SIBUYAN ISLAND, Philippines (Reuters) - Divers found bodies in lifevests bobbing in airpockets of a giant sunken ferry in the Philippines on Tuesday, and an official said it would be a miracle if any of the hundreds of missing had survived.
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A relative cries as she posts a photo of her kindred, who was on board the capsized ferry MV Princess of Stars, inside the terminal of Sulpicio Lines in Manila June 24, 2008. (REUTERS/John Javellana) |
The MV Princess of the Stars had over 860 people on board when it ran aground and capsized in huge swells off the cost of Sibuyan island during a typhoon on Saturday.
There are fears that hundreds more bodies may be trapped within the seven-storey vessel after a handful of survivors said many people did not make it off in time.
One spoke of children rolling around on the floor as the ship tilted.
“They may have been caught wherever they were at the particular time that the vessel changed its position,” said Lieutenant-Colonel Edgard Arevalo, a navy spokesman.
He said divers saw up to 15 bodies in one part of the ship. The ghostly white bodies were floating head up. “When they tried to enter the vessel they saw several corpses floating in the airpocket,” Arevalo said.
Three bloated corpses were cut free from a tangle of cables and brought to the surface. One, believed to be a crew member, was still clutching his radio.
“It will be a miracle if we find survivors,” Lieutenant-Commander Inocencio Rosario, who led a team of divers, said.
Retrieval efforts were hampered by a lack of search lights, the ship’s large size and unstable condition.
Officials plan to bore a hole inside the vessel to retrieve more corpses.
Drilling will have to be done cautiously because the ship, which is resting upside down with only the tip of its bow above water, is estimated to have around 100,000 litres of bunker fuel still on board.
A slick of oil had formed around the ship, but local officials said it did not represent a leak.
So far, 48 people have been found alive out of 865 passengers and crew on board and 70 bodies have been counted, the coast guard said.
Decomposing corpses keep washing up on surrounding islands, including 22 on one island, forcing ill-equipped communities to quickly bury them.
The sinking of Princess of the Stars may be the Philippines’ worst maritime disaster since 1987 when the Dona Paz ferry collided with an oil tanker killing more than 4,000 people.
Sulpicio Lines, which owns Princess of the Stars, also owned Dona Paz.
SHIPPING TRAGEDIES
Sulpicio offered to fly one family member per victim to Manila from Cebu, where the ship was meant to dock, to help identify recovered bodies.
In the capital, family members also waited anxiously.
“We want to see our relatives, even if they are dead already,” said Rey Gilbuena, who had 18 kin on board.
Shipping tragedies are common in the Philippines, an archipelago of over 7,000 islands where safety rules are poorly implemented and substandard vessels ply dangerous waters.
Families are irate at Sulpicio for proceeding with a sailing when Typhoon Fengsen, with gusts of up to 195 kph, had already hit the archipelago on Friday.
The government has ordered a review of maritime regulations and suspended Sulpicio’s passenger ferry operations.
The company has been involved in three other major shipping disasters in the past 21 years. It has said Princess of the Stars set sail with the permission of the coast guard and before Fengshen, which was meant to just hit the east of the country, changed direction.
Aside from the ferry disaster, at least 213 people were killed, largely by drowning, in a torrent of floods in the western Visayas region in the centre of the country, the office of civil defense said.
The sixth typhoon to hit the archipelago caused nearly 1 billion pesos ($22.4 million) in damage to infrastructure, and washed away thousands of homes.
The Department of Agriculture said around 3.3 billion pesos worth of crops had been damaged but the destruction would not impact 2008 rice production.
Fengshen, which has weakened to a tropical storm, was expected to bring more rain to already flood-ravaged southern and eastern China as it makes landfall near Shantou in Guangdong province on Wednesday, according to the tropical storm monitoring website Tropical Storm Risk (http://tsr.mssl.ucl.ac.uk).
Authorities in the coastal province of Guangdong have ordered local governments to prepare disaster relief work.
(Additional reporting by Manny Mogato in Cebu and Rosemarie Francisco and Karen Lema in Manila)
Copyright © 2008 Reuters
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