Twenty French pensioners drowned and more than 40 were injured yesterday when a pleasure boat sank on a lake in north-eastern Spain, officials said.
Some of the victims were trapped inside when the electric-powered boat, carrying 141 passengers, went down just 25 metres from the dock as it began a cruise on Lake Banyoles, a popular tourist site in Girona province.
The boat was heavily overloaded, the Interior Minister for the Catalan region, Mr Xavier Pomes, said. The boat, the Anna, had 141 people on board when it broke in two. It was licensed to carry a maximum of 80 people.
Mr Pomes said it sank in 8 metres of water after the captain realised there was a problem and tried to reverse direction moments after the vessel left the shore. The sudden change of direction caused a panic on board the Anna. Dozens of panic-stricken passengers leaped into the cold waters. Some swam to safety but others drowned. Rescue crews rushed to the scene to pick up survivors, and scuba divers scoured the lake. An emergency services spokesman said 20 passengers were confirmed dead, 44 were injured and everyone else on board had been accounted for. The victims all belonged to a French tour group from the port of La Rochelle.
"The cause of the accident could be an overload of the boat or a [mechanical] fault when it was built," the Mayor of Banyoles, Mr Joan Solana said. "We don't really know yet."
Witnesses said the boat started sinking at 10.30 a.m. (Irish time) soon after it left the dock for a planned two-hour tour.
"I got there as fast as I could but there was nothing to be done," Mr Lluis Barba, chairman of the local yacht club, said. "The boat went down like a rock."
The stern of the boat took on water first.
"The problem is that most people were trapped and there were others that didn't know how to swim and drowned," the local mayor told state radio. "But the worst thing was that most people were trapped at the end of the boat and couldn't get out."
Bodies draped with sheets lined the pier at Banyoles. A crane was brought in and preparations were made for lifting the boat from the lake bottom.
Mr Jordi Pujol, President of the Catalonia region, expressed his condolences to the victims' families for "this great tragedy".
"I commit myself and my government to do all we can to find out what happened," he said.
The boat went into operation during the summer and had made regular tours of the lake. Lake Banyoles, 2 km long and up to 700 meters wide at one point, is the largest natural lake in Catalonia and was used for several water events in the 1992 Barcelona Summer Olympics.