Ferry with 243 on board capsizes in the Java Sea

The passenger ferry Virgo Transport 8 was sailing from Surabaya in East Java to Banjarmasin in South Kalimantan when it lost contact with its operator early on Sunday. It had 243 people on board, 213 passengers and 30 crew. Al Jazeera reports that six people are confirmed dead, 130 are still missing and 107 have been rescued. The ship was about 81 nautical miles from Banjarmasin, well out in open water, when it turned over.

Local officials point to rough weather, and the same weather is now slowing the search. I Putu Sudayana, who runs the Banjarmasin search-and-rescue office, said waves as high as 2.5 metres have hampered the operation. That is the hard part of a sinking this far from shore. The boats and the helicopter sent out have to work in the sea that caused the accident, and every hour of delay widens the area where survivors could be. Basarnas, the national search and rescue agency, has not named a cause. Investigators are looking at both the state of the sea and a possible technical failure.

This is the third serious accident on the country's ferry routes since the middle of the year, after a sinking in July and a fire off Madura in August. In a country of thousands of islands, a ferry ticket is what most people can afford, and the Surabaya routes carry traders, migrant workers and families going home. What repeats is not only the accident but the shape of it: a full ship, open water, and a long wait for help.

Why it matters

The practical lesson from this one is about the forecast rather than the vessel, because bad weather is the reported cause, yet the ship still sailed. If you are booked on an inter-island crossing, check the sea conditions first, and be ready to lose a day rather than board in a storm. Watch whether investigators say what the forecast looked like before departure and who decided it was safe to leave port, since that is the part of the system that could be fixed before the next crossing.