A riot has broken out between families of those who are awaiting word on their loved ones and police who are limiting access to the port itself. People are frustrated because news is slow in coming. It took 10 hours for rescue boats to arrive on scene.
It's believed that 2 out of every 3 people on board were killed. There are conflicting reports of just how many people were on board.
Passengers are claiming that the ferry captain fled.
Survivors of the Red Sea ferry disaster said its captain fled the burning ship by lifeboat and abandoned them to their fate, as hopes faded on Saturday of finding some 800 missing.I've got to believe that there are going to be some big lawsuits over the way the company's employees handled the crisis, but I have little faith that the Egyptian government will do what's necessary to get to the heart of the matter and determine what happened and why the ferry sunk so quickly. The fire appears to have broken out in one of the vehicles belowdecks, and spread quickly.
Some passengers plucked alive from the sea or from boats after the ferry caught fire and sank early on Friday said crew had told them not to worry about a fire below deck and even ordered them to take off lifejackets.
Officials at el-Salam Maritime Transport Company, which owned the Al Salam 98, were not immediately available to answer the allegations.
Rescue workers have recovered 195 bodies from the Red Sea and saved 389 people but about 800 more, most of them Egyptian workers returning from Saudi Arabia, are missing.
The survivors said a fire broke out below deck shortly after the 35-year-old vessel left the Saudi port of Duba on Thursday evening with 1,272 passengers and a crew of about 100.
The ferry sailed on for two hours listing to the side. Then it just went onto its side and within five minutes it had sunk.The Egyptian government is paying out $5,200 to families of each of the dead victims and $2,600 to each of the survivors.
It was not immediately clear what happened to the captain, named as Sayyed Omar, or why coastguards did not appear to have received any distress signal from the ferry.
State news agency MENA said that on Friday morning a ship did pick up a message from the ferry's captain saying he was in danger of sinking. It did not say how the ship reacted.
UPDATE:
Additional reports from survivors point to mistakes made by the crew, particularly not turning around at the first sign of trouble - a fire involving at least one vehicle on board the ship. There's no real way to confirm any of the following at this time, but some survivors are claiming that the crew confined some people to their rooms - locking them in - and presumably sealing their fates. People crowded to one side of the ship, further destabilizing the boat, which when combined with winds on the Red Sea pushed the ship over.
There are eyewitness accounts that claim that the crew didn't know how to work the lifeboats and some claim that they were in the water for hours before they located lifeboats and rafts. The most serious question is why would the crew push forward with a fire in the hold when it was only 20 miles from the Saudi port, and instead tried to head to the Egyptian port more than 110 miles away?
The Al-Salaam Boccaccio 98 had sailed only about 20 miles from the Saudi shore, but its crew instead tried to reach Egypt’s shores 110 miles away. Only 376 survivors had been rescued by late Saturday.
“We told the crew, ‘Let’s turn back, let’s call for help,’ but they refused and said everything was under control,” said passenger Ahmed Abdel Wahab, 30, an Egyptian who works in Saudi Arabia.
And there are people who were injured in the riots between relatives seeking information and the security forces. A horrible situation made all the worse because there is little information and even that information doesn't hold much hope for the families.
According to the Washington Post, the ship sank about 40 miles from the Egyptian coastline. By my calculation, the ship went 70 miles before suddenly keeling to one side and sinking rapidly. Unless there was a serious problem with the rudder, the ship should have been able to return to the Saudi port of Dubah.
Apparently the captain jumped overboard as the ship was listing, not willing to go down with the ship. And there were issues with the firefighting efforts as well:
During the ordeal, survivors said, no one received instructions for inflating the rubber life rafts, which hold about 25 passengers and were contained in buoyant barrels. Egyptian rescuers took up to 18 hours to pick up some of the survivors. The sinking was not announced until 12 hours after the ship had lost contact with land.
Ahmed, the maintenance crewman, said he fought fire with sea water pumped into the ship through hoses. The fire would go out and revive, Ahmed said. "We couldn't figure out the cause," he added in a low murmur.
The long battle against inextinguishable flames had a fatal consequence, Ahmed concluded: "The water wasn't draining. Pumps weren't working right."
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