At least 15 people have died and 27 are unaccounted for after a passenger ferry capsized on Lake Kariba in Zimbabwe. The vessel was traveling from the lakeside town of Kariba to islands and fishing camps when it was hit by large waves.
According to the Zimbabwe Civil Protection Unit (CPU), the ferry had a capacity of 90 passengers but was carrying 114 adults, five crew members, and an unrecorded number of children, based on ticket sales data.
A crew member told the national broadcaster ZBC that 153 people were aboard when the ferry capsized on Tuesday after encountering heavy swells. Another passenger recounted that water began flooding the boat roughly 30 minutes after it had left shore.
A team of specialized divers has been dispatched to the area, while search-and-rescue operations continued on Wednesday. Footage shared by ZBC showed people perched on the overturned hull as at least four motorboats rushed to the scene and a helicopter hovered overhead.
Maxwell Kanhema Page, who shared the initial video, wrote on his Facebook page that the lake surface was “angry” at the time. “Minutes later, I received over 200 calls about the ferry sinking. A sad day,” he said.
Lake Kariba is the largest man-made lake in the world by volume, stretching about 150 miles along Zimbabwe’s northern border with Zambia. It was created in the 1950s under British colonial rule when the Zambezi River was dammed, displacing roughly 57,000 people. The Kariba Dam supplies at least a third of the electricity needs for both countries.
Boat capsizes on the lake are not uncommon. In 2014, 26 people, including 24 children, drowned on the Zambian side when their boat capsized en route to an Independence Day celebration. On the Zimbabwean side, five people drowned in a 2021 accident, and three are believed to have died in a boat capsize in October 2023. A month earlier, a police boat also capsized on Lake Kariba without any fatalities.
