A boat carrying 36 people capsized near the Black Sea city of Zatoka in Odessa Oblast around 3 p.m. on Oct. 17. Fourteen people drowned, 18 of the surviving passengers were hospitalized. The boat was overloaded, the authorities say.
The boat “Ivolga” was overturned by a wave when it was 300 meters away from the shore. It carried 33 passengers and a crew of three. The capacity of the boat allowed only 12 passengers, according to Odessa authorities.
“Ivolga” took to the sea around 7 a.m. that day for a fishing trip. The authorities don’t specify if it was an entertainment trip or the people on board were professional fishers.
A preliminary list of identified victims was published on the morning of Oct. 18. All of the dead were men, aged 39 to 64. The identification was complicated because the crew had no list of passengers and many of the victims didn’t have any identifying documents on them.
No women were said to be among the identified passengers of the boat.
According to Odessa Governor Mikheil Saakashvili, part of the passengers managed to use an inflatable lifeboat to get to the shore. But since the boat’s capacity was 12 people, the lifeboat could carry only that number.
The captain, who also owns the boat, survived and attempted to flee the spot but was detained by the authorities, according to Odessa Prosecutor Davit Sakvarelidze.
A YouTube video screenshot shows surviving passengers of “Ivolga” leaving the lifeboat.
President Petro Poroshenko offered his condolences to the families of the victims. Prime Minister Arseniy Yatsenyuk ordered the investigation of the case to be overseen by Deputy Prime Minister Hennady Zubko.
One of the surviving passengers told TSN TV news program that the boat was on its way back to the port when a storm started. A big wave hit the side of the boat and overturned it. The passengers tried to hold to the overturned boat but the waves were washing them down.
“We were trying to clamber up the best we could, but the waves grew bigger and people got scattered all around,” an unnamed passenger said in an interview he gave on a hospital bed.
Another passenger, Dmytro Martynov, told TSN he didn’t even understand how the catastrophe happened – so unexpectedly it happened.
“There was a big storm. We were on our way to the port and it just capsized,” Martynov said.
A video published by Odessa-based news website Dumskaya.net shows the lifeboat with the surviving passengers, all men, arriving to the shore. One of the people on a beach is heard asking if anyone was left in the sea.
“There were many more on the boat,” says one of the surviving passengers.
