Rescuers are racing against time to find the 10 people who went missing after a boat capsized off Indonesia’s Mentawai Islands in West Sumatra province.
Eight others were rescued after the boat sank due to bad weather on Monday around 11am local time, Indonesia’s national search and rescue agency said.
The boat had departed Sikakap, a small town in the Mentawai Islands, and was heading to another small town, Tuapejat. At least 10 government officials were among the 18 people on board the boat, according to reports.
“The boat carried 18 people; eight of them managed to swim ashore with life vests and reached Sikakap Village,” Dhio, an official from the Search and Rescue Agency, told Jakarta Globe.
Authorities deployed two boats and dozens of rescuers on Tuesday to find the missing people. The Indonesian authorities were reportedly informed of the accident around 5.40pm local time on Monday, about six hours after the boat sank.
Officials from the Mentawai search and rescue agency said the focus was on combing the area around the estimated accident site to find the victims.
“Some of the victims were seen floating on the surface, but the team couldn’t reach them in time, and they eventually disappeared from sight,” said Mr Dhio, who goes by just his first name as is common with Indonesians.
“We can’t disclose the identities of the missing passengers now out of respect for their families’ privacy,” the official told the newspaper.
Boats and ferries are a regular mode of transport in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and accidents are relatively common due to bad weather as well as lax safety standards that often allow vessels to be overloaded.
A ferry sank earlier this month near the island of Bali. Of the 65 people on board, 18 died, 30 survived and 17 remain missing. A national-level search, which lasted for around two weeks and involved around 500 people, including rescuers, police, and military personnel, was officially called off on Monday.
A provincial-level team will continue to search for the missing people for the next seven days, an official told Reuters.
In March, an Australian woman was killed following a boat accident in the rough waters of Bali. In 2018, more than 150 people were killed after a ferry sank in one of the world’s deepest lakes on the island of Sumatra.
