Edward Wong
The New York Times
Jnue 1, 2015
Most of the 458 people aboard a chartered cruise ship in China were still missing on Tuesday morning, more than a dozen hours after the vessel sank during a torrential rainstorm along the central Yangtze River, according to a report by Xinhua, the state news agency.
Just 13 people had been rescued, local news media reported, making this perhaps the worst passenger maritime disaster in East Asia since the sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol last year.
The water where the boat sank is about 50 feet deep. Rescuers could hear the sounds of people trapped inside, according to a Twitter post by China Central Television, the main state network. The ship, whose name translates as Oriental Star, was crossing Hubei Province in the middle of the country when it sank at 9:28 p.m. on Monday, Xinhua reported, citing the Yangtze River Navigation Administration. Rescue work was hampered by strong winds and heavy rain.
Most of the passengers were 50 to 80 years old and had been traveling on a group tour, according to Hubei Daily. The newspaper reported that one body, which appeared to be that of a tour guide, had been discovered. Hundreds of soldiers and police and paramilitary officers were on the scene. More than 100 boats and divers were also there, the newspaper reported. The ship had capsized, with part of the hull above the surface of the water.
A relative of passengers who were on a sunken cruise ship heard news of the disaster outside a travel agency in Shanghai on Tuesday.CreditAgence France-Presse — Getty Images
Prime Minister Li Keqiang arrived Tuesday, Xinhua reported. News organizations reported that Xi Jinping, the country’s president and Communist Party leader, had “issued important instructions immediately” to direct rescue operations, an indication of how seriously the party regarded the accident.
The captain and an engineer were detained by the police, Xinhua reported on one of its social media accounts, citing the river administration authorities. The report did not say why they were being held, or whether that was a routine procedure in the investigation.
According to Xinhua, the authorities learned of the disaster after several survivors swam to shore and alerted them. At least eight people were reported to have been hospitalized.
The Chinese Navy was sending a contingent of more than 140 divers to the site of the capsized ship, the Twitter account of the state-run People’s Daily reported. People’s Daily also reported that a 65-year-old woman had been rescued early Tuesday afternoon, more than 15 hours after the ferry sank. It was not clear where she had been found. People’s Daily originally reported that the woman was 85 years old.
The ship had been hired by the Shanghai Xiehe Tourism Agency to carry hundreds of retirees on a multiday trip along a long, scenic stretch of the Yangtze. A handwritten sign posted on the company’s door on Tuesday said the head of the company had gone to the scene. A mobile number scrawled on the sheet was busy throughout Tuesday morning.
Some relatives of the passengers were furious that they learned about the accident through news reports and not directly from the travel agency, according to a report by The Paper, an investigative news organization.
The people on board included five employees from one or more travel agencies and 47 crew members.
The vessel sank in Jianli County in Hubei Province. It was sailing between two of China’s largest cities, from Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu Province, on the east coast, to Chongqing, an interior metropolis. That journey takes several days.
Both the captain and the chief engineer, who were questioned separately by the police, said the ship was suddenly struck by a tornado and capsized, Xinhua reported.
In Chinese, the term for tornado, longjuanfeng, is used more loosely than Americans use its English equivalent. One report in a Chinese newspaper said that a “tornado,” with winds of about 50 miles per hour, had struck the area around the time the ship was reported to have capsized. Winds of that strength are associated with twisters near or below the lowest rung on the six-level scale used in the United States to measure tornadoes.
The ship’s passengers were largely from relatively wealthy areas of eastern China, according to Hubei Daily. The newspaper said 204 passengers were from Jiangsu Province, 97 from Shanghai, 11 from Zhejiang Province, 43 from Tianjin, 23 from Shandong Province, 19 from Fujian and eight from Anhui.
One resident of Shanghai wrote in a microblog post that he had lost contact with his father, Zhang Yuming, and his uncle, both on the tour. He said both men had taken a bus from the Shanghai Grand Theater on May 28 to Nanjing to board the ship.
The ship was built in February 1994 and was capable of carrying 534 people, Xinhua reported. The ship is owned by the Chongqing Oriental Ferry Company. The company is state owned and reported to be deeply in debt. Last year the company reported assets of about $14.5 million and liabilities of more than twice that amount, or $29.8 million, according to records filed with the government.
The accident is certain to catalyze public calls for investigations into both the company and the government officials who oversee safety regulations and boat traffic along the Yangtze. Ordinary Chinese believe that corruption among local officials is rampant, and the Communist Party has made rooting out corruption a priority. In recent years, passenger ship services have come under scrutiny in some countries following deadly accidents.
The Yangtze, the world’s third-longest river, is China’s most important waterway. Tourists often take pleasure cruises along the middle stretch. Those cruises are focused on the area called the Three Gorges, where vertiginous canyon walls rise from the waters and are often shrouded in mist. That section is also the site of the world’s largest hydropower project, the Three Gorges Dam, located in Hubei Province.
The section of the Yangtze in Hubei is also the starting point of the middle route of China’s most ambitious water engineering project, the South-North Water Diversion. A series of canals runs 800 miles from a reservoir at Danjiangkou to the area around Beijing, carrying water to northern China, which is in the midst of a chronic drought. Many farmers were forced to abandon their villages during the construction of that project.
In January, a tugboat sank while on a test voyage in the eastern section of the Yangtze. Twenty-two people died in that accident.
The Sewol tilted and sank off South Korea’s southwestern tip in April 2014, killing more than 300 people on board, most of them high school students. The captain, Lee Jun-seok, and key members of his crew fled the boat as it went down. In the aftermath of that disaster, ordinary Koreans criticized government officials and the executives who ran the private ferry company. Investigators found that the ship had violated many regulations, including carrying twice its legal weight limit.
