The ferry that went down in Lake Toba was licensed to carry 43 passengers. It had 206 people aboard. That gap, revealed on 21 June 2018 as the search continued, is now the centre of Indonesia’s inquiry into the sinking of the KM Sinar Bangun, a wooden passenger ship that capsized in North Sumatra’s great volcanic lake two days earlier.
The ship went over at roughly 05:30 p.m. local time on the Monday, in the stretch of water between Simanindo on Samosir island and Tigaras village in Simalungun. By Thursday, the joint search team had pulled 19 survivors from the lake and recovered three bodies. The captain survived too. He is being held by police.
Transportation Minister Budi Karya Sumadi would not quite call it overcrowding, but he came close. “I do not say directly that the ill-fated ship was overcrowded with passengers, but it is a possibility, as it is marked by the absence of manifest data and the issuance of a license to sail or SIB”, he told a press conference at his Jakarta office on the Wednesday. The ship, he said, held a legal permit from the North Sumatra Transportation Office, yet its operation could turn illegal if the implementing unit carried no manifest and no sailing permit. Manifest data, notably, had never been submitted to the ministry at all. The results of the investigation into the cause have gone to the National Transportation Safety Committee.
Down into the lake
Underwater, the search has narrowed but not closed. Riyadil Akhir Lubis, who heads the North Sumatra disaster management office, said the joint team keeps tracking the passengers and the sunken hull. “The coordinates of the ship’s existence have been found”, he said, though the wreck itself had not. A special team is to be deployed shortly, including marine troops who will dive at the coordinates, using equipment that detects metal on the lake bed.
Weather is part of the story. The captain, investigators said, ignored two warnings issued by Indonesia’s meteorology, climatology and geophysics agency, BMKG, before sailing into the lake.
On the shore, the counting is anguished. Hotna Saragih, 38, a survivor of the accident, wept when she visited the lake on the Thursday, at Tigaras Port in Simalungun, before scattering flowers on the water where the ship went down. Three bodies recovered, 19 people alive, and a manifest that never existed to say how many more were aboard.
