FOURTEEN people have been rescued and five were confirmed dead after a passenger ship carrying over 450 people capsized in the Yangtze River in Hubei Province, said Yang Chuantang, minister of transport, yesterday.

    The ship was bound for Chongqing Municipality, Southwest China, from the eastern Chinese city Nanjing. It sank after being caught in a cyclone at around 9:28 p.m. Monday on the Jianli section of the Yangtze River.

    Latest statistics from the Ministry of Transport showed that there were a total of 456 people on board, including 405 passengers, 46 crew members and five tourist guides. Most of the passengers were 50 to 80 years of age, CCTV said.

    Some of the survivors swam ashore, but others were rescued more than 12 hours after the ship went down, after search teams climbed aboard the upside-down hull and heard people calling out from within.

    Divers pulled out a 65-year-old woman and, later, two men who had been trapped yesterday afternoon, CCTV said. It said additional people had been found and were being rescued, but did not say whether they were still inside the overturned hull. Other survivors include the ship’s captain and the chief engineer.

    President Xi Jinping had ordered a work team of the State Council to rush to the site to guide the rescue work and Premier Li Keqiang asked rescuers to seize every second while flying to the accident site yesterday afternoon.

    The overturned ship had drifted about 3 kilometers downstream before coming to rest close to the river shore, where choppy waters made the rescue difficult. The location is about 180 kilometers west of the Hubei provincial capital of Wuhan.

    Xinhua cited the captain and the chief engineer as saying the ship sank quickly after being caught in a cyclone. CCTV said the two were under police custody. The People’s Daily said the ship sank within two minutes.

    The ship sank in the Damazhou waterway section, where the river is 15 meters deep. The Yangtze is the world’s third-longest river and sometimes floods during the summer monsoon season. More than 50 boats and 3,000 people were involved in search efforts.

    The Eastern Star ship measured 76.5 meters long and 11 meters wide, and was capable of carrying a maximum of 534 people. It is owned by the Chongqing Eastern Shipping Corp., which focuses on tourism routes in the popular Three Gorges river canyon region.

    (SD-Agencies)