Rinto Arahap was asleep, like most of the people around him, when the floor of the ferry began to tilt. It was around two in the morning on Sunday, roughly five hours out from port, and he says he heard something that sounded like metal breaking. Then the shouting started. “People were panicking. Some climbed onto tables, some were pushing each other,” the 33-year-old told AFP later, speaking from a stretcher at a health facility in Banjarmasin. Nobody in a uniform told them anything, he said. “There was no warning from the ship’s crew. Basically, it was just someone taking the initiative, shouting, ‘Oh, the ship is listing, listing, listing.’”
The waves were more than two metres high. Passengers fought each other for life jackets as the deck went over. Arahap got one, and then he got into the water, and then he floated for about four hours in the Java Sea before somebody pulled him out. He was on his way to Samarinda in East Kalimantan to start work on a palm oil plantation. “I didn’t save anything, just myself,” he said. “My wallet, everything... was lost. Things like my school diploma were gone. All my clothes were swept away.”
The ship was the Virgo Transport 8, Japanese-built, designed to carry both passengers and vehicles. It had left Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city, at 10:33 on Saturday morning, bound for Banjarmasin on the southern coast of Borneo, and was due to arrive at about two on Sunday afternoon. On board were 213 passengers and 30 crew, along with vehicles.
Before the ship went silent, the captain had reported rough seas with waves up to three metres and sent a distress message saying the vessel was listing, according to I Putu Sudayana, who heads the Banjarmasin Search and Rescue Office. Contact was lost at about two in the morning. The rescue agency in Banjarmasin said it received a report two hours later. Authorities were then told the vessel had overturned, and afterwards that it had sunk. “The ship’s operator reported the incident to authorities after receiving information that the vessel had encountered bad weather,” Sudayana said in a video briefing.
Heri Purwanto, who heads the Banjarmasin Sea Port Authority, said the ship had been carrying vehicles and that contact was lost at two. “We responded quickly to the incident report,” he said.
A rescue ship was sent toward the last known position, and rescue teams were deployed with four vessels, including a navy ship, and a helicopter, because of the number of people aboard. The searchers were working in the same seas that had turned the ferry over. Sudayana told reporters that crews faced waves of up to 2.5 metres in conditions he described as “extremely risky” for vessels. “Even our Basarnas vessel, which is 40 meters long, is at great risk,” he said.
The numbers moved through the day the way they do in an event still happening. Reuters reported at least 103 people evacuated. By Sunday afternoon, search teams assisted by nearby tugboats and other vessels had rescued 102 and recovered one body, with about 140 missing. Later, 107 rescued and six bodies recovered, with roughly 130 unaccounted for. By evening Basarnas put it at six dead, 108 rescued and 129 missing.
The vessel’s last position had been detected in the Java Sea, about 150 kilometres from its destination. It is a shallow sea, on the Sunda Shelf between Borneo and Java, with a mean depth of 46 metres, formed when sea levels rose at the end of the last ice age over what had once been dry, low-lying land.
At the pier in Banjarmasin, the first rescue ship carrying survivors came in before nightfall. A command centre had been set up at the port, with paramedics and ambulances waiting. Dozens of relatives and friends stood in front of a whiteboard where the names of the rescued were being written up as they came. Jenah, 26, was among them, looking for her older brother. Like many Indonesians she has only one name. “I am saddened and very shocked. Until now, I haven’t received any more information,” she said. “He was travelling alone. I hope he survives. I couldn’t contact him since last night.”
Basarnas exists because of exactly this. The agency was created in stages out of Indonesia’s obligations as a member of the International Civil Aviation Organization from 1950 and the International Maritime Organization from 1959: countries without a search and rescue organization were once classified as a “black area”, a label that could damage their standing and their transport safety. A formal agency was set up in 1972, renamed Basarnas in 1979, and since 2007 has reported directly to the president. In 2021 alone it carried out 2,264 search and rescue operations. In this work, response time, the interval between the news of an accident arriving and the rescue unit reaching the scene, is the crucial variable, and Basarnas sets an average response time by regulation as a way of estimating the survival probability of victims. For the Virgo Transport 8, the report reached the agency two hours after contact was lost.
Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands where ferries are a common method of travel, and disasters occur regularly, with weak safety enforcement often blamed. Last month at least 211 people were taken off an Indonesian ferry that caught fire in rough seas near Bali, with one dead and four missing; less than two weeks before that, the Mutiara Sentosa 2 caught fire off Java, leaving at least five dead. Sunday’s sinking came four days after a fire gutted a passenger ferry in the Philippines, killing at least 76 people with more than 10 still missing. And earlier in the week a speedboat carrying eight people, five of them journalists covering the eruption of Mount Anak Krakatau, went missing; that search is also still going.
None of this is random. Almost 2,000 deaths a year are known to result from passenger vessel accidents, and 91 percent of them involve ferries; reporting deficiencies mean the true figure could be at least half again as high. About 76 percent of the known accidents and 95 percent of the deaths occur in poor, tropical regions, 80 percent of them in just ten developing countries, and 93 percent on domestic voyages that passengers usually cannot avoid taking. By one estimate, 88 percent of the accidents and 98 percent of the deaths are directly attributable to human error: unseaworthy vessels, poor lookout, overloading, negligence, poor seamanship, made worse by failures in evacuation, lifesaving equipment and search and rescue.
In North America and Europe, ferries are the safest form of transport there is.
Arahap floated for four hours with a life jacket he had grabbed himself, after a warning nobody official gave. In Banjarmasin, Jenah was still watching the whiteboard.