THE YANGTZE RIVER CRUISE INCIDENT

At about 9:30PM on 1 June 2015, the Yangtze River cruise ship theEastern Star东方之星 capsized in fifteen-metre-deep water in Jianli County, Hubei province. It had been halfway through an eleven-day, 1500km journey from Nanjing to Chongqing via the Three Gorges, with 403 tourists, forty-six crew and five travel guides on board. The final death toll of the disaster was 442, making it China’s worst boat disaster in over six decades. The twelve survivors recalled travelling through pounding rain and lightning, when the boat sudden ly tilted to a ‘forty-five-degree angle’ and overturned in ‘about half to one minute’.