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June 2, 2015 Rescue workers carry a body removed from
the ship. Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
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(The Washington Post)
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Chinese authorities Friday righted an overturned cruise liner that capsized four days ago
with 456 people aboard, turning their efforts to recovering bodies as anger
boiled over from grieving families.
The official death toll climbed to
97, as authorities said they had given up hope of finding any more survivors
from the ship that overturned on the Yangtze river in a freak storm Monday
night. Only 14 survivors have been found, leaving 345 people, most of them
retirement-age tourists, unaccounted for, state media reported.
Media reports from multiple sources:
Righting the capsized ship brought
its own watery horrors.
Authorities had to thread a sling
“underwater, which hindered the process significantly,” Transport Ministry
Spokesman Xu Chengguang told a news conference Friday.
Bodies were found during the
threading process, he said, and “to show the greatest respect for the bodies of
the dead, we readjusted the threading plan.”
What we know about the Eastern Star
capsizing
A ship capsized during a violent storm
on China’s Yangtze River.
Work will now focus on recovering
more bodies, pumping water out of the righted ship, refloating it and salvaging
it, authorities said.
State media reported earlier that
authorities are also searching downstream for bodies. One body was found
downstream Friday, state media reported.
A distraught family member of two of
the victims screamed at authorities at the news conference, the Reuters news
agency reported, demanding more answers.
“Is it necessary to treat the common
people, one by one, as if you are facing some kind of formidable foe?” said a
woman identified as Xia by the news agency. Xia’s sister and brother-in law
were on board the Eastern Star ship.
Xia, from the eastern city of
Qingdao, told reporters she had wanted to get into the news conference to hear
for herself what the government was saying, and that she wanted an honest
investigation because relatives doubted that freak weather was the real cause
of the disaster, Reuters reported.
“You view the common people as if we
are all your enemy,” she is quoted as screaming. “We are taxpayers. We support
the government. You had better change your notion of this relationship. You are
here to serve us. You need to be humane,” she said, before being escorted out
of the news conference.
Hundreds of relatives of the
passengers gathered in a public square in the town of Jianli, a roughly
90-minute drive from the site of the disaster, clutching candles and flowers.
Some knelt with tears in their eyes, Reuters reported.
Officials say more survivors
unlikely from China boat sinking(1:25)
Only 77 bodies have been recovered
from a cruise ship that capsized on the Yangtze River, which was carrying 456
people aboard. Officials say the chances of finding more survivors is
increasingly unlikely. (Reuters)
“We just want an early resolution to
this tragedy,”one woman told Reuters as she sobbed. “We feel so devastated.”
About 200 divers had been working
around the clock to search for survivors, but muddy water, a strong current and
debris piled up inside the boat made their job extremely tough.
Other rescue workers cut into the
hull Wednesday to find anyone who might have been sheltering in air pockets.
Despite an extensive search and the
deployment of sensitive scanning devices, “no sign of life was found,” Xu
Chengguang said at the time. Authorities then turned their efforts to righting
the boat.
“Turning the boat will make it
easier to bring the bodies out,” said Gong Yongjun, a professor specializing in
rescue and salvage at the Transportation Equipment and Ocean Engineering
College in the northeastern city of Dalian. “It would be very dangerous to turn
the boat with lives inside.”
China has promised that there will
be no “coverup” in the investigation into why the Eastern Star capsized
suddenly in stormy weather Monday — including a powerful tornado that cut
across its path — while on an 11-day cruise up Asia’s longest river.
But anger has been rising among
relatives of those on board, largely at a lack of information and access to the
site.
“At the moment, we know absolutely
nothing,” Alex Chu, the son-in-law of a passenger, told CNN. “We want to go to
the site, but we can’t. We want to see the latest developments, but they tell
us it looks the same on TV.”
Some relatives have questioned why
the boat carried on upriver in the teeth of a storm, when at least three other
boats dropped anchor.
Others asked why the captain and
several crew members apparently had time to put on life jackets but had not
been able to send a distress call.
It was also unclear whether the
Eastern Star was sufficiently stable to withstand adverse weather conditions.
It is unusual for a ship to capsize
so quickly, and investigators will examine “why the ship’s stability failed so
catastrophically,” said Lawrence Brennan, a maritime law expert at Fordham Law
School in New York.
Investigators could study factors
such as proper crew training and whether they had received a warning about
impending bad weather, he said.
Chinese President Xi Jinping and
other senior Communist Party leaders called on rescuers Thursday morning to
“take all possible measures” to find survivors.
The Politburo Standing Committee
also “noted the importance of caring for passengers’ families” and promised
“timely, accurate and transparent” information from the investigation, the
official Xinhua News Agency reported.
However, restrictions have been
placed on domestic and foreign reporting at the scene, and local media were
ordered not to deviate from the official line.
Dozens of relatives, frustrated at their lack of
access, broke through a police cordon Wednesday night and marched several miles
to the river.
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