Jakarta.- Six people have died and 130 remain missing due to the shipwreck of a boat, from which 107 passengers were rescued, while it was sailing early this morning through the Java Sea, Indonesian authorities reported this Sunday.
Emergency teams, supported by the Navy and volunteer groups, have deployed more than a dozen vessels to try to find the missing people, notes the National Search and Rescue Agency (Basarnas) in its latest update.
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The ferry “Virgo Transport 8”, which was traveling the route between the cities of Surabaya -on the island of Java- and Banjarmasin -in southern Borneo-, stopped transmitting its position around 2:00 local time (18:00 GMT on Saturday), before sinking at a point yet to be located, according to the preliminary report.
The latest coordinates place the vessel about 80 nautical miles southwest of the town of Basirih Banjarmasin, in southern Borneo.
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Basarnas noted that at the time of the alert the ship was already “listing” and facing “adverse weather conditions”, with waves between 2 and 2.5 meters high.
According to the shipping manifest cited by rescuers, there were 243 people on board the vessel (213 passengers and 30 crew members).
Maritime accidents are common in Indonesia due to poor infrastructure, overloading of passengers and goods, lax enforcement of safety regulations, and inclement weather.
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The boat is one of the main means of transport in the Indonesian archipelago, made up of more than 17,000 islands and with a population of more than 270 million inhabitants.
In 2018, more than 150 people drowned when a ferry sank in one of the deepest lakes in the world, on the island of Sumatra, in one of the worst accidents of this kind in the country’s recent history.
