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Divers Find Bodies Floating In Capsized Ferry

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The New York Times

Published: June 25, 2008

MANILA, Philippines - What Rodel Laborte could not forget was the screaming of fellow passengers.

As strong waves and wind tossed the 24,000-ton ferry "like a paper boat," pandemonium broke out, he said. The shrieks got so loud that he could not determine whether the captain had given an order to abandon ship, he said.

"My heart was racing fast," Laborte said. "All I could think about was whether there were enough lifeboats for all of us."

When the ship listed heavily to the left, Laborte said that he decided to jump, along with several others, into the churning water, where they clung to a lifeboat. It took minutes for most of the ferry to disappear beneath the waves, he said.

Laborte, 60, was one of the 62 confirmed survivors of the Princess of the Stars, which was struck by Typhoon Fengshen on Saturday, possibly killing most of the more than 800 passengers and crew who were aboard.

He and 27 others huddled in the lifeboat, which ended up Monday on the shore of Quezon province, miles from the island of Sibuyan, near where the ferry had capsized.

The ferry disaster could turn out to be one of the worst in the Philippines in the past two decades.

On Tuesday, rescue teams from the Philippine coast guard penetrated the overturned ship and found many corpses.

Coast guard divers retrieved only one body from inside. Another body was seen floating outside the ship, said Lt. Col. Edgard Arevalo, a Philippines navy spokesman.

He said that it was too dark inside the ship to determine the number of victims.

"Most of the bodies were floating inside. They were trapped when the seven-story ship suddenly tilted and capsized," he told DZBB radio.

Apart from sinking the ferry, the typhoon also submerged whole towns and communities, knocked down power lines and caused landslides.

The Red Cross said that 177 people died elsewhere in the country, including 106 in Iloilo province. An additional 438 people, excluding those from the ferry, are still missing.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council said 38 of the country's 82 provinces were affected by the typhoon, which packed winds of up to 125 mph.

"We learned from the news that a storm was coming, but we were confident when we left Manila that everything was OK because the weather at the time seemed perfect," Laborte said in an interview Tuesday at Red Cross offices in Manila, where he and 24 other survivors were taken earlier in the day for medical attention and debriefing.

The ferry left Manila on Friday night, bound for Cebu City in the central Philippines.

By noon Saturday, it had run straight into Typhoon Fengshen, which had changed its path, the weather bureau said.

Aside from the Princess of the Stars, more than a dozen vessels, mostly fishing boats, capsized as the typhoon made landfall Saturday morning.

Bodies have been washing ashore on several different islands near Sibuyan. Authorities could not yet determine whether the bodies came from the ferry or other vessels.

"It's a daunting operation," Sen. Richard Gordon, who is also the chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, said Tuesday. Hundreds of Red Cross volunteers across the country have been assisting in the rescue and recovery operations.

Coast guard officials said they were not losing hope of finding survivors inside because part of the ship was protruding from the water.

"Our mission is to search all the cabins, but it is dark inside," coast guard diver Inocencio Rosario told ABS-CBN television.

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