Survivors pulled from China boat capsizing; hundreds missing

JIANLI, China — Divers pulled three people alive from inside an overturned cruise ship and searched for other survivors Tuesday, state media said, giving some small hope amid an apparently massive tragedy with well over 400 people still missing on the Yangtze River.

Fifteen people were brought to safety and at least five people were confirmed dead after the Eastern Star capsized in Hubei Province during a severe storm Monday night with 458 people aboard, the official Xinhua News Agency said. The cruise was from Nanjing to the southwestern city of Chongqing, and many of those aboard were elderly.

"Looks like we are in trouble," tour guide Zhang Hui, 43, recalled telling a colleague. In an interview with Xinhua from his hospital bed, he said rain pounded the ship, seeping into cabins, and that heavy listing sent bottles rolling off tables before the ship suddenly went all the way over.

The 43-year-old Zhang said he grabbed a life jacket with seconds to spare and drifted all night despite not being able to swim, reaching shore as dawn approached.

"The raindrops hitting my face felt like hailstones," he said. "'Just hang in there a little longer,' I told myself."

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 travellers started their journey by bus, questioned whether the captain did enough to ensure the safety of passengers and demanded answers from local officials in unruly scenes that drew a heavy police response.

Some of the other 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 state broadcaster CCTV showed rescuers in orange life vests climbing on the upside-down hull, with one of them lying down tapping a hammer and listening for a response, then gesturing downward.

Divers pulled out a 65-year-old woman and, later, two men who had been trapped, CCTV said. It said additional people had been found and were being rescued, but did not say whether they were still inside the overturned hull.

"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 brought an extra breathing apparatus up into the bowels of 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 on the scene and would be bolstered by 170 more by Wednesday, he said. Chinese Premier Li Keqiang travelled to the accident site to help coordinate efforts.

The overturned ship had drifted about 3 kilometres downstream before coming to rest close to the shore, where fast currents made the rescue difficult. The location is about 180 kilometres 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 said.

Xinhua cited the captain and the chief engineer as saying the ship sank quickly after being caught in what they described as a cyclone. The Communist Party-run People's Daily said the ship sank within two minutes.

CCTV said the four-level ship had been carrying 406 Chinese passengers, five travel agency employees and 47 crew members. The broadcaster said most of the passengers were 50 to 80 years of age.

Many of the ship's passengers took a bus from Shanghai to Nanjing for the departure to Chongqing. Relatives of passengers gathered in Shanghai at a travel agency that had booked many of the trips, and later headed to a government office to demand more information about the accident before police broke up the gatherings.

Huang Yan, 49, an accountant in Shanghai, wept as she told a reporter that she believes that her husband, 49, and his father, who is in his 70s, were aboard the boat. But she said she couldn't be sure because she hadn't seen an official passenger list yet.

"Why did the captain leave the ship while the passengers were still missing?" Huang shouted. "We want the government to release the name list to see who was on the boat."

A group of about a dozen retirees from a Shanghai bus company were on the trip, said a woman who identified herself only by her surname, Chen. Among them, she said, were her elder sister and her elder sister's husband, both 60, and their 6-year-old granddaughter.

"This group has travelled together a lot, but only on short trips. This is the first time they travelled for a long trip," Chen said.

The ship sank in the Damazhou waterway section, where the river is 15 metres deep. The Yangtze is the world's third-longest river and sometimes floods during the summer monsoon season.

More than 50 boats and 3,000 people were involved in search efforts.

The Eastern Star measured 76.5 metres and 11 metres and was capable of carrying a maximum of 534 people, CCTV reported. It is owned by the Chongqing Eastern Shipping Corp., which focuses on tourism routes in the popular Three Gorges River canyon region. The company could not be reached for comment.

CCTV reported that 150 millimetres of rain had fallen in the region over the past 24 hours. Local media reported winds reached 130kph during the accident.