,” said Gong Yongjun, a professor specializing in rescue and salvage at the Transportation Equipment and Ocean Engineering College in the northeastern city of Dalian. “It would be very dangerous to turn the boat with lives inside.”
China has promised that there will be no “cover-up” in the investigation into why the Eastern Star capsized suddenly in stormy weather Monday — including a powerful tornado that cut across its path — while on an 11-day cruise up Asia’s longest river.
But anger has been rising among relatives of those on board, largely at a lack of information and access to the site.
“At the moment, we know absolutely nothing,” Alex Chu, the son-in-law of a passenger, told CNN. “We want to go to the site, but we can’t. We want to see the latest developments, but they tell us it looks the same on TV.”