One person died and three are still missing after a cabin cruiser boat sank in the San Francisco Bay near Alcatraz Island on July 14 at around 3:30 p.m. PT, authorities said.
According to authorities, 20 people were involved in the incident, with 17 of them having been rescued from the water, including the one who later died. Three of them were transported to a local hospital and have been released.
It appears “that the vessel took a wave … and lost a little bit of stability and then it quickly rolled over,” U.S. Coast Guard Captain Jarod Toczko said in an update Wednesday afternoon. “The cause of that, though, at this point in time, I don’t know.”
There was a report that a fire caused the incident, but Toczko said there’s no evidence to back that up.
A dog aboard the boat also died, and the number of missing people was updated from two to three after authorities spoke to witnesses.
San Francisco Fire Chief Dean Crispen said that when crew arrived, they found a three-deck pontoon vessel almost fully underwater with the motor still running and leaking fuel.
Authorities identified the boat as a 49-foot vessel named “Volare,” documented out of Stockton, California. They added that 911 callers misinterpreted the boat’s steam as smoke.
Multiple agencies assisted in the initial rescue efforts, including the San Francisco Police Department, San Francisco Fire Department, U.S. Coast Guard, Oakland Police Department, Tiburon Fire Department, and Southern Marin Fire Protection District, in addition to commercial and recreational vessels around the area.
The San Francisco Fire Department and U.S. Coast Guard continued search efforts until sunset on Wednesday, but authorities did not announce any progress in the search for the three missing people.
“We have completely saturated the search area. We were there, as I said, immediately upon notification of the distress,” Toczko said. “Despite that extensive effort, we have been unsuccessful in locating any survivors within the search area.”
Toczko said that his crews have been out there for 23 consecutive hours and have cumulatively covered 950 nautical miles, which equals almost 1,100 miles. He added that they’ve searched more than 1,700 miles of trackline and used four aircraft.
“There is a high possibility that [the three missing] individuals could have been trapped inside the vessel,” he said. “We do know that individuals were in the main deck, and potentially below deck … however, that is going to come out in the investigation stage of this.”
