The Albany Gazette - Survivors recall blasts before deadly Indonesian ferry fire

There were 236 people on board the vessel when it left Indonesia's second-largest city, Surabaya, for Makassar on Sulawesi island on Sunday morning, search and rescue agency head Nanang Sigit said.

Nanang told Kompas TV on Monday 229 people had been rescued alive and five bodies were also recovered.

"Mathematically, only two that have yet to be evacuated. We are confirming this data with the shipowner," he said.

Numbers provided by officials have fluctuated wildly. The last toll given on Sunday was 41 people missing and five dead from a total manifest of 271 people.

Arman Asmara Syarifuddin, an East Java police official, told Kompas TV on Monday some 28 people were still missing.

The reason for the discrepancy was not clear.

The fire broke out on Sunday morning as passengers were eating breakfast, survivor Muhammad Abdul Karim told reporters in Surabaya after disembarking from a rescue vessel.

"Initially, the smoke entered the information room, the sleeping quarters. And then explosions happened," he said.

The blaze originated in the stern, sending passengers fleeing to the bow where they were all given life jackets, Muhammad said.

He said he jumped overboard with an elderly man as the fire came closer, and saw flames engulfing "almost all" of the ferry as he looked back.

"The waves were big and the ship coming to save us was quite far. Those were our fears when we were about to jump," said Muhammad -- who was rescued drifting at sea in his life jacket about seven hours later.

He said he had not seen any lifeboats aboard the ferry.

- 'No choice' -

Rescuers worked through the night to find survivors even as estimates of the number of missing people kept changing.

Most evacuees were taken back to Surabaya, a six-hour boat ride from where the ferry ran into trouble.

Bambang Susilo, 36, said he felt the blaze come closer to the bow of the ferry and the floor getting warmer, convincing him and a female passenger to jump some 10 metres (33 feet) into the sea.

"We had no choice but to surrender" to our fate, he told reporters at the Bhayangkara Hospital in Surabaya, where he was waiting to retrieve the body of a colleague.

Bambang and five other survivors had swum to the nearest rescue ship, some five kilometres (three miles) from the blazing ferry.

Another rescue vessel was deployed on Monday to help find the missing, said Nanang.

Marine accidents are a regular occurrence in Indonesia, an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, partly due to lax safety standards and unpredictable weather.

At least four people were found dead and 14 others remained missing until the end of the search operation.

(A.Thompson--TAG)