Guatape (Colombia) (AFP) – Divers struggled in the weed-choked depths of a Colombian reservoir Monday searching for the bodies of passengers on a tourist pleasure boat that sank in a reservoir killing at least six people.
Authorities did not yet say what caused the four-deck Almirante to go down in the El Penol reservoir in the tourist town of Guatape, where Colombian and foreign tourists take leisure cruises.
The admiral in charge of the search, Juan Francisco Herrera, said on Blu Radio that more divers would arrive on Monday “to carry out a bigger search inside the boat to determine whether there are people trapped in there.”
President Juan Manuel Santos said Sunday that six of the estimated 170 people on board had been confirmed dead.
Sixteen people were still unaccounted for while 134 were confirmed to have survived, said regional government emergency official Margarita Moncada.
Divers were searching as far as 40 meters underwater in “the deepest part of the reservoir” where algae were hampering their progress, she said.
An official in the National Risk Management Unit, Carlos Ivan Marquez, told AFP the six dead were “all Colombians, and no minors.”
Most of those on the Almirante were rescued by other boats or escaped by themselves, officials said.
“It sank extremely quickly. It all happened in a few minutes,” said a fire service captain involved in the rescue effort, Luis Bernardo Morales, on Sunday.
A storm overnight forced the search operation to be suspended and one diver was hurt by lightning, Moncada said.
Divers resumed work on Monday morning in the chilly waters.
– ‘Crowded’ decks –
Video circulating on social media showed the ship going down and dozens of other vessels approaching it to try to rescue people.
One woman who survived the sinking, Laura Baquero, said on television that the two lower decks were “too crowded” and the passengers were not wearing lifejackets.
“We started to feel like the boat was going to capsize,” she said.
She said there were “lots of children” on board.
Santos said he had been told “the boat had a capacity greater than the number of people on board, so that it was not due to overloading” that it sank.
He said naval experts had come to investigate the sinking.
– Holiday weekend –
The reservoir is 68 kilometers (40 miles) from the city of Medellin and is one of Antioquia department’s main tourist draws.
Guatape fills with tourists on long weekends. Monday is a public holiday in Colombia.
Visitors come for one- or two-hour cruises on the reservoir and to fish and jet-ski.
Morales said on Sunday that rescuers had difficulty reaching the reservoir by road due to heavy traffic on the major Medellin-Bogota highway.
The national fire service said it dispatched firefighters from six towns to help.
“The area is a bit difficult to reach and various rescue and emergency teams have started joining in,” Medellin’s mayor Federico Gutierrez said on Blu Radio.
Guatape town hall declared three days of mourning.
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