Capsized ship the Eastern Star has been righted on the Yangtze River, as China faces it’s worst shipping disaster in 70 years.
The main body of the capsized ship is righted and out of the water.
There remains no chance of finding any more survivors, authorities have said, with 103 bodies recovered thus far and a further 339 people missing.
The 6,300 km (3,900 mile) Yangtze River, Asia’s longest, became the world’s busiest river in 2010 after cargo throughput hit 1.5 billion tonnes, according to the official Xinhua news agency. The route is among China’s more than 130,000 km (80,000 miles) of inland waterways.
For sure, China has poor workplace safety record – a poultry slaughterhouse fire in 2013 killed 120 people for example – and tens of thousands die on the roads each year.
But according to the Changjiang Maritime Safety Administration, responsible for a third of the Yangtze, there were just 16 incidents involving ships last year that left 32 people missing or dead. The regulator oversees the passage of around 60,000 ships each year.
In the worst previous incident of its kind in China, the steamship Kiangya blew up on the Huangpu river in southeast China in 1948, killing more than 1,000 people.
More recently, 280 people died in 1999 after a ferry caught fire and capsized in the Yellow Sea close to the port city of Yantai in Shandong province. Other accidents have mostly involved fatalities in the low double- to single-digits, according to past local media coverage.
Passenger ships in China undergo safety inspections by the domestic certification provider, the China Classification Society, as well as local maritime bureaus, and are checked on matters such as life-saving facilities, navigational equipment and crew skills, local maritime officials said.
The most important thing that will emerge from this accident is that people will be more discerning.
The Eastern Star passed inspections by the authorities in the central province of Chongqing last month before it sailed for Nanjing, the capital of Jiangsu province that is near Shanghai, unnamed officials at the Nanjing Maritime Bureau told the People’s Daily. It was not checked at the Nanjing port as such ships tended to receive safety inspections every three months.