More than 120 people were injured – 14 of them seriously – after a high-speed ferry collided into an “unidentified object” Sunday night off the largest island in Hong Kong.
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The news agency quotes the Hong Kong police as saying the injured were taken to hospital, but that details of their injuries were not immediately available.
The ferry, with about 174 passengers and crew on board, lost power near Lantau Island at 6 p.m. Sunday (Manila time) and began taking in water.
Hong Kong’s Secretary for Transport and Housing Anthony Cheung and Secretary for Food and Health Ko Wing-man visited a few of the injured at Pamela Youde Nethersole Eastern Hospital.
“So far it is understood around 100 people have been injured”, a government spokesman said in a statement.
Boats were sent to the scene, while ambulances were put on standby at the Central Ferry Piers. While serious accidents are rare, the waters have become increasingly crowded with leisure boats and vessels that ferry passengers to the nearby gambling hub of Macau. “It was chaotic at first but then the passengers managed to calm down soon”, said one of the passengers while talking to the South China Morning Post.
In 2012, 39 people were killed in a ferry collision in Hong Kong’s worst maritime disaster in decades.
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Last year, a Macau-bound ferry crashed into a seawall off the coast, injuring over 50 people. In addition to the five patients in critical condition, five were categorised as serious and 27 stable.
