A Ferry Carrying 271 People Caught Fire Off Indonesia. Five Are Dead and 41 Are Still Missing.

A passenger ferry carrying 271 people caught fire in the Java Sea early Sunday, killing at least five and leaving 41 unaccounted for as rescue crews and passing merchant ships pulled survivors out of the water through the day.

The vessel, the Mutiara Sentosa 2, was operated by PT Atosim Lampung Pelayaran and was making the overnight run from Surabaya, the capital of East Java province, to Makassar in South Sulawesi. The fire broke out between 6 and 7 a.m. local time. The operator reported it to authorities roughly an hour later, by which point the ship had already lost contact and its position had to be established by search aircraft — about 19 nautical miles, or 35 kilometers, north of Buruan Sapudi Island, off the eastern end of Madura.

Of the 271 people aboard, 232 were passengers and 39 were crew. By Sunday evening, Indonesia's National Search and Rescue Agency, known as Basarnas, said 225 people had been rescued. Five bodies had been recovered and 41 people remained missing, a figure officials cautioned could change as survivors were counted at multiple landing points along the coast.

Footage released by Basarnas showed thick black smoke pouring off the ferry's superstructure while passengers in orange life jackets crowded the open deck waiting to be taken off. Other clips showed people jumping into the sea as the fire spread. Indonesian navy vessels joined the response alongside civilian ships that diverted to the scene, a common feature of rescues in the busy shipping lanes between Java and Sulawesi.

The cause of the fire has not been determined. Investigators typically look first at the vehicle deck on ferries of this type, where trucks and cars are parked close together and fuel and cargo are difficult to isolate once a fire starts.

Indonesia is an archipelago of more than 17,000 islands, and ferries are the everyday link between them for people who cannot afford to fly. That dependence, combined with what maritime safety analysts and Indonesian officials themselves have repeatedly described as lax enforcement of safety rules — overloading, poor firefighting equipment, incomplete passenger manifests — has made the country the site of some of the deadliest ferry accidents in the world. Manifest problems in particular complicate the accounting after disasters like this one, because the number listed as sailing is not always the number actually aboard.

Search operations were continuing overnight, with Basarnas coordinating vessels and aircraft across a widening area as currents carried survivors and debris away from the ferry's last reported position.