Hundreds missing after Indonesian ferry sinks

This latest group brings the number of survivors to about 245. More than 400 passengers and crew, however, are missing, feared dead. Bad weather and the lack of a precise location for the sinking have hampered rescue efforts. Only 13 bodies have so far been retrieved.

The Senopati Nusantara started to sink around midnight on December 30, about 10 hours into a 19-hour trip from Kumai in central Kalimantan to the Javanese city of Semarang, According to rescued passengers, the ship first veered to one side, but took two hours to completely capsize. A government investigator Ruth Simatupang told Associated Press: “I suspect waves entered the car deck over the door and became trapped, making the vessel too heavy and unstable.”

The ferry was a “roll on, roll off” or “ro-ro” type which has a poor safety record. In the 1987 sinking of the Herald of Free Enterprise in Belgium, the bow doors had not been properly closed before leaving port, resulting in the deaths of nearly 200 people. The subsequent tightening of standards in Europe led to the sale of a number of ro-ro ships to Third World operators. Since then there have been a series of disasters, including the sinking of the Al-Salam Boccaccio 86 in the Red Sea last February with the loss of hundreds of lives.

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http://wsws.org/articles/2007/jan2007/indo-j09.shtml