Trapped woman, 65, learns from divers before dramatic rescue
Print Edition
BAD weather was hampering rescue efforts last night as a search continued for more than 430 people, many of them elderly Chinese tourists, missing after a cruise ship capsized on the Yangtze River.
Meteorologists last night confirmed a sudden, strong and violent storm which lasted about 15 to 20 minutes on the Yangtze at the time the accident happened on Monday night.
The ship was bound for Chongqing City in southwest China, from the eastern city of Nanjing and many of the passengers were from Shanghai.
Last night, the Ministry of Transport said that 14 people had survived and seven people were confirmed dead.
The survivors included the ship’s captain and chief engineer, both of whom were taken into police custody, state broadcaster CCTV said. Relatives who gathered in Shanghai, where many of the travelers had started their journey by bus, questioned whether the captain did enough to ensure the safety of passengers.
Some of the survivors swam ashore, but others were rescued after search teams climbed aboard the upside-down hull and heard people yelling for help from within more than 12 hours after the ship overturned.
Footage from CCTV showed rescuers in orange life vests climbing on the hull, with one of them lying down tapping a hammer and listening for a response.
Divers found one 21-year-old man in a small compartment yesterday afternoon. He was given diving apparatus and was able to swim out by himself. Rescue efforts were complicated by the intricate layout of the vessel, as well as the bad weather.
Divers also pulled out a 65-year-old woman, CCTV reported.
Many passengers had retired to bed around 9pm on Monday, when a storm began, said Zhang Hui, a tour guide from Shanghai who was rescued yesterday morning.
Twenty minutes later, the ship began to tilt. Zhang said when he was picking up fallen objects he was hit by an eerie feeling of foreboding. Then the ship capsized.
“We will do everything we can to rescue everyone trapped in there, no matter they’re still alive or not and we will treat them as our own families,” Hubei military region commander Chen Shoumin said during a news conference broadcast live on CCTV.
The 65-year-old woman was rescued by divers who took extra breathing apparatus into the ship and spent about five minutes teaching her how to use it before bringing her out to safety, Chen said.
“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.
Thirteen navy divers were at the scene and would be bolstered by 170 more by today, he said.
Premier Li Keqiang traveled to the accident site to help coordinate efforts while President Xi Jinping ordered that no efforts be spared in the rescue, Xinhua news agency reported.
The overturned ship had drifted about 3 kilometers downstream before coming to rest close to shore, where fast currents made the rescue difficult. The location is about 180 kilometers west of the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan.
The fact that the capsized ship drifted downstream was a good sign for rescuers because it meant there was enough air inside to give it buoyancy, and could mean there are enough air pockets for survivors to breathe, 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 told The Associated Press.
The ship sank in a section of the river which is 15 meters deep. The Yangtze is the world’s third-longest river and sometimes floods during the summer monsoon season.
A maritime rescue center in Yueyang received a call from a vessel called “Tonggonghua 666,” which reported seeing two people struggling in the river at 10:10pm on Monday. The center immediately despatched a patrol boat, which pulled the two from the water at 11:51pm.
Li Yongjun, captain of Tonggonghua 666, told Xinhua: “It was raining so badly that visibility was very bad. Even our radar did not work due to the rain.
“We were not able to save them in such bad weather. I shouted to them ‘swim to the shore’,” he said.
More than 50 boats and 4,000 people are involved in search efforts.
The People’s Daily published a passenger manifest online, and said those on board were aged from 3 to 83 with the majority in their 60s and 70s.
Xinhua said initial investigations found the ship not overloaded and it had enough life vests on board for its passengers.
Many of the 406 tourists on board were elderly, and there were 47 crew members and five tour guides, the newspaper said.
State radio said the ship went over in about two minutes and no distress call had been issued. Seven people swam to shore to raise the alarm, it said.
Fishing boats were among the dozens of vessels helping in the search and rescue, Xinhua said, and more than 1,000 police with 40 inflatable boats had also been sent.
The Eastern Star, which has the capacity to carry more than 500 people, is owned by the Chongqing Eastern Shipping Corp, which focuses on tourism routes in the popular Three Gorges river canyon region.
Wang Jianhua, its vice general manager, said it had never suffered an incident of this magnitude.
Hubei Daily said the company has been operating since 1981.
CCTV reported that 150 millimeters of rain had fallen in the region over the past 24 hours. Local media reported winds reaching 130kph.
Accidents of this magnitude are uncommon in China where major rivers are used for tours and cruises.
A tug sank on the Yangtze while undergoing sea trials in January, killing 22 of 25 people on board.
In 1948, the steamship Kiangya blew up on the Huangpu River in Shanghai, killing more than 1,000 people.
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