NSRI Port Alfred was called to the scene of a motor vehicle accident yesterday afternoon where a vehicle had plunged off the Kariega river bridge.
Police, suspecting there were people trapped in the submerged vehicle or missing in the river, requested NSRI assistance and NSRI dispatched rescue swimmers and sea rescue craft Rescue 11 Alpha which was launched onto the river where NSRI, assisted by local spear fisherman who was in the area conducted a search.
Some of the occupants, a man, two women, a teenage girl and a toddler escaped from the submerged vehicle and were safe but taken to hospital for treatment.
Divers later recovered the bodies of an adult female, 10-year old girl and a female toddler from the wreckage of the motor vehicle.
9 people in this vehicle? Why is there no info on the type of vehicle involved in this accident? What’s the point of playing with words? Let us hope there will be a more detailed follow-up published in SFT soon, if only to stop speculation about the reasons for’a vehicle’ which could easily have been described as ‘a bus’ or ‘people-carrier’ being involved in such a dramatic end to young lives. Clearly it wasn’t a bus or similar & one wonders how so many people could have fitted into anything else unless it was a ‘people-carrier’.
Unfortunately SFT relies on press releases to a large extent and this release was released to the media at large by NSRI late on Sunday night and picked up by SFT at 4:00am Monday morning to be published by our deadline of 7:30. Unfortunately SFT is not equipped nor do we have the financial resources to travel to news hotspots around the country to get first hand information. For more comprehensive coverage published on a major network NEWS24 some 6 hours later than the SFT article, they too don’t offer details of the vehicle. You can read the NEWS24 article on the following link – https://www.news24.com/SouthAfrica/News/3-now-confirmed-drowned-after-car-plunges-into-eastern-cape-river-nsri-20180604