Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: FRIDAY, February 19, 1993 TAG: 9302190191
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: PETIT GOAVE, HAITI LENGTH: Medium
FERRY SINKS; 1,700 FEARED DEAD
A packed ferry carrying up to 2,000 people sank in stormy seas off Haiti, and only 285 people were known to have survived, the Red Cross said Thursday.Survivors told how they clung to floating objects, in one case a bag of charcoal, to stay alive.
"The sea was full of people," said one survivor, 29-year-old Madeleine Julien, from her hospital bed in this coastal town. "I kept bumping into drowned people."
The ferry Neptune went down late Tuesday off Petit Goave, 60 miles west of the capital. Communications are so crude outside the capital that it took a group of survivors a day to report the accident.
A Haitian boat and three U.S. cutters began taking the bodies of 134 women and children to Port-au-Prince late Thursday.
Lt. Gary Thomas, commander of the U.S. cutter Padre, said the bodies were found floating among broken ladders, charcoal, small chairs, coconuts and the diesel fuel from the sunken vessel.
The Coast Guard said it had found more than 100 bodies floating off Petit Goave. Bodies earlier were reported washing up on the beaches of Miragoane, 18 miles to the west of Petit Goave.
Mizell said there was "no correlation between this and the boat people," referring to the tens of thousands of Haitians who have fled their homeland by sea since the army ousted elected President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in 1991.
The Coast Guard operations center in Miami said Thursday night that Haitian officials reported the Neptune was carrying between 820 and 2,000 passengers. Mizell said port authorities in Port-au-Prince sold 800 tickets for the overnight trip.
Benjamin Sinclair, 32, said he survived by clinging to a bag of charcoal from 11 p.m. Tuesday until fishermen picked him up at 4 p.m. Wednesday.
He said the vessel was cruising in a rainstorm and, as conditions worsened, passengers panicked.
Julien, a street merchant, said the storm tossed the Neptune from side to side. People crowded atop the ferry were knocked screaming into the waters, she said.
Julien was separated from six family members, all presumed drowned. She and other survivors said there were no life jackets or lifeboats on board. People had little chance of surviving unless they were lucky enough, as she was, to grab an object to stay afloat.
Keywords:
FATALITY