Return to Transcripts main page

CNN Newsroom

Divers Reach Sunken Ferry's Cafeteria; Flight 370 Search; Teen Stowaway with Child Services; Surviving Subzero Temps and No Oxygen; Body of Ukrainian Official Found

Aired April 22, 2014 - 14:00   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

BROOKE BALDWIN, CNN ANCHOR: Wolf Blitzer, thank you so much.

Great to be back here in studio with you. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

Top of the hour, news on the South Korean ferry is far from good. The death toll keeps ticking grimly upward as divers bring more bodies to the surface. Two more crew members now have been arrested. A total of nine are facing charges, including the ferry's captain. And when asked about the ferry's lifeboats, crew members said it was hard to get them as the ship rolled over and began to sink. That's what the crew says.

Today, divers finally reached the ferry's cafeteria. Because the ferry sank in the morning, many of those passengers onboard are believed to have been in that part of the ship. That's where they wanted to get to see if there were any survivors. Authorities are still calling this a search and rescue operation, although I have to point out, no survivors have been pulled from the frigid waters alive since right after the ferry went down last Wednesday. And conditions for divers are worsening by the hour.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARD YOON, RESCUE DIVER (through translator): The conditions are so bad, my heart aches. We're going in thinking there may be survivors. When we have to come back with nothing, we can't even face the families.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: One hundred and twenty-one people are confirmed dead, another 181 are still missing. And most of the bodies recovered, we're now told, were wearing life vests.

Let me bring in CNN's Will Ripley. He's live in Jindo, South Korea.

And now that we know, Will, that these search teams have gotten into the ferry's cafeteria, what is next for them?

WILL RIPLEY, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Well, sadly, Brooke, it's horrible to say, but likely what we expect to happen now in the coming hours is to see more of these ships coming back to shore, bringing with them the people who were in that cafeteria, trapped in the cafeteria as the water was rising. So many of these young students were in there having breakfasts, visiting with their friends, likely looking forward to the class trip that they were sailing out on, when all of a sudden things started to happen. They knew that something was wrong with the ship.

We know that there were students in that cafeteria, Brooke, who were making calls to emergency services before the ship even reported its official distress call.

BALDWIN: We have learned too well that the first emergency call came in actually not from a crew member onboard that ferry, but from a passenger. Do we know who from?

RIPLEY: Isn't that remarkable. Yes, 8:52 a.m., a voice described as a young boy, very shaken up, called and he said, I think there's a problem with the ship. I think we're sinking. That was 8:52. Three minutes before the official mayday came from the ferry. We know that 20 of those calls were made by students on that ship. Many of them frightened, scared about what was going to happen as the ship was going down. And we know that most of the people who made those calls are now still on the list of the missing, which just makes it so much more tragic.

BALDWIN: Will Ripley for us in South Korea. Will, thank you.

And just a quick reminder, at the top of next hour, I'll be talking to a woman with an absolutely stunning story. She's a mother, she's a wife, she was on the Costa Concordia, knows all too well that notion of fighting gravity, fighting rushing water, fighting for her life. She says she thought she was going to die six times. Her stunning story and her fury over what's happened here with this ferry, at the top of the next hour.

Now this.

We are in a critical moment in the search for Flight 370 now. And it may be time to actually go back to the drawing board. A tropical cyclone today forced authorities to suspend air searches over the Indian Ocean. But it's the search under the surface that's really the chief concern right now. Here it is, the U.S. Navy's underwater drone, the Bluefin-21. It is potentially near hours away from wrapping up its search of this suspected crash site. And still, nothing. No trace of the missing jetliner.

And now CNN has just learned some exclusive new information coming out of Australia here as officials are working out what those next steps of this investigation will be. So let me just lay out for you the key focuses of the three key areas. This is what we have just gotten. One, you have the handling of debris, who gets it, where does the debris stay. That's what they're going to be working out. Also, the care of human remains, if and when they are found. And then this one, potentially widening the search area if the Bluefin's final hours come up empty. All of this is according to Martin Dolan (ph), he is the chief commissioner of the Australian Transport Safety Bureau.

So joining me now, Fred Hegg. He is a sonar expert and vice president of engineering at Falmouth Scientific.

And so, Fred, nice to have you on.

And here I just have to ask in these final hours, potentially, of this underwater drone, this Bluefin-21, how much confidence do you have in this piece of technology, in mapping the area? What is next?

FRED HEGG, V.P., ENGINEERING FALMOUTH SCIENTIFIC INC.: Well, the Bluefin-21 is a great, amazing piece of technology. And we just have to remember, there's a lot of other acoustic systems that are in play there trying to make that system work. You have not only the side scan sonar, which we've seen operate and see dramatizations of, but you also have these positioning systems. They almost act like taking the GPS from the surface and projecting that down and using acoustics to get through all those layers and then figuring out where the Bluefin is on the seabed.

And then there's other technologies called a -- basically acoustic modems that allow the operators there to send virtually text messages, get status messages, send texts down to the vehicle and have control and updates from the vehicle. But that -- all of that technology is really used for something where you know -- you have an area where you believe that it's pretty well defined.

BALDWIN: That's the thing. That's the thing, they think they have this -

HEGG: And up until now it's - up -

BALDWIN: They think they have this area. But again, we -- there has been no debris. This is based upon science and triangulation, you know, that they think this is the area, but so far, I mean I've lost track of how many days they've been looking for this plane. I think it's 47 now. You know, they have this Bluefin-21 and you're, you're appropriately so, outlining all these different pieces of technology. Why not use more I guess is my question?

HEGG: Well, there are different -- there are other technologies that can be brought to bear if the search area expands. Some of these are deep towed systems that can see out a much broader range. But it makes the coordination of efforts more difficult if you have many of these systems operating in the same region. You really have to have somebody --

BALDWIN: How do you mean? Why?

HEGG: Because of all the various acoustics -- like I said, all the various acoustics sonar signals that are being put to play for each - in to play for each type of instrument. So the Phoenix -- the people at Phoenix International, they have their own deep sonar systems, but there's also the Deep Submergence Lab in Woods Hole, the Chinese have their own deep towed sonar instruments. And all of these groups would have to coordinate and stay far enough apart from each other to operate their systems without interfering with the other group.

But also then you have this tremendous amount of data that's going to be collected. And there's no real high-speed Internet on these ships to coordinate it. It's much different than the aircraft search, where all the aircrafts come in every day and they can download their data, exchange it over the Internet. When it comes to these ships gathering hundreds of megabytes of data an hour, somewhere that has to get coordinated where it can be brought to a central location and have somebody handle these efforts. So the more people you get involved, although there's plenty of equipment out there, it just becomes a more challenging scenario.

BALDWIN: Yes. Sounds like the challenges continue to mount. But at least there are plans, and they're asking the questions, and again, the possibility of widening the search really seems to be something they're exploring. You know, how to deploy resources, including other search assets, the ones you just outlined.

Fred Hegg, thank you so much. Of course we'll be watching to see what they decide as we're getting this new information on this hunt for this 777. Appreciate you.

Coming up, the questions keep coming. How in the world did a teenager manage to hop an airport fence, climb up inside this wheel well of an airplane and survive a five hour flight to Hawaii. Remember, no oxygen in there. We'll discuss that.

Also ahead, Vice President Biden is in Ukraine today, as pro-Russian forces are defying any peace talks. What is next? We will take you there live.

And later, the immense avalanche that killed 13 Sherpa's, those guides from the Himalayas, helping people summit this beautiful mountain. After their deaths now new questions, big questions about safety on that mountain. The climbing season. The best time to summit Everest weeks away. Will it go on? Stay with me. You're watching special coverage here on CNN.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Welcome back. I'm Brooke Baldwin.

You know that teenage stowaway who survived that overseas flight from California to Hawaii, really defied death. But it turns out the odds were not as severely stacked against him as you might have thought. Here's the deal. The FAA Civil Aerospace Medical Institute knows of 105 cases of people trying to fly inside wheel wells goes all the way back to 1947. Of that number, 25 survived. And now the FBI says this 16-year-old boy is among them. He is with child welfare services now in Hawaii. Officials have told his family in Santa Clara, California, that he is safe. CNN's Dan Simon joins me from Santa Clara.

And, Dan, is he going to face charges?

DAN SIMON, CNN CORRESPONDENT: We don't think so, Brooke. You know, first of all, as you said, we're in the neighborhood where we believe this young man lives with his family. As you said, he's in protective - you know, in the custody of child protective services in Maui. At some point they'll make arrangements to bring him to Santa Clara.

In the meantime, Brooke, we're getting some new details in terms of the timeline of all this. We're told by federal officials that the teenager -- and we're now told he's 15, by the way -- that he jumped the fence at the San Jose Airport at approximately 1:00 a.m. Sunday morning. The plane took off for Maui at approximately 8:00 in the morning. So for a full seven hours, he's somewhere on the tarmac. Is he in the wheel well the entire time? That we don't know.

Now, in terms of possible charges, there's a whole laundry list of things that he could have faced. We're talking about trespassing. If he was charged as an adult, you could receive up to five years in prison for being a stowaway. But because he's a minor, and because authorities have discretion in dealing with minors, they have made the decision not to charge him because apparently he seemed - you know, he didn't have a motive to cause any ill intent here, Brooke. So that's what we're being told at this point.

BALDWIN: Huh. OK, so, Dan, here's the obvious question. I know you're asking this as well. But if we're now hearing that this 15-year-old could have been somewhere - you know, whether it's the tarmac or up in that wheel well for seven hours, he hops a fence. My question is, where were surveillance cameras? Where was security? How did he pull this off?

SIMON: You know, that's the big question. We know that a surveillance camera did capture him hopping the fence, again, at 1:00 in the morning. We know there was a surveillance camera in Maui when he came off the airplane. So I think that that's really the question, Brooke, you really hit it, authorities are really going to have to be looking at this very closely. Are they going to have to bolster the perimeter, the fence line perimeter, not only at the San Jose Airport but at airports across the country?

Where he apparently jumped the fence it's a bit sort of flimsy, if you will. It apparently wasn't all that difficult to do so. So if there's a problem in San Jose, chances are there's a problem at other airports across the country and that's something that both the FBI and the TSA are going to have to look at very, very closely.

BALDWIN: Yes, they will. Dan Simon, thank you so much, in Santa Clara for us.

And, you know, we talk so much about a wheel well. You know what a wheel well looks like? We'll show you next hour. We will show you exactly how cramped a ride in a wheel well of a 767 can be. I mean look at this for yourself.

Plus, the FBI told our Hawaii TV affiliate KGMB, the stowaway was just wearing jeans, sneakers, a hoodie, carrying a comb. That was it. Yet he withstood, according to experts, temperatures as cold as 80 degrees below zero and no oxygen, with altitudes as high as 38,000 feet. Somehow this 15-year-old walked out of this wheel well on his own and officials say yes it was captured on airport surveillance video.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

MARVIN MONIZ, MANAGER, KAHULUI AIRPORT: He was weak. He hung from the wheel well. And then he fell to the ground and regained some strength and stood up and started walking to the front of the aircraft.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

BALDWIN: Senior medical correspondent, Elizabeth Cohen.

And when I hear - I mean he fell out of the wheel well. That tells me he obviously wasn't doing well after multiple hours on this plane. Eighty degrees below zero. I don't care how old you are, how do you survive that?

ELIZABETH COHEN, CNN SENIOR MEDICAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, there is a good chance that he might have been actually a little bit warmer because that was the ambient air temperature. But, remember, he was in the plane. I mean he was in the wheel well, but he was in the plane. The plane is going to be a bit warmer. Your, you know, near all the -

BALDWIN: Body heat.

COHEN: All the machinery, the body, you know, all of that.

BALDWIN: OK.

COHEN: So you're in this enclosed space. So it is possible that it was warmer than that. But, you know, when you hear that, you think, oh, to be 16 again, right? That you can survive something like this.

You know, what happens is that when your - when you aren't getting enough oxygen, your metabolic processes slow down. And - I mean, I'm sorry, when you're in that cold temperature, your metabolic processes slow down. So you actually need less oxygen. So that may have really helped him to be that cold.

Now then you wonder, well, gee, then how did he regain consciousness, because he probably lost consciousness within a minute of being oxygen deprived. And so maybe it was, you know, the decent is gradual and slow, so maybe he gradually got some more oxygen in him. He sat on the tarmac for about an hour before he came out. So maybe that was just enough time to get the oxygen, you know, back in him and he was able to walk. But it really is -- I mean, stunning is really the only word to use.

BALDWIN: Uh-huh. It's short-term, but I'm also wondering long-term here as well. We're going to talk to a doctor next hour who knows a lot about this kind of altitude and issues within the body. But, for now, thank you so much. It is stunning indeed.

Coming up, the families of those lost in the South Korean ferry disaster directing their anger, their frustration and grief at the captain and the crew of that ship. Coming up, I'll talk to a retired Coast Guard officer about the lessons that he says can be learned from a tragedy like this and what the captain of a ship really should do when it goes down.

Also ahead, Vice President Joe Biden in Ukraine today with some tough talk for Russia. We will take you live to Ukraine coming up.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

ANNOUNCER: This is CNN breaking news.

BALDWIN: All right, breaking news from Ukraine now. We are getting some new information on some severely tortured bodies found in Slavyansk. Our Arwa Damon is in Donetsk in eastern Ukraine.

Arwa, what are you learning?

ARWA DAMON, CNN SENIOR INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Well, these are two bodies that were fished out of the river close to Slavyansk. Both seemingly bearing signs of torture. This happening over the weekend. One of those bodies now has been identified as being that of a local government official from a town not too far away from Slavyansk itself. His family identifying the body at the morgue earlier today.

The second body that was found, as of yet, still remains unidentified. These are, of course, incredibly disturbing developments as the conflict here continue to unravel, rather than de-escalate as many would have hoped after the Geneva agreement. In fact, the country's acting president saying that he's going to re-launch anti-terrorism operations, saying that the Geneva agreement is off the table.

This is because, as he says, an attack that took place yesterday in the city of Kamatusk (ph) that saw pro-Russian protesters, armed, take over one of the police buildings there and also take the police chief into their custody. The situation here, Brooke, again, as we've been saying, seeming to be unraveling rather than coming more under control, more to a resolution.

BALDWIN: Arwa, just so I'm crystal clear, because we've been on the ground there reporting on what's been happening with Ukraine and Russia for quite some time. We've reported on threats. We've reported on, you know, troops in and around the border and within Ukraine. But in terms of violence, this is the first I'm hearing of tangible signs with these severely tortured bodies, is that correct?

DAMON: Well, you do have that instance that took place with these two tortured bodies. And in listening to the reports that were coming out about them, it is chillingly reminiscent of the violence that we saw taking place in Iraq where unidentified mutilated bodies were regularly being pulled out of the Tigris River. But you also have the incident that took place a few nights ago where a pro-Russian checkpoint was attacked. Three pro-Russian protesters that were manning that checkpoint were killed. Their funerals took place earlier today.

There have been a few instances of clashes, people being killed. But it most certainly seems, when you look at all of this, with now this local politician's body being identified, with the -- one of the police chiefs being taken into custody, the situation here does seem to be unraveling. And despite all of the efforts, at least on the bigger political level to try to bring about some sort of (INAUDIBLE) ground, Brooke, we're really not seeing any of that materialize into anything concrete.

BALDWIN: Unraveling, the appropriate word here, it sounds like in Ukraine. Arwa Damon live in Donetsk. Arwa, thank you.

And the adage here -- other news. The adage says the captain should go down with the ship. But what happens when he does not? The captain of the Costa Concordia faced a public shaming. You'll remember this.

Also ahead, what does the law say about this. When is it fair for a captain to abandon ship, even when lives are at stake? It's a questions a lot of people are asking after this South Korean ferry disaster. CNN, back after this.

(COMMERCIAL BREAK)

BALDWIN: Day seven now in the search for people onboard that capsized ferry in the frigid waters of the Yellow Sea. Major developments this afternoon here. South Korean rescue divers have finally made it into the ship's cafeteria. And that was really important because that's where they think many of those passengers, many of those young high school students were eating breakfast when that ferry began taking on all that water. They are also focusing on the third and fourth floors of the ferry, where there are passenger cabins. Might there be survivors in there. Two buoys mark the spot where the ship sank and dozens of rescue vessels are now surrounding that site here. One hundred and twenty-one people now confirmed dead, still 181 missing. And officials say most of the bodies recovered were wearing life vests.

Also new today, the criminal investigation is growing. There are now more arrests to report. A total of nine crew members have been detained. Four of them appearing in court today with - you can see here -- heads bowed, faces covered, hats on. They're accused of causing deaths due to abandonment.