Indonesia has been struck by another deadly maritime disaster, after a passenger ferry traveling from the popular tourist island of Bali to neighboring Lombok caught fire in the early hours of Wednesday, leaving one young woman dead and prompting a large-scale rescue operation that pulled 172 people to safety. This incident marks the second fatal ferry fire in the Southeast Asian archipelago in less than a week.
Muhamad Hariyadi, a search and rescue official based in Lombok, confirmed to Agence France-Presse (AFP) that a navy ship and multiple other civilian vessels responded to the emergency, evacuating all 172 people from the burning vessel. Among those rescued were two Australian tourists, who were among the passengers on the inter-island route popular with both locals and international travelers. The sole fatality was identified as a 19-year-old Indonesian woman, whose body was brought to shore at Lembar port on Lombok’s west coast in a body bag, witnessed by an AFP photographer on the scene.
One 25-year-old survivor, Kiky Okta Pradika, described the chaotic scene to reporters at Lembar after arriving ashore. Pradika said he had managed to grab a life jacket before jumping overboard alongside several other passengers as flames spread across the ferry. He added that passengers waited several hours before the first rescue vessels arrived at the remote location off the coast.
Hariyadi noted that multiple vessels — including a military navy ship and a nearby commercial ferry that diverted to assist — coordinated the evacuation effort in the early morning. By mid-morning, search and rescue crews confirmed that no passengers or crew remained trapped on the burning ferry, with search and rescue boats stationed at the scene and a helicopter conducting aerial surveillance to support the operation. As of the latest update, officials have not released any information about injured or unaccounted-for people beyond the confirmed fatality.
This ferry fire comes just one week after another ferry blaze off the coast of Indonesia’s Java island killed five people. Maritime accidents are a persistent, common issue across Indonesia, a nation made up of more than 17,000 islands where inter-island boat travel is a foundational part of both daily domestic transport and the country’s massive tourism industry. Industry observers and safety officials have long cited chronically lax safety standards for passenger vessels and the archipelago’s unpredictable tropical weather as the two leading causes of repeated maritime disasters.
Just last month, another major incident underscored the risks: a ferry carrying more than 70 passengers sank near Selayar, a small island off the southern coast of Sulawesi. Rescuers recovered four bodies from that incident, but the search operation was called off with 14 people still officially listed as missing.