Relatives protest as China hunts ship survivors
Only 14 people, including vessel’s captain, found alive since it capsized in Yangtze River with more than 400 on board.
Breaking through a police cordon, dozens of Chinese have marched in protest to the site of a sunken cruise ship in the Yangtze River to demand news of missing relatives.
Rescuers searched on Wednesday for more than 400 missing people, many of them elderly, but hopes were fading of finding more survivors from the worst shipping disaster in modern Chinese history.
Only 14 people, including the ship’s captain, have been found alive since the ship capsized in a tornado on Monday night with 456 people on board.
Just 29 bodies have been recovered.
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Al Jazeera’s Adrian Brown, reporting from the rescue site, said while on Tuesday rescuers had heard shouts from the stern, there had been nothing since.
Frustrated by the level of information coming from local authorities, about 80 family members hired a bus to take them from Nanjing to Jianli county in Hubei, an eight-hour journey.
They were seen walking towards the rescue site late on Wednesday evening.
“This isn’t going to be much use, we’re just doing this for the government to see,” Wang Feng, one of the organisers, said.
The protesters later broke through a cordon of 20 to 25 paramilitary police who had tried to prevent them from going through a roadblock.
Volunteers from Jianli offered rides and water to the relatives.
Some people tied yellow ribbons on their car side mirrors.
Crew’s rescue questioned
Earlier, 47 of the relatives asked the Chinese government to release the names of the living and the dead to them at the rescue site, according to a statement.
In a separate statement, other relatives questioned why most of the people rescued were crew members, why the boat did not dock, and why the captain and crew members had time to don their life vests but not sound an alarm.
State television showed rescuers, some standing on the Eastern Star’s upturned hull, and scores of divers working through the night.
Rescuers have not slackened although divers face difficulties such as cabin doors blocked by tables and beds.
There is also the fear that rashly cutting holes in the hull could burst air pockets keeping people alive.
“Although there’s lots of work to do, saving people is still being put first,” Xu Chengguang, transport ministry spokesperson, said.
TV pictures showed a rain-soaked Premier Li Keqiang bowing in respect to bodies laid out on the deck of a boat covered in sheets.
Relatives were already bracing for the worst.
The ship was on an 11-day voyage upstream from Nanjing, near Shanghai, to Chongqing.
The People’s Daily said the ship passed inspections by authorities in Chongqing last month. But according to documents from a local maritime watchdog, it was investigated and held by authorities due to defects in 2013.
The Nanjing Maritime Safety Administration investigated Eastern Star as part of a safety campaign into passenger ferries and tour boats and held the ship along with five other vessels, according to three documents on the bureau’s website.
The documents gave no details on the defects but said the issues were reported to the Chongqing maritime safety bureau.
Search area expanded
The search area has been expanded up to 220km downstream, state television said, suggesting that bodies could have been swept far from where the ship foundered.
Zhang Hui, a tour guide who survived the disaster, told the official Xinhua news agency that it was raining so hard water was seeping through cabin windows, and that the ship then listed violently.
“I thought, ‘this isn’t right’, and I told my colleague, ‘I think we’re in trouble’. After I said that, the ship flipped over. It only took 30 seconds or a minute,” Zhang said.
China’s weather bureau said a tornado buffeted the area where the ship was cruising, a freak occurrence in a country where twisters can happen but are uncommon.
Accidents of this magnitude are uncommon in China.
State media said it was the worst recorded ship disaster on the Yangtze River. In 1948, the steamship Kiangya blew up on the Huangpu river, killing more than 1,000 people.
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