Traveling by ferry in developing countries has always been a hit-and-miss affair, as you just don’t know how many people are on board and whether everything below is as it should be. If you think about health and safety, ship maintenance and lifesaving equipment, then best to go to the lower-deck bar and have a few stiff drinks.
I decided to look back through ferry disasters over the period from 1953 to 1999, a 46-year trip down many rivers of the world. To be honest there were hundreds of disasters and therefore it was too time-consuming to go through them all, and so I decided to be selective and picked out about 60 of them that collectively caused the deaths of at least 16,500 people.
That’s an average of 275 deaths per ferry, although the biggest was in the Philippines, when more than 3,000 people were killed when an overcrowded passenger ferry, the ill-fated Dona Paz, collided with an oil tanker off Mindoro Island in December 1987.
What was noticeable about many of the disasters, in fact at least 25 percent of them, was that the ferries were either overcrowded or overloaded or both, with some having twice as many passengers as was allowed or considered safe. Bad weather, collisions and running aground were other causes of sinking, but then one tipped over with a lopsided load when all the tourists went over to one side of the ferry to see a fistfight.
A hundred and fourteen perished on that occasion, and then one in Haiti did the same when a crowded ferry capsized as the passengers rushed to one side of the ship to disembark. In doing so, more than 170 people drowned. In the Philippines, at least 50 people were killed when an overcrowded ferry capsized at the entrance to the port at Cadiz as passengers shifted to one side to avoid high waves – is there a design fault here somewhere?
Another one that caught my eye happened in Myanmar, where the Bama Kyei, a double-decker ferry en route to Yangon, sank when it was overturned by a cattle stampede. More than 170 people were killed or went missing. Can you imagine sitting there in your comfortable chair on the
lower deck reading the National Geographic when a crazed herd of cattle comes charging at you?!
In Bangladesh there were three ferry disasters in just seven months in which 1,000 people drowned.
First, a crowded double-decker ferry capsized and sank during a storm on the Shitalakhya River near Dhaka, killing more than 200 people. And the next month, even greater tragedy struck when a similar ferry accident on the Meghna River reportedly claimed at least 600 lives.
This was followed by a severely overloaded ferry that overturned in the Kajla River five months later that killed a further 150 people. You can even die before you get on board a ferry, as was the case in the Congo when about 150 people were killed in Brazzaville when the ferry they were boarding pulled away from shore prematurely, thus breaking the gangway.
There was one in Nigeria where a ferry carrying more than 300 people smashed into a giant rock in the sea near Oron, drowning more the 200 people. Now you would have thought the captain would have seen that rock, especially as it was a giant one.
This was a grave affair that leads me on to Indonesia, when in February 1999, an overloaded ferry sank near the island of Kalimantan, killing more than 300 people. According to reports, the ship was not licensed to carry passengers.
Survivors reported the ship did not carry lifesaving equipment for everyone aboard. Horrendous; they were all horrendous, so maybe next time you step foot on a ferry you should seriously consider asking a few basic questions before the ropes are loosened.
David Wallis
Medan
