Taipei – Plane crash – February 4, 2015

TAIPEI (Taiwan News) – At least 25 people were reported dead and 18 were missing after a TransAsia Airways flight from Taipei to Kinmen hit an elevated road and then plunged into the Keelung River in Taipei Wednesday.The plane, an ATR-72-600 barely one year old, took off from Taipei Songshan Airport at 10:53 a.m. with 53 passengers and five crew members on board but crashed just ten minutes later. Passengers included two children and two groups totaling 31 Chinese tourists on their way home to Xiamen in Fujian Province.

Rescue efforts to find survivors in the wreckage on the river in Taipei’s Nangang District continued into the evening. Frogmen dived into the water to seek survivors, while an unknown number of people were still believed to be trapped inside the fuselage. The black boxes were recovered from the tail of the plane around 4 p.m., reports said.

The injured people rescued from the wreckage were divided over eight hospitals. The death toll climbed gradually over the afternoon from nine to 25 in the evening. A total of 15 survivors, including three Chinese citizens, were being treated for injuries and 18 were still missing around 9:30 p.m., reports said.

Cable stations played footage of the plane flying low over the elevated highway, its right wing up in the air and its left wing smashing into the road and hitting a taxi. The driver and a female passenger were taken to hospital, but they were not severely injured, reports said. The road was closed off to all traffic for a while.

Work to pull the fuselage out of the water started just before 9 p.m. in the hope of finding those still unaccounted for. As evening fell, the darkness and falling temperatures hampered the rescue effort, reports said. Some structures were torn down to allow heavier equipment to move closer to the site. When the fuselage had been lying in the water, only two divers at a time could reportedly venture inside, and their expectations about the chance of finding people alive were reportedly grim.

During the afternoon, an injured person was reportedly found at the Dajia Riverside Park, while six of those rescued were picked out of the river downstream from the site of the accident. A three-year-old boy had been found alive, but the other infant on the flight was still missing. Water department employees set up a barrier to catch any more passengers floating away, reports said.

The plane sat on the river with its nose stuck in the mud, about 69 meters from the nearest bank, close to Jingmao Second Road in Nangang and the Nanyang Bridge in Xizhi, New Taipei City. Rescue workers aided by the military set up a floating bridge from the river bank to the wreckage and a work platform. A total of 1,000 police, military and fire service staff were involved in the operation to find survivors.

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