Frantic rescue efforts continue in China boat tragedy

Rescuers fought bad weather yesterday as they searched for more than 400 people, many of them elderly Chinese tourists, missing after a cruise boat capsized on the Yangtze River.

The accident on Monday night is likely to end up as China’s worst shipping disaster in almost 70 years.

Divers and other rescue workers pulled five people they found trapped in the upturned hull of the four-deck Eastern Star, a fraction of the 458 people state media reported were on board when the ship capsized.

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 15m deep.

The Xinhua newsagency 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.

About another dozen people had been rescued and six bodies recovered, media reported, leaving more than 430 people unaccounted for.

China’s weather bureau said a tornado hit the area, a freak occurrence in a country where tornados are not common. The disaster could bring a bigger toll than the ferry sinking in South Korea in April 2014 that killed 304 people, most of them children on a school trip.

The People’s Daily, which published a passenger manifest on its microblog, said those on board the Eastern Star ranged in age from three to more than 80.

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.

“Wave after wave crashed over me; I swallowed a lot of water,” Zhang said.