Chinese Cruise Ship Capsizes on Yangtze Leaving 437 People Missing
A cruise ship called the Eastern Star, which was carrying 458 people, has capsized on the Yangtze River in China's Hubei province. The ship went down late Monday night.
So far five people been declared dead and hundreds remain listed as missing.
As reported by USA Today, Chinese President Xi Jinping has ordered "all-out rescue efforts."
As reported by the BBC, both the captain and the chief engineer were among the survivors. The men, who have been detained, say that the ship was caught in a cyclone. The Eastern Star sent out no emergency signal.
Although the rescue effort is ongoing, it has been seriously mired by bad weather. Chinese media is quoting the captain as stating that the ship sank within minutes, and that many people on board -- tourists who ranged in ages from 50 to 80 -- were asleep when it started going down.
Peter Gibbs, a weather forecaster for the BBC, has said there were severe thunderstorms in the area.
Most on board were tourists traveling a 930 miles journey from the eastern city of Nanjing to Chongqing in the south-west.
As reported in the New York Times, one of the survivors, a 65-year-old woman named Zhu Hongmei, was pulled from an air pocket inside the ship just after midday on Tuesday by rescue divers. According to Chen Shoumin, the commander of the local military district who relayed details of the rescue at a televised briefing, the divers had to quickly instruct the elderly woman on how to use scuba equipment before guiding her into the water and away from the overturned vessel.
The official Xinhua News, made a change to the number of survivors late on Tuesday, without explanation, bringing the count down from an earlier reported 15 to 14.
According to state media, as of late Tuesday, 437 people were still missing.
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