Ferry fire off Indonesia's Madura island kills five, with 41 still missing
The Mutiara Sentosa 2 was halfway from Surabaya to Makassar when fire broke out at dawn. Rescuers pulled 227 people from the Java Sea.
The fire took hold between six and seven in the morning, while most people on board were still asleep. The Mutiara Sentosa 2 had left Surabaya, on Java, bound for Makassar in South Sulawesi, and was midway through the crossing when flames caught the ship off the island of Madura. There were 271 people aboard: 232 passengers and 39 crew.
By Sunday evening Indonesian authorities had confirmed five dead and 41 unaccounted for. The other 227 were picked up by vessels that happened to be nearby and answered the distress call — fishing boats, cargo ships and maritime agency craft that spent the morning lifting people out of the water and off inflatable rafts.
Where the fire is thought to have started
The cause has not been established. One survivor said the flames appeared to have begun in a lorry parked on the lower vehicle deck, which is the line investigators are working on, though nothing has been confirmed officially. Indonesian inter-island ferries carry passengers and rolling freight in the same hull, and it is that enclosed deck, full of fuel and flammable cargo, that makes a fire aboard so hard to contain.
Search operations continued on Monday with aircraft and boats, slowed by the size of the area to cover. The Java Sea is shallow and busy, which helps, but currents move survivors a long way fast.
Why this keeps happening
Indonesia is more than 17,000 islands, and for millions of people a boat is not a holiday option but the ordinary way to get from one to another. That scale comes with a grim record: overloaded vessels, ageing fleets and uneven enforcement between ports have been flagged as the underlying problem for years. Each disaster brings pledges of tighter inspections, and the routine resumes soon after.
It is the second serious passenger-boat disaster in Southeast Asia to make headlines in a matter of weeks, after the capsizing off Phu Quoc in Vietnam in July. The international safety rules that passenger ships are meant to be built and run to sit with the International Maritime Organization, the UN agency that writes them and leaves each flag state to enforce them.
Image: Mujionomaruf / Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
