On China’s Yangtze River, a Race Against Time to Find Survivors
06/02/2015 18:41
JIANLI, China — Rescue divers from across China converged on a remote stretch of the Yangtze River on Tuesday in a race to save people believed to be trapped inside the hull of a capsized cruise ship that had carried 456 passengers and crew members.
As of Tuesday evening, nearly a full day after the four-story ship, the Oriental Star, capsized amid high winds and heavy rain, only 14 people were known to have survived the accident, including a 65-year-old woman, Zhu Hongmei, who was dramatically pulled from an air pocket inside the ship just after midday Tuesday by divers. They briefly instructed her on how to use scuba equipment before guiding her into the muddy water and free of the overturned vessel, according to Chen Shoumin, the commander of the local military district, who spoke at a televised briefing.
Late on Tuesday, the official Xinhua News Agency lowered the number of people onboard to 456 from 458, and said there were 14 survivors, down from an earlier report of 15. The agency did not explain why the numbers had changed. As of late Tuesday, 437 were still missing, according to state news media.
Five bodies have been recovered, said Xinhua, and many hundreds are probably still inside the vessel. Mr. Chen said that more people might still be alive in the ship and that additional rescuers were on their way to the scene of the accident, in Jianli County in Hubei Province in central China, with plans calling for 183 divers to be there by Wednesday.
Other rescue workers were seen on state television tapping hammers on the hull, then listening for any response that could indicate survivors.
It appeared that the death toll could exceed that of East Asia’s last major such disaster, the sinking of the South Korean ferry Sewol ln April 2014, in which 304 people were killed, most of them high school students. Many of the passengers who boarded the Oriental Star in Nanjing on Thursday for a trip to last 10 days or more were older people on group tours, although there were also children among the passengers, including a 3-year-old.
In an indication of how seriously the ruling Communist Party regarded the accident, Premier Li Keqiang arrived at the scene on Tuesday, Xinhua reported. Xinhua and other state media outlets showed pictures of him giving instructions to the rescue crews. News organizations reported that Xi Jinping, the country’s president and the party’s leader, had “issued important instructions immediately” to direct rescue operations.
“This shows that the party and the government, they genuinely care about the people,” Mr. Chen said.
But some anxious relatives of the passengers disputed that, saying they had been kept in the dark.
The offices of the Xiehe Tourism Agency in Shanghai, where many of the tourists had booked their trips, were closed on Tuesday with a note taped to the door saying the managers had gone to the site of the accident.
Grieving family members who had shown up at the office were sent by officials to a local petition bureau and told to wait there. Many of them were angry that the government had not provided them with any information about the accident or a list of possible victims.
