On Sunday, a devastating fire broke out aboard an Indonesian inter-island ferry traveling off the coast of East Java, leaving at least five people dead and triggering an urgent search operation for unaccounted passengers that stretched into Monday, national rescue officials confirmed.
The blaze erupted on the Mutiara Sentosa 2, a 160-meter passenger and cargo ferry operating on the high-traffic route between Surabaya, Indonesia’s second-largest city located on East Java, and Makassar, the capital of South Sulawesi. According to initial details from the vessel’s official manifest, the ferry was slated to carry 232 passengers and 39 crew members when the fire broke out between 6 a.m. and 7 a.m. in waters administered by Indonesia’s Sumenep regency, roughly 35 kilometers north of Buruan Sapudi Island. The ferry was also transporting 180 vehicles, mostly commercial trucks, along with a heavy construction excavator.
By Monday morning, search and rescue teams had pulled 229 survivors from the burning vessel and recovered five bodies of deceased victims. However, officials confirmed that the actual number of people on board far exceeded the count listed on the official ship manifest, leaving the exact number of missing passengers unclear. Rescue teams are currently cross-referencing accounts from survivors and statements from families of potential missing people to pin down an accurate count of unaccounted individuals.
Ahmad Abdul Karim, one of the passengers who escaped the fire, shared his firsthand account of the disaster. He told reporters the fire appeared to originate from a truck parked on the ferry’s lower vehicle deck, before strong winds fanned the flames across the ship at an alarming speed. Karim said that within 30 minutes of the fire being spotted, all passengers and crew were ordered to evacuate to the ferry’s bow to avoid the spreading blaze.
Discrepancies between official passenger manifests and actual on-board counts are a widespread issue in Indonesia’s domestic ferry industry, according to Nanang Sigit, head of the Surabaya Search and Rescue Office. Sigit explained that these gaps are most often caused by unrecorded overcrowding, a common practice that creates major complications for search and rescue teams working to identify missing people after a disaster.
Multiple assets have been deployed to the incident site to support the search effort. A dedicated rescue vessel was dispatched from Surabaya, with additional support from Indonesian Navy ships and several commercial vessels that were passing through the area near the time of the fire. The investigation into the root cause of the blaze is still ongoing, and no official conclusions have been released as of Monday.
Built in Japan in 1992, the Mutiara Sentosa 2 operated in Japanese waters before being sold to an Indonesian ferry operator in 2015. The vessel is rated to carry up to 689 passengers and 49 crew members, along with a maximum cargo of 181 vehicles. The 40-hour Surabaya-Makassar route is a critical transport link for domestic travelers and cargo moving between Java and Sulawesi, two of Indonesia’s most populous major islands.
As the world’s largest archipelagic nation, Indonesia is made up of more than 17,000 separate islands, making ferries the primary mode of inter-island transport for millions of residents. However, ferry disasters are a regular occurrence across the country, with transportation safety experts and officials repeatedly citing weak regulatory enforcement of safety standards as a leading contributing factor to these incidents.
This report was compiled with contributions from Associated Press journalists Niniek Karmini and Edna Tarigan based in Jakarta, Indonesia.