Java Sea ferry still closed to divers five days after 129 went missing

Five days after the Virgo Transport 8 capsized in the Java Sea, Indonesian divers still had not been inside the wreck. About 129 people remained missing. Six were confirmed dead. One hundred and eight had been pulled out on the day of the accident. Those three numbers had not moved since Sunday, 13 September.

The 4,277-ton ferry left Surabaya at 10:33 on Saturday, 12 September, with 243 people aboard, including 30 crew, bound for Banjarmasin on a crossing that should have taken about 20 hours. Contact was lost in bad weather. The operator, PT Virgo, reported distress at 04:10 on Sunday. The last reported position was about 150 kilometres south of Banjarmasin. The ship later drifted about 1.8 nautical miles, stayed partly afloat for days, then settled on the seabed.

Arianto Ardi, operations head for the search agency’s Banjarmasin office, said some 60 divers from the navy and the national rescue service could not reach the interior. The hull form, current, pressure and near-zero visibility stopped them. Waves of 2.5 metres and wind kept surface boats off a clean pattern. Banjarmasin Navy Commander Galih Nurna Putra said on 18 September that a salvage plan to right the ship had started after an observation dive the day before. As long as the hull lay on the bottom, he said, divers would stay outside.

Rizky Apriansyah, who had been asleep on the top deck, told Reuters that friends woke him around 01:00 when the ship already leaned about 30 degrees to port. He grabbed a life jacket. In less than ten minutes the ferry went over. He and his friends held a 12-kilogram cooking-gas cylinder about 15 metres from the hull and watched it invert. They floated for about ten hours before another ship found them.

Indonesia moves people by ferry because the archipelago has 17,000 islands and air tickets cost more than a deck bench. The Surabaya-Banjarmasin run is a working route between Java and southern Borneo, cargo and families on the same manifest. When a ship on that run goes over at 1 a.m., the missing are not tourists. They are the reason the route exists.

Search resources listed during the week included 17 ships, five aircraft and about 1,100 personnel at the high count, then eight ships and two helicopters on the Friday surface sweep. The drop in listed assets is what a five-day weather fight looks like. Families waited at Trisakti Port in Banjarmasin. The dead and the saved were known on Sunday. The 129 were not.

Righting a sunken ferry is a bet that compartments still hold air or that bodies can be reached once the deck is no longer the floor. It is also an admission that swimming searches have failed. Putu Sudayana, who heads the Banjarmasin rescue office, said evacuees on Sunday went off on other ships, some back toward East Java. After that the story became current, welders and whether the hull would come level.

There is no public final report yet on watertight doors, cargo shift or the weather limit the master was given. There is a survivor who timed the capsize in minutes and a navy commander who will not send divers through a door that is underwater and dark. Those two statements are the reliable record as of 18-19 September.

The Java Sea will give the rest up slowly. Salvage either opens the hull or it does not. The missing either become recovered dead or they stay a number. For a country that runs on ferries, 129 names on one overnight crossing is a system failure, not a freak wave. The wave was real. The system is the ship that could not stay upright for the last hours of a scheduled run.