Rescue workers scrambled around the upturned hulk of a sunken cruise ship Tuesday as China grappled with an unfolding disaster in the murky waters of the Yangtze River.
The ship, the Eastern Star, capsized late Monday in stormy weather as it ferried 458 passengers and crew along a stretch of the Yangtze that winds through central China’s Hubei province, authorities said.
By Tuesday afternoon, only 15 survivors and five bodies had been recovered, state media reported, amid a desperate effort to reach those trapped inside the wreck.
Divers plunged into the river, and rescue workers gathered along part of the vessel’s upturned hull that was sticking out of the water.
The divers knocked on the ship under the water and heard responses from inside, a state-run local newspaper reported. Welders were trying to cut the cabin open.
Captain, engineer in custody
One rescue worker was seen lying on the exposed part of the hull, tapping the metal with a small hammer and apparently listening out for responses.
The searchers continued to pull the occasional survivor from the submerged ship during the afternoon.
The captain and chief engineer, who both made it off the ship alive, have been taken into custody for questioning by police, according to state media.
The fates of the hundreds of other people aboard the ship remained unclear.
Youngest passenger was 3 years old
Their relatives were desperately seeking news.
Yan Mao told CNN that his mother, aunt, and two cousins were on the ship after boarding it at Nanjing, the eastern Chinese city where the multiday river cruise began Thursday.
Yan said he was on his way to Wuhan, a major city roughly 150 kilometers (95 miles) from the area where the ship is reported to have gone down.
“I am anxious to find them,” he told CNN. “Of course I believe they are alive, otherwise I wouldn’t go there.”
Yang Min, a resident of Shanghai whose parents and child were on the ship, said he was anxiously waiting with many other families for updates at a local government office in the city.
Most of the 406 passengers on the cruise were aged between 50 and 80, according to a list published by state media. The youngest was only 3 years old.
There were also 47 crew members and five travel agency workers on board, according to state media. All of those on board were reported to be Chinese citizens.
Alarm raised by survivor
The Eastern Star capsize around 9:30 p.m. Monday during a storm over the section of the river that flows through Hubei’s Jianli county, Xinhua reported, citing the Yangtze River navigation administration.
Xinhua said the captain and engineer both claimed the ship had been hit by a longjuanfeng, a Chinese word that can be translated as cyclone or tornado.
But Zhang Zuqiang, a senior official with the China Meteorological Administration, told the newspaper Beijing News that he wasn’t sure that there had been a longjuanfeng.
Zhang described the conditions at the time of the sinking as severe convective weather with severe precipitation. A team of weather experts have been dispatched to Hubei to investigate further, he said.
Local authorities launched their rescue efforts after receiving a phone call from a survivor who had managed to swim ashore, according to Chinese media.
The sunken ship is now located about 3 kilometers from the shore where the river is around 15 meters (50 feet) deep, China’s state-run broadcaster CCTV reported.
Chinese Premier arrives at site
Chinese Premier Li Keqiang and other senior officials arrived Tuesday at the site of the disaster to oversee the large-scale emergency response.
To help with the rescue effort, authorities reduced the amount of water being discharged from the Three Gorges Dam, the world’s largest hydroelectric plant, which is situated upstream from the sunken ship, state media reported.
A CNN team saw scores of military trucks and buses on an expressway heading toward the site of the sinking. Each one was packed with soldiers wearing orange life vests.
The Yangtze is the third-longest river in the world, stretching 6,300 kilometers (3,915 miles) from its source in the mountains of Tibet all the way to the East China Sea.
The Eastern Star had been making a multistop journey up the river from Nanjing to Chongqing, a city hundreds of kilometers inland. River cruises along the Yangtze are popular among both Chinese and international tourists.
The images of the upended ship evoked memories of the sinking of the Sewol, the South Korean passenger ferry that sank last year, taking the lives of more than 300 people, most of them high school students.