Search for 171 ferry victims halted

A rescued survivor cries as he is comforted by a relative at a port in Cebu city. (Centre) A woman carrying her son walks towards a hospital after they were rescued. Survivors look for their missing relatives from lists of survivors after the ferry disaster in Talisay.

AFP/Manila

Stormy weather forced Philippine rescuers to suspend a search yesterday for 171 people missing after a crowded ferry collided with a cargo ship and quickly sank, with 31 others confirmed dead.

The St Thomas Aquinas ferry was carrying 831 passengers and crew when the vessels smashed into each other late on Friday night in a dangerous choke point near the port of Cebu, the Philippines’ second-biggest city, authorities said.

Coastguard and military vessels, as well as local fishermen in their own small boats, frantically worked through the night and yesterday morning to haul 629 people out of the water alive.

But when bad weather whipped up the ocean mid-afternoon yesterday, authorities suspended the search with 171 people still unaccounted for.

“It rained hard... with strong winds and rough seas,” navy spokesman lieutenant commander Gregory Fabic said.

He added powerful currents had earlier prevented divers from assessing all of the sunken ferry to determine how many people had died and were trapped inside.

Fabic said rescuers had not given up hope that there were other survivors who were still drifting at sea.

However, Rear Admiral Luis Tuason, vice commandant of the coastguard, said the death toll would almost certainly rise from the 31 bodies that had already been retrieved.

“Because of the speed by which it went down, there is a big chance that there are people trapped inside,” he said, adding the ferry sank within 10 minutes of the collision.

One survivor, Lolita Gonzaga, 57, recalled the terror of falling from the top deck of the ship to the bottom level when the collision occurred, then the horror of escaping the black waters with her 62-year-old husband.

“When we were rescued we had to share the rubber boat with a dead woman. She was just lying there,” Gonzaga said from a hospital bed in Cebu where she was nursing spinal injuries.

“We were transferred to the other ship that hit us, but I could not go up the stairs because it was full of dead people. “They were left hanging there. We thought we were going to die. I just held hands with my husband and prayed to God to save us.”

Fisherman Mario Chavez said he was one of the first people to reach passengers after the ferry sank in calm waters 2-3kms from shore. “I plucked out 10 people from the sea. It was pitch black and I only had a small flashlight. They were bobbing in the water and screaming for help,” he said.

“They told me there were many people still aboard when the ferry sank... there were screams, but I could not get to all of them.”

The cargo ship, Sulpicio Express 7, which had 36 crew members on board, did not sink. Television footage showed its steel bow had caved in on impact but it sailed safely to dock.

Tuason said it appeared one of the vessels had violated rules on which lanes they should use when travelling in and out of the port, without specifying which one.

The strait leading into the Cebu port is a well-known danger zone, said the enforcement office chief of the government’s Maritime Industry Authority, Arnie Santiago. “It is a narrow passage, many ships have had minor accidents there in the past. But nothing this major,” Santiago said. “There is a blind spot there and each ship passing through needs to give way in a portion of that narrow strip.”

Industry authority head Maximo Mejia later told reporters that both vessels had previously passed safety inspections and were sea worthy, indicating human error was to blame. The captain of the ferry survived, coastguard authorities said.

Disaster fifth tragedy for shipping firm

A company whose cargo ship was involved in the Philippines’ latest ferry disaster confirmed yesterday its vessels were involved in four other tragedies that claimed more than 5,000 lives.

The first of those accidents occurred in 1987 when the firm’s Dona Paz ferry collided with an oil tanker, leaving more than 4,300 dead in the world’s worst peacetime maritime disaster.

Philippine Span Asia Carrier Corporation chief executive and president Jordan Go said his family’s company owned the Dona Paz as well as the ships involved in the four other accidents.

But he insisted the company’s track record had nothing to do with the accident on Friday night, when his firm’s cargo vessel collided with a ferry that quickly sank, leaving 31 people dead and 171 missing.

“It’s immaterial to what happened right now,” Go said when asked to comment about the firm’s history of accidents.

In Friday’s incident, the Sulpicio Express 7 cargo ship was trying to leave the central city of Cebu’s port via a narrow channel while the St Thomas Aquinas ferry was trying to sail in the opposite direction, authorities said.

After the vessels collided, the ferry sank within 10 minutes while the cargo vessel was able to reach dock with its steel bow crushed in.

Maximo Mejia, head of government regulatory body the Maritime Industry Authority, said both vessels had previously passed safety inspections and were seaworthy.

“There is no reason to believe that the incident has anything to do with questions of stability or structural integrity of the ships,” Mejia told reporters, indicating human error may be to blame.

Mejia noted that officials of both firms had been “fully co-operative”, with Philippine Span Asia also helping out in the search.

Nonetheless, Mejia said he had temporarily suspended the fleets of Philippine Span Asia as well as that of 2Go Group, which owned the sunken ferry, pending investigations.

Philippine Span Asia was previously named Sulpicio Lines Inc.

In October 1988, Sulpicio’s Dona Marilyn ferry sank off Leyte island amid a typhoon, killing more than 250 people.

In 1988, another 150 were killed when the firm’s Princess of the Orient sank in a port near Manila in similarly bad weather.

It also owned the MV Princess of the Stars, which set sail during a storm in 2008 and sank. Only about 50 of the 850 people on board survived.

Arnie Santiago, head of the maritime authority’s enforcement division, said Sulpicio Lines was suspended after the 2008 disaster, then re-emerged with its new name of Philippine Span Asia.

Go said changing the company name in 2009 was unrelated to the previous accidents, but did not explain what the reasons were.

Go is the grandson of Sulpicio Go, a Chinese Filipino businessman who founded the firm in 1973.