Two female bodies recovered at boat capsize site in central China

By press time, divers have found two female bodies in the Xiaolangdi Reservoir, where a boat capsized on Tuesday, leaving one drowned and 43 others missing, said local officials on Thursday.

"The victims, who were trapped in the sunken boat, have no possibility of survival," said Ding Pingsheng, deputy director of the salvage bureau under the Ministry of Communications, who is directing rescue work at the site.

Twelve rescue vessels and a salvage team from Shanghai, comprising of eight divers, have been searching in the reservoir, which is located at the lower reaches of the Yellow River in Jiyuan City of the province, since 2 a.m. Wednesday.

So far, the position of the sunken boat has been confirmed and it is about 61 meters under the water, which has posed a great challenge for the rescue work as the depth has reached the bottom line for the divers to work underwater, said the chief engineer ofthe salvage bureau.

By 5 p.m. Thursday, a batch of large-scale salvage equipment, like decompression cabins, had been sent to the site from Shanghaiand so far, several hundreds of people have taken part in the rescue work.

An investigation team sent by the State Council arrived Wednesday evening to pinpoint the cause of the tragedy.

Five people who are found responsible for the accident have been detained, a local official said Thursday.

These detainees are General Manager Zhang Zongmin of Jiyuan Mingzhu Island Tourism Development Corporation, General Manger LiuSanxi and Deputy General Manager Shi Hongwei of Mingzhu Island Tourism Corporation, Captain of the sunk boat Li Xiaohui and engineer on the boat Liu Dongwu, said Mayor Duan Xizhong of Jiyuan City, where the mishap took place.

The accident occurred at around 8 p.m. Tuesday when the boat Mingzhu No. 2 suddenly capsized and sank during a rainstorm in the reservoir in Jiyuan city, and 69 sightseers, including a boat man, three guides and 65 tourists, fell into the water.

Twenty-six people were rescued from the boat and 43 were missing. One survivor died on the way to hospital.

All the survivors in hospital are in a stable condition, according to hospital sources.

The tourists are all staff members of Xinghua Fine Chemical Plant in Kaifeng City some 200 km away, whose management rented two boats that day for 129 employees to tour the Xiaolangdi Reservoir of a mammoth water conservancy project on the Yellow River.

A third-round silt-washing operation is currently going on in the Yellow River and a huge amount of water is deluged from the reservoir and churning the sediment in the lower reaches of the river.

The provincial tourism administration has issued an emergency notice overnight to ban visits to the reservoir during the silt-washing operation.

Source: Xinhua