The ferry that capsized was built in Japan in 1987 and sold to Indonesia last year

The search in the Java Sea got bigger on Monday. France 24 reports that 622 people from the military, police and other agencies were working with 17 ships and aircraft, and that divers and navy underwater drones had joined them. Six people are confirmed dead and 129 are still missing, with 108 rescued. The Virgo Transport 8 lost contact around 2am on Sunday and turned over in the Masalembo waters, about 148 kilometres from Banjarmasin, after its captain radioed that the ship was leaning over in waves of up to three metres.

Two details in the report say more about the accident than the weather does. The first is the ship itself. The 119-metre vessel was built in Japan in 1987 and worked there until last year, when it was sold to Indonesia and put on the Surabaya to Banjarmasin run carrying passengers and 89 vehicles. Buying a retired ship from a country that has finished with it is normal and legal in the region. It also means the hull doing this crossing had already spent most of a working life somewhere else.

The second detail is the passenger list. The manifest recorded 243 people, 213 passengers and 30 crew, but France 24 notes that the real number on board Indonesian ferries often differs from the manifest. That is not a small clerical point during a rescue. Every count of the missing, including the figure of 129, rests on a document that may be incomplete, so nobody can say for certain when the search is finished. The report links this back to weak enforcement of safety standards on a network that carries people between more than 17,000 islands.

Why it matters

If you have family on an inter-island crossing, insist that every name goes on the manifest, including children travelling on a lap, because that list is what rescuers count from. For the rest of us the question is what the operator's fleet looks like, since ships this old arriving second-hand is a purchasing pattern, not bad luck. Watch whether investigators publish the vessel's age, its inspection record, and the true headcount, because those three facts would tell you whether this was one ship or a whole way of running a route.