Jianli County (China): Rescuers fought bad weather on Tuesday as they searched for more than 400 people, many of them elderly Chinese tourists, missing after a cruise boat, with 458 people on board, was buffeted by a freak tornado and capsized on the Yangtze River in central China. The accident is likely to end up as China’s worst shipping disaster in almost 70 years. Six bodies have been recovered from the wreckage, leaving hundreds more still missing, possibly trapped within the ship which apparently sank in a matter of seconds, state media said.
Local reports said the passengers were mostly aged over 60. Just 14 people have been confirmed as surviving after the Dongfangzhixing, or “Eastern Star,” a tourist boat, the official Xinhua news agency reported. Distraught relatives of some of the passengers scuffled with officials in the city of Shanghai, where many of those on board booked their trips, angry about what they said was a lack of information.
Dozens of rescue boats battled wind and rain to reach the ship, which lay upturned in water about 15 metres deep. The Xinhua said rescuers could hear people calling for help from inside the ship’s hull and television showed rescuers cutting through it with an angle grinder. One of the people pulled from the capsized boat was a 65-year-old woman. Divers fixed breathing equipment to her nose and mouth to bring her up from under the water.
China’s weather bureau said a tornado hit the area where the boat was, a freak occurrence in a country where tornados do happen but are not common. The disaster could bring a bigger toll than the sinking of a ferry in South Korea in April 2014 that killed 304 people, most of them children on a school trip.
Tour guide Zhang Hui, 43, told Xinhua the boat sank very fast and he scrambled out a window in torrential rain, clutching a life vest as he could not swim. President Xi Jinping had ordered that no efforts be spared in the rescue and Premier Li Keqiang went to the scene of the accident in central Hubei province, Xinhua said.
