More than 400 people still missing from capsized Chinese cruise ship

Hopes dimmed Wednesday for the more than 400 people still trapped aboard a capsized river cruise ship that overturned in stormy weather about 36 hours earlier, as hundreds of rescuers searched the Yangtze River site in what could become the deadliest Chinese maritime accident in decades. Chinese state media reported that seven bodies had been pulled from the boat, which was floating with a sliver of its hull jutting from the gray river water. A total of 14 people have been rescued, but the vast majority of the 458 people on board, many of them elderly tourists, were unaccounted for.

From about 9 p.m., it began raining extremely hard, then the cyclone hit and the wind was really terrifying.

Huang Delong, a deck hand on a car ferry crossing the Yangtze River several miles upstream of the site

Amid continuing uncertainty about their fate, the state broadcaster CCTV announced Wednesday morning that it was suspending live broadcasts from the disaster site for technical reasons. The passenger ship Oriental Star was traveling upstream Monday night from the eastern city of Nanjing to the southwestern city of Chongqing when it overturned in China’s Hubei Province in what state media reported as a cyclone with winds of up to 80 mph. State media reported that rescuers heard people yelling for help within the overturned hull. Divers rescued a 65-year-old woman and, later, two men who had been trapped. CCTV said more people had been found and were being rescued, but did not say whether they were still inside the overturned hull.

yangtze World