22 people confirmed dead in sunken tugboat tragedy
Print Edition
TWENTY-TWO of the 25 people aboard a tugboat that sunk in the Yangtze River in east China’s Jiangsu Province on Thursday have been confirmed dead, local authorities said yesterday.
Rescuers found the body of the last missing person in the cockpit of the stricken “Wanshenzhou 67” about 2pm yesterday, the Jiangsu Maritime Safety Administration said.
The process of lifting the boat from the river was completed yesterday morning, 40 hours after it sank in the Fubei Channel, near the city of Jingjiang.
Local authorities published the names of those on board, who included eight foreigners — four from Singapore and one each from Indonesia, Malaysia, India and Japan. All 25 were men, the administration said.
Just three people were saved, all of them Chinese, it said.
Pictures posted on Sina Weibo, the Chinese equivalent of Twitter, showed relatives crying desperately by the river. Many braved the cold yesterday morning to wait for news of their loved ones.
Wang Zhenkai, one of the three people rescued, said he was an interpreter for a 60-year-old Japanese engineer.
“Only the two of us were in the cockpit. We had just finished the load test of the boat’s main engine when the vessel suddenly turned on its side. Water immediately flooded in,” he said.
Wang, from Yantai in east China’s Shandong Province, was saved at 5:36am on Friday after rescuers cut through the bottom of the boat. He is now in a stable condition in hospital.
Wang said he survived by clinging to a hydraulic pump. He said he grabbed the Japanese engineer, but lost his grip as the boat started to sink.
About 30 vessels were dispatched to help with the rescue work, local authorities said.
Initial investigations found that the boat capsized due to “improper operations.”
The boat’s operators did not complete the compulsory procedures needed for trial operations, nor did they report the tug’s condition to the authorities, the administration said.
The boat sank due to improper handling, it said.
The 30-meter-long, 368-ton tugboat was built in October by Bengbu Shenzhou Machinery Co in Anhui Province.
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