The stories you want. The opinions that matter.
No, thanks
Tag: ferry
Typhoon Kills Eight, Displaces Nearly 18,000 In Philippines

Typhoon Kills Eight, Displaces Nearly 18,000 In Philippines

By Girlie Linao, dpa

MANILA — Typhoon Kalmaegi killed eight people and displaced nearly 18,000 people as it battered the northern Philippines on the weekend, the national disaster relief agency said Monday.

More than a dozen ferry trips and nearly 50 domestic flights were cancelled as the storm hit Sunday, cutting off electricity in eight northern provinces.

Kalmaegi was packing maximum winds of 120 kilometers per hour and gusts of up to 150 kph, the weather bureau said.

Schools were closed in Manila and northern provinces, where 17,633 people were forced to flee their homes, the national disaster relief agency said.

At least eight people died when a ferry sank Saturday evening in rough seas off the eastern province of Leyte, the navy said.

Three bodies were recovered shortly after the accident, five more were retrieved on Monday by navy ships, navy Lieutenant Commander Marineth Domingo said.

“The five cadavers included an infant girl,” she said.

Rescuers saved 113 people from the boat that was en route to the southern city of Surigao.

In Manila, 15 crew members were rescued from a docked vessel that capsized after being battered by strong winds and big waves on Sunday evening, the Office of Civil Defense said.

The ship was undergoing repairs at the Manila port. Seven of the crew members boarded a life raft, while the rest swam towards the shore, the office said.

Kalmaegi left some roads and bridges impassable in the northern Philippines, officials said.

The weather bureau said the typhoon, which blew out of the Philippines on Monday, would bring more trailing rains to the northern provinces, while the seas would continue to be rough.

AFP Photo/Jay Directo

Interested in world news? Sign up for our daily email newsletter!

Bangladesh Ferry Carrying Hundreds Sinks

Bangladesh Ferry Carrying Hundreds Sinks

Gajaria (Bangladesh) (AFP) – A heavily-laden ferry capsized and sank in central Bangladesh on Thursday after being caught in a storm, leaving at least 12 people dead and hundreds more missing, police and officials said.

Survivors of what is the latest in a string of ferry disasters to blight Bangladesh said the vessel began to sway when the storm hit, finally tipping over and sinking in minutes, giving passengers little time to leap to safety.

The exact number of passengers was not immediately known. It is common for ferries to carry many more than their official limit.

“We are receiving confusing figures on how many passengers were on board when it sank, but the number could range from 200 to 350,” said district government administrator Saiful Hasan, who is coordinating the rescue effort.

“The toll now stands at 12,” he said of the accident on the river Meghna in Munshiganj district, some 30 miles south of the Bangladeshi capital Dhaka.

Local police chief Ferdous Ahmed also confirmed the recovery of the bodies, which included at least two women and one child.

The double-decker vessel was travelling to the southern district of Shariatpur from Dhaka when it encountered problems and sank in the mid-afternoon, according to the police.

“Around 20-30 people managed to swim to safety when the boat went down,” Ahmed told AFP.

Rescue coordinator Hasan told AFP that a navy ship, a salvage vessel and about a dozen speedboats had reached the spot. Fire service divers had located the sunken ferry and were attempting to recover bodies as darkness fell.

The width of the river, the depth of the water and the strong currents were hampering rescuers’ efforts to retrieve the wreckage, Hasan said.

Hundreds of distraught relatives gathered on the banks of the river as the bodies were laid in lines in order to be identified.

Others accompanied rescuers on boats as they searched for the missing passengers.

25-year-old Sumon, who only uses one name, said his uncle and teenage cousin were both missing.

“They were travelling home from Dhaka to our village,” Sumon told AFP.

The local online newspaper Banglanews24.com quoted a survivor of the accident, Abdur Razzaq, as saying that the boat was hit by the storm suddenly and sank in a matter of minutes.

Fire service officer Nurul Alam, who was taking part in the rescue effort, told AFP: “I fear there are many more bodies trapped inside the vessel.”

Ferry accidents are common in Bangladesh, one of Asia’s poorest nations which is crisscrossed with more than 230 rivers.

Experts blame poorly maintained vessels, flaws in design and overcrowding for most of the tragedies.

Storms known locally as Kalboishakhi often hit Bangladesh during the early summer months in the lead-up to the monsoon, which generally begins in the first week of June.

Boats are the main form of travel in much of Bangladesh’s remote rural areas, especially in the southern and northeastern regions.

Some 150 people were killed in the same district in March 2012 after a overcrowded ferry carrying about 200 passengers sank after being hit by an oil barge in the dead of night.

In 2011, 32 people were killed after a passenger vessel sank in the same river in the same district after colliding with a cargo ship.

At least 85 people drowned in 2009 when an overloaded triple-decker ferry capsized off Bhola Island in the country’s south.

Naval officials have said more than 95 percent of Bangladesh’s hundreds of thousands of small and medium-sized boats do not meet minimum safety regulations.

Photo via AFP

Death Toll In South Korea Ferry Disaster Crosses 120

Death Toll In South Korea Ferry Disaster Crosses 120

Jindo (South Korea) (AFP) – The confirmed death toll from South Korea’s ferry disaster rose sharply to more than 120 Tuesday as divers sped up the grim task of recovering bodies from the submerged ship and police took two more of its crew into custody.

Better weather and calm seas spurred their efforts but underwater visibility was still very poor, forcing divers to grope their way blindly though the corridors and cabins of the ferry that capsized and sank last Wednesday.

Nearly one week into one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters, close to 200 of the 476 people who were aboard the 6,825-tonne Sewol — most of them schoolchildren — are still unaccounted for.

The official toll stood at 121, with 181 still missing.

Distraught families of victims gathered in the morning at the harbor on Jindo island — not far from the disaster site — awaiting the increasingly frequent arrival of boats with bodies.

In the initial days after the Sewol went down, their anger was focused on the pace of the rescue effort.

With all hope of finding any survivors essentially gone, this has turned to growing impatience with the effort to locate and retrieve the bodies of those trapped.

“I just want my son back,” said the father of one missing student. “I need to be able to hold him and say goodbye. I can’t bear the idea of him in that cold, dark place.”

The disaster has profoundly shocked South Korea, a proudly modernized nation that thought it had left behind large-scale accidents of this type.

The sense of national grief is accompanied by an equally deep but largely unfocused anger that has been vented towards pretty much anyone in authority.

Coastguard officials have been slapped and punched, senior politicians — including the prime minister — pushed and heckled, and rescue teams criticized for their slow response.

If there is a chief hate figure, it is the ferry’s captain Lee Joon-Seok, who was arrested at the weekend and charged with criminal negligence and abandoning his passengers.

Six members of his crew are also under arrest and prosecutors said two more were taken into police custody on Tuesday.

President Park Geun-Hye, who faced a hostile crowd when she met relatives on Jindo last week, has described the actions of Lee and his crew as being “tantamount to murder”.

Four of the detained crew were paraded — heads bowed and faces hidden — before TV cameras on Tuesday, and asked why only one of the Sewol’s 46 life rafts had been deployed.

“We tried to gain access to the rafts but the whole ship was already tilted too much,” one of them responded.

The Sewol capsized after making a sharp right turn — leading experts to suggest its cargo manifest might have shifted, causing it to list beyond a critical point of return.

The large death toll has partly been attributed to the captain’s instruction for passengers to stay where they were for around 40 minutes after the ferry ran into trouble.

By the time the evacuation order came, the ship was listing so badly that escape was almost impossible.

A transcript released Sunday of the crew’s final communications with marine transport control illustrated the sense of panic and confusion on the bridge before the ferry sank.

Captain Lee has insisted he acted in the passengers’ best interest, delaying the order to abandon ship because he feared people would be swept away and drowned.

Nearly 750 divers, mostly coastguard and military, are now involved in the operation.

“The weather is better, but it’s still very difficult for the divers who are essentially fumbling for bodies in the silted water,” a coastguard official told reporters.

A priority for Tuesday was to access the ferry’s main dining hall.

“We believe there are many bodies there as the accident took place in the morning when students must have been eating breakfast,” the official said.

Of the 476 people on board the Sewol, 352 were students from the Danwon High School in Ansan city just south of Seoul, who were on an organised trip to the holiday island of Jeju.

Among the bodies recovered so far were those of three foreign nationals — believed to be a Russian and two Chinese.

Giant floating cranes have been at the disaster site off the southern coast for days, but many relatives remain opposed to raising the ferry before all the bodies have been removed.

Yao Qilin/Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT

South Korea Seeks Arrest Warrant For Ferry Captain

South Korea Seeks Arrest Warrant For Ferry Captain

By Dirk Godder, McClatchy Tribune News Service

SEOUL, South Korea — South Korean state prosecutors are seeking an arrest warrant for captain Lee Jun Seok as investigators look into the actions of the crew of the ferry that capsized and sank off the country’s southwest.

The 69-year-old Lee is accused of breaches of the seaman’s code in actions that include turning over the wheel of the ship to a 26-year-old third mate.

Lee is also under investigation for being one of the first to leave while there were passengers still in danger.

Survivors state that passengers were told by loudspeaker not to move even as the ship was already beginning to capsize. According to experts, precious time was lost through the late evacuation of the ship.

Meanwhile, rescuers intensified the search for the 268 passengers, mostly schoolchildren, still missing two days after the accident.

A total of 28 were confirmed dead by Friday afternoon, and 179 rescued, Yonhap News Agency said.

“It seems like bodies have begun to spill out of the sunken ship due to current shifts,” Yonhap quoted an official as saying.

All bodies recovered were found in the sea near the Sewol ferry, not retrieved from the wreck.

Rescue ships and cranes were moved into place as the hull finally disappeared beneath the waves around noon local time, the report said.

Divers accessed the inside of the submerged ship for the first time, battling strong currents and water as cold as 54 degrees Fahrenheit, Yonhap said. Underwater visibility was as low as 8 inches, according to China’s Xinhua news agency.

Rescuers were also pumping oxygen into the boat to help potential survivors breathe, and restore some of its buoyancy, Yonhap quoted coast guard officials as saying.

Cranes were preparing to either lift the boat, currently lying in about 100 feet of water, or move it to weaker currents where it would be easier to access.

“We are reviewing the options very carefully, as the salvage operations may hurt survivors trapped inside,” a coast guard officer was quoted as saying.

The Sewol sank on Wednesday while traveling from Incheon near the capital Seoul to the southern resort island of Jeju.

Investigators were reportedly looking into the possibility that the ship’s cargo shifted, causing the capsize. The ship carried vehicles and shipping containers in addition to passengers.

Police and prosecutors have raided the offices of Chonghaejin Marine Co., which owns the ship, for information.

There were 475 passengers and crew on the vessel, including 325 students and 15 teachers from Danwon High School in Anson, near Seoul.

The school’s 52-year-old vice principal was found hanged from a tree in an apparent suicide on the nearby island of Jindo after being rescued from the ship, Yonhap said, giving his name only as Kang.

U.S. President Barack Obama expressed his “deepest condolences to the Republic of Korea and the families of all those who have seen their loved ones lost” in the ferry sinking.

Yao Qilin/Xinhua/Zuma Press/MCT