China river-cruise ship with 458 aboard sinks

Rescue workers prepare today to search the Yangtze River for passengers and crew after a ship capsized in central China’s Hubei province. The passenger ship carrying more than 450 people sank overnight during a storm, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.
Rescue workers prepare today to search the Yangtze River for passengers and crew after a ship capsized in central China’s Hubei province. The passenger ship carrying more than 450 people sank overnight during a storm, the official Xinhua News Agency reported.

BEIJING -- A small cruise ship sank overnight in China's Yangtze River during a storm, leaving at least one person dead and nearly 450 people missing, most of them elderly, state media said today. Ten people were rescued, the state media reports said.

Search teams heard sounds coming from within the partially submerged ship about 12 hours after it went down, state broadcaster CCTV said, but it was not immediately clear whether they amounted to signs of life among the missing.

Footage from the broadcaster showed rescuers in orange life vests climbing on top of the upside-down hull, with one of them lying down tapping a hammer and listening for a response, then pointing downward.

The boat was traveling from Nanjing upstream to the southwestern city of Chongqing when it sank Monday night in Hubei province, the report said.

The captain and chief engineer were among those rescued, and they said the vessel sank quickly after being caught in a tornado or hurricane, according to the English version of the Xinhua report. The Chinese version online early today had no mention of the rescue of the captain and chief engineer.

The report cited the Yangtze River shipping management authority saying a hurricane or tornado had caused the accident.

The Communist Party-run People's Daily said the ship sank within two minutes.

CCTV said the boat was carrying 406 Chinese passengers, five travel agency employees and 47 crew members. The broadcaster said 10 people were rescued and that one person was confirmed dead.

Most of the passengers were between 50 and 80 years old and had been traveling on a group tour, according to Hubei Daily. The newspaper reported that one body, which appeared to be that of a tour guide, had been discovered.

The vessel sank in the Damazhou stretch of the river in Jianli County of Hubei province, where the water is 50 feet deep. It was heading between two of China's largest cities -- from Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province, on the east coast, to Chongqing, an interior metropolis that is the biggest municipality in the country.

CCTV video footage of the river showed calm waters this morning, with dozens of rescue personnel in bright orange vests gathered on the shore. Several rescue ships were searching the waters, and divers had been deployed. The broadcaster said rescue personnel were trying to determine whether they could right the sunken ship.

The channel said seven of the survivors swam to shore and alerted authorities of the sinking.

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

The Eastern Star ship measured 251 feet long and 36 feet wide and was capable of carrying a maximum of 534 people, CCTV reported. The ship was built in February 1994, Xinhua reported. It's 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 6 inches of rain had fallen in the region over the past 24 hours. Local media reported winds reached 80 mph during the accident.

By this morning, Premier Li Keqiang had arrived on the scene in Jianli County, Xinhua reported. Xinhua reported that President Xi Jinping had ordered a work team of the State Council, the country's Cabinet, to rush to the site to guide the rescue work.

The Yangtze, the world's third-longest river, is China's most important waterway. Tourists often take pleasure cruises along the middle stretch.

In January, 22 people were killed after a tugboat on a test voyage overturned in the river in Jiangsu province, according to state media.

Information for this article was contributed by staff members of The Associated Press; by Edward Wong of The New York Times; and by Stuart Leavenworth and Tiantian Zhang of Tribune News Service.

A Section on 06/02/2015

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