Weather hinders search for AirAsia victims
December 31, 2014
The first two victims' bodies arrived in the Indonesian city of Surabaya, on Wednesday, where the plane had taken off on a flight bound for Singapore early on Sunday, before it vanished from air-traffic controllers' radar screens after being airborne for about 45 minutes.
Indonesian military personnel unloaded the two wooden coffins from a plane that had delivered the bodies of a woman and a boy to Surabaya from Pangkalan Bun, which is closer to the site of the crash off the coast of Borneo.
However, officials said that just seven bodies had been recovered so far, contradicting a report from Tuesday, which claimed that dozens had already been plucked from the Java Sea.
They said efforts to retrieve the remains of the 162 people thought to have perished in the crash of AirAsia flight QZ8501 were being hindered by heavy rain, wind and thick clouds.
"I went to the search area this morning and saw there was no way we could do a search," Dwi Putranto, a senior air force official told the Reuters news agency. "Now we are standing by in case remains can be evacuated," he said, adding that more than 100 divers and rescue workers were "ready to search."
Expanding search area
The inclement weather was also making the job of recovering the bodies more difficult in that it was spreading them further afield.
"All the wreckage and bodies have drifted around 50 kilometers (30 miles) and we're expecting all the bodies will end up on the beaches around here," Indonesian Vice Air Marshal Sunarbowo Sandi, the search and rescue coordinator in Pangkalan Bun told reporters. "That is why we are searching all the beaches, because the current is moving."
Using sonar, officials have also said that they believed they had identified the bulk of the wreckage of the Airbus A320-200 on the seabed.
Some of the relatives of the victims were in Surabaya hoping to learn more about the fate of their loved ones. Investigators were gathering DNA and blood samples from them, to be used in the process of identification.
pfd/es (AP, Reuter)