Western Embassy officials were on stand by in case any of their nationals were caught up in the disaster
March 4, 2016 - INDONESIA - A major rescue operation is underway after a ferry carrying 51 people capsized between the Indonesian islands of Bali and Java.
Dramatic footage shows the vessel rolling over in calm waters, throwing passengers into the sea, after it was believed to have sprung a leak.
It was not immediately known if tourists were aboard the vessel, but Western embassy officials were on stand by in case any were caught up in the disaster.
Rescue officials said they were confident that most people – if not all – on board had been rescued.
Many are understood to have been picked up by other vessels that were in the vicinity.
The footage shows the ferry on its side after capsizing in calm waters in Bali Strait
But amid confusing reports, it was suggested that up to 10 people were missing including two crew members.
It was not known if anyone had been trapped inside.
'This will not be known until we can send divers down to check the ship,' said Lieut-Col Wahyu Endriawan head of the local naval base.
Rescuers now face the prospect of searching for survivors in the dark.
Added to the confusion was uncertainty as to just how many people were on board the vessel, named the Rafelia II.
Many of those rescued had suffered injuries jumping or falling into the sea, said local media.
The ferry that runs between Gilimanuk port in north west Bali and Banyuwangi on the eastern tip of the main Indonesian island of Java carries both cars and passengers.
The ship was en route from Gilimanuk port in Bali to Banyawangi on Java when it capsized in the Bali Strait
While it is not a route popular with tourists, the ferry is sometimes used by adventurous backpackers island-hopping across the Indonesian archipelago.
Bali is particularly popular among Western tourists at this time of the year, now that most of the severe mid-summer storms have passed.
Over the years, hundreds of people have died in ferry disasters in Indonesia, which has a poor reputation for travellers on land, sea and in the air.
Ferries are often poorly maintained and frequently sail when they are overloaded. - Daily Mail.
WATCH: Dramatic footage - Ferry sinking caught on cam, people jump off deck.
January 29, 2016 - NICARAGUA - Thirteen women drowned on Saturday when a tourist ferry capsized in rough seas just off the coast of south-eastern Nicaragua.
A pair of British newlyweds, along with two American tourists, three Nicaraguans and 12 Costa Ricans, were rescued from the sunken boat.
All 13 women who lost their lives when a giant wave sank the vessel were vacationing Costa Rican nationals.
The Reina del Caribe (Caribbean Queen) got into difficulty in high winds, rain and “mountainous seas” while travelling between the Corn Islands, a popular tourist area.
Local authorities had reportedly suspended boat launches in the area due to high wind speeds that reached 25 to 30 knots (29 to 35 mph) after several days of stormy weather.
“There was a warning that the weather conditions would be bad, but it appears that was ignored and this tragedy happened,” said Mario Berrios, the Nicaraguan navy’s commander for the southern Caribbean region.
Reina del Caribe’s skipper, Hilario Blandon, 53, was arrested after being rescued from the wreck along with his assistant Eliot Absalon Prats Carter, 30.
General Francisco Diaz, a military police chief, said: “Both are under arrest and will be tried for the crimes of manslaughter and exposing people to danger.”
With special reference to the lives lost, government spokeswoman Rosario Murillo told El 19 Digital: “This is a great tragedy, truly painful, because they were our Costa Rican, Central American brothers and sisters who were vacationing in the waters of the Nicaraguan Caribbean.”
Local media published pictures of police covering some of the dead with a tarpaulin on a wooden jetty after their bodies were recovered. - Caribbean 360.
April 19, 2015 - LIBYA - A rescue operation is under way after a boat carrying an estimated 700 migrants capsized in Libyan waters, 120 miles south off Lampedusa.
Twenty-eight people have been reported rescued, while a number of bodies have been washed ashore in Libya.
The migrants reportedly fell overboard when they ran to draw the attention of a passing vessel. The boat is said to have capsized at midnight.
The disaster could become one of the worst over the decades of the migrant situation in the southern Mediterranean, which has seen the death toll rise over 1,500 since the beginning of 2015, Reuters reported.
"At the moment, we fear that this is a tragedy of really vast proportions," Carlotta Sami, a spokeswoman for the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, told SkyTG24 television.
"The first details came from one of the survivors who spoke English and who said that at least 700 people, if not more, were on board,” Sami added.
A Maltese Navy spokesman told the BBC that Italian ships and commercial boats were also involved in the emergency operation.
In the next few hours, the operation will focus on the search for bodies.
AFP Photo / Fethi Nasri
A few days earlier, almost 400 migrants drowned in the Mediterranean as their boat carrying 550 people bound for Italy capsized approximately 24 hours after leaving Libya.
The flow of migrants has increased due to fine spring weather over the last few weeks.
WATCH: Lampedusa migrant boat disaster - 700 feared dead as ship capsizes off Libya.
About 20,000 migrants have made it to the Italian coast this year, according to estimates by the International Organization for Migration (IOM).
Libya has been largely lawless since the toppling of Muammar Gaddafi four years ago, and criminal gangs send vessels to carry migrants from Africa and the Middle East. - RT.
April 16, 2014 - SOUTH KOREA - Rescue boats and helicopters scrambled Wednesday to find almost 300
passengers, including scores of high school students, missing after a
ferry sank off the southwest coast of South Korea.
Several coast guard, military and commercial vessels were involved in
the rescue effort,
which unfolded rapidly on Wednesday morning.
Of the 459 people on board, 164 have been rescued, the security ministry said.
Many jumped from the listing ship to the freezing waters of the Yellow Sea.
The bodies of at least four people -- a female and three males-- were confirmed dead. About 292 remain unaccounted for, the ministry said.
The rescue operation was still underway Wednesday evening, hours after the ferry first sent out a distress signal.
Authorities could not immediately say what caused the ship to sink. The weather at the time of the incident was clear.
'I wanted to live'
The ferry, Sewol, was carrying 325 students; 15 teachers; 30 crew members; and 89 other passengers.
The students were from Seoul's Ansan Danwon High School. They left from the port city of Incheon, just west of Seoul, for a four-day trip to Jeju. The resort island is considered the Hawaii of Korea.
Around 9 a.m. local time, the ferry sent out its first distress call. It had started to list.
Dozens of passengers have been rescued but the fate of many others remains unknown
Reports said the ship capsized and sank within a period of two hours
Teams have brought rescued passengers to shore - at least 13 are reported to be hurt
Military and civilian ships and helicopters have been searching for survivors
A rescued student, Lim Hyung Min, told CNN affiliate YTN that he heard a loud bump. Several off his classmates were flung off their feet. Everyone was ordered to don life jackets and jump, he said.
Lim said he jumped into the sea before swimming to a rescue vessel.
"I had to swim a bit to get to the boat to be rescued," he said. "The water was so cold and I wanted to live."
Soon, the 6,800-ton ferry sank. Only its white and blue hull remained above water.
A desperate dash
With the clock ticking, rescue crews dashed desperately to get to passengers.
At least 178 people are involved in the rescue work, including 118 marines, 42 navy personnel and 18 police officers, Kang said.
The U.S. Navy ship USS Bonhomme Richard joined the operation and was headed to the scene. It sent helicopters to the area, the U.S. Navy said.
Dive teams have been going in and out of the submerged ship looking for bodies. But poor visibility has made their task difficult.
WATCH: South Korea ferry sinks - dramatic footage of passengers being rescued .
WATCH: South Korea ferry - Dramatic first-hand rescue team Go-Pro-style video.
At Ansan Danwon High School, parents clutched their cell phones in an agonizing wait for a call from their children. Officials posted a list of names. Once a confirmation of a rescue came, they circled that name. So far, 78 students had been pulled to safety.
At one point, the school announced that all students had been rescued but soon backtracked, to the parents' wrath.
Passenger Kim Seung Mok said that despite his efforts and those of others, he couldn't get to several passengers on one of the decks.
"I stayed till the last to rescue people at the hall," Kim told YTN. "But the water was coming in so fast (that) some didn't make it out." - CNN.
October 04, 2013 - ITALY - Italy has declared a day of mourning for the 300 African migrants who died in a boat accident off the coast of Lampedusa, as rescuers told of a "nightmarish situation" as they fought to pull people from the water.
Body bags containing African migrants, who
drowned trying to reach Italian shores, lie in the harbour of Lampedusa
October 3, 2013. REUTERS/Nino Randazzo/ASP press office/Handout via Reuters
As the search continued for more than 200 people still missing off the Mediterranean island where their overloaded boat caught fire and sank, an emotional Pope Francis said Friday should be "a day of tears" for a "savage world" that ignored the plight of refugees.
Flags flew at half mast across Italy and schools held a minute of silence for the victims.
Locals on the island, which is closer to North Africa than to Italy and has a population of just 6,000, fought back tears as they spoke of the desperate rush to save the drowning immigrants.
"The hardest thing was seeing the bodies of the children. They had no chance," said local doctor Pietro Bartolo, who said in 20 years on the island he had "never seen a human tragedy like this".
Alessandro Marino, a shopkeeper on Lampedusa, spoke of seeing "a nightmarish situation" when he saw the scene from his boat. Rossella Manuci, a waitress who also came to the rescue, said: "For most of the poor souls, it was too late".
Rescued migrants arrive onboard a coastguard vessel at the harbour of Lampedusa October 3, 2013. REUTERS/Nino Randazzo/ASP press office/Handout via Reuters
"They were drowning, it was like a scene from the Titanic," Sharanna Buonocorso, one of the first rescuers to reach the scene, told Corriere della Sera.
Raffaele Colapinto, a local fisherman who was one the first on the scene, said: "We saw a sea of heads. We took as many as we could on board."
There were also stories of survival such as a young Eritrean woman thought dead and laid out with other corpses before medical personnel realised she was still breathing and revived her.
Rescue teams have so far recovered 111 bodies and expect to find more than a hundred others in the submerged wreck, which is sunk in around 40 metres of water less than 1 km (0.6 miles) from the shore. Among the dead are at least three children and two pregnant women.
The accident happened when a fire broke out on board a boat packed with an estimated 500 Eritrean and Somali refugees as it neared the end of its journey from the Libyan coast and approached Lampedusa, Italy's southernmost scrap of territory.
The boat's engine stopped working and it began to take on water, prompting some of the passengers to burn a sheet in order to summon help from the island.
But that started a fire on board and terrified migrants rushed to one side of the 65ft-long boat, causing it to capsize about half a nautical mile off the coast.
Body bags containing African migrants, who
drowned trying to reach Italian shores, lie in the harbour of Lampedusa
October 3, 2013. REUTERS/Nino Randazzo/ASP press office/Handout via Reuters
As they were recovered on Thursday, the bodies of the dead were covered in blue plastic sheeting and laid out along the quayside of the island's tiny port, as soldiers wearing protective face masks brought more corpses ashore and emergency officials sobbed with grief.
Angelino Alfano, the deputy prime minister, said Italy urgently needed assistance from Europe in dealing with the exodus of refugees and asylum seekers from Africa and the Middle East.
"This is not an Italian tragedy, this is a European tragedy," he said, speaking in Rome. "Lampedusa has to be considered the frontier of Europe, not the frontier of Italy."
He then flew to Lampedusa and shortly after arriving said: "I saw 93 bodies, a horrific sight that I never thought I would witness. It was a sight that offends the West, that offends the whole of Europe. We cannot remain inactive. We have to get control of this situation."
The tragedy underlined the dangers faced each year by the tens of thousands of desperate migrants and asylum seekers who flee war-torn and poverty-stricken countries in the hope of forging new lives in Europe.
The number of migrants has sharply increased since the Arab Spring of 2011 and the ensuing political chaos in countries like Libya, Tunisia, Egypt and Syria.
In the first six months of this year, nearly 8,000 migrants and asylum-seekers arrived in Italy, while 600 reached neighbouring Malta.
WATCH: Italy boat disaster death toll climbs.
Lampedusa, a speck of land covered in cactus and scrub with a single port and a string of white sand beaches, is where many of the migrants make for because it lies just 80 miles off the coast of Tunisia.
An estimated 13,500 have perished while trying to cross the Mediterranean since 1998, according to Fortress Europe, an internet blog that tracks the deaths.
Europe needed to "step up its efforts to prevent these tragedies and show solidarity both with migrants and with countries that are experiencing increasing migratory flows," said Cecilia Malmstrom, the European Commissioner for home affairs.
"We also need to intensify our efforts to fight criminal networks exploiting human despair so that they cannot continue to put people's lives at risk in small, overcrowded and unseaworthy vessels," she said.
On a visit to Lampedusa in July, Pope Francis, whose grandparents emigrated to Argentina from Piedmont in northern Italy before the Second World War, criticised what he called "globalised indifference" to the plight of refugees and asylum seekers. - Telegraph.
