1,300 feared dead in wake of typhoon in the Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 26, 2008

MANILA: The death toll from Typhoon Fengshen, the storm that battered the Philippines last week, could go as high as 1,300 if the missing passengers and crew of a capsized ferry are included, officials said Thursday.

Rescue divers continued to search the overturned ferry Thursday but failed to retrieve any new survivors, raising the possibility that as many as 809 of the 865 passengers and crew had perished in the disaster.

Since the ship capsized Saturday near Sibuyan Island, only 56 survivors have been found. The Philippine Coast Guard said 124 bodies had either washed ashore on nearby islands or had been found floating in the sea.

Adding to the uncertainty of the situation was the way in which some of the recovered bodies were being handled. On some of the islands where bodies had washed up, television footage showed corpses being dumped from a truck into mass graves. Many of the bodies had not been examined by forensic experts for possible identification.

Officials on Thursday raised the overall death toll from the storm to 498, excluding those still missing.

Divers have had difficulty pulling corpses from inside the ship because of narrow passageways that are blocked by debris. Retrieval efforts, officials said, could last a month.

As hopes dimmed of finding more survivors, friends and relatives were becoming more desperate. At the offices of Sulpicio Lines, the company that owns the ferry, relatives have been pressing officials for answers.

During a Catholic Mass held on a tugboat near the wreckage of the ferry, emotions ran high, with relatives weeping and throwing flowers into the sea. Mark Anthony Barrozo, whose pregnant girlfriend was among those believed dead, exclaimed “forgive me” and then broke down, according to Reuters.

The National Disaster Coordinating Council said the typhoon affected more than 2.4 million Filipinos in 42 of the country’s 81 provinces. It estimated damage to property at more than 5.5 billion pesos, or about $125 million.

The coast guard’s Board of Marine Inquiry has initiated an investigation into the ferry disaster.

At a hearing Wednesday, lawyers for Sulpicio Lines stopped short of blaming the coast guard for the tragedy. Coast guard officials, on the other hand, insisted it had been the company’s fault.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo said Wednesday that Sulpicio Lines should be held accountable for the tragedy. The hearings are scheduled to resume Friday.

Grim scene greets rescue divers in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
Published: June 24, 2008

MANILA: What Rodel Laborte could not forget was the screaming of his fellow passengers. As the strong waves and wind tossed around the 24,000-ton ferry - “like a paper boat,” he said - pandemonium broke out. The shrieks got so loud, he said, he could not determine if the captain gave an order to abandon the ship.

“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 tilted heavily to the left, Laborte decided to jump, along with several others, into the churning water, where they clung to a lifeboat. It took only minutes for much of the ferry to disappear, he said.

Laborte, 60, was one of the 62 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 on board. 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 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 managed to penetrate the overturned ship and found many decomposing corpses floating inside.

Coast guard divers managed to retrieve only one body from inside while another body was seen floating outside the ship, according to a Philippines Navy spokesman, Lieutenant Colonel Edgard Arevalo.

Arevalo said 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 storm 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. Another 438, not including those from the ferry, were still missing.

The government was working intensively to mount recovery operations, which have been hampered by the rough seas and the sheer amount of damage the typhoon wrought in the central and northern Philippines.

According to the National Disaster Coordinating Council, 38 of the country’s 82 provinces were affected by the typhoon, which packed winds of up to 200 kilometers an hour, or 125 miles an hour.

“We learned from the news that a storm was coming, but we were confident when we left Manila that everything was O.K. because the weather at the time seemed perfect,” Laborte said in an interview Tuesday at the Red Cross offices in Manila, where he and 24 other survivors were brought early Tuesday for more medical attention and debriefing.

The ferry left Manila on Friday evening, bound for Cebu City, in the central Philippines, and by noon Saturday had run straight into the path of Fengshen, which had changed its path, according to the weather bureau.

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

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

“It’s a daunting operation,” Senator Richard Gordon, who is also the chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, said in an interview Tuesday. Hundreds of Red Cross volunteers across the country have been assisting in the rescue and recovery operations, complimenting the government’s effort.

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

“Our mission is to search all the cabins, but it is dark inside,” one of the coast guard divers, Inocencio Rosario, told ABS-CBN television.

Rosario said he doubted any survivors were left inside the ship, but he added, “Miracles can happen.”

Hopes fading for Philippine ferry survivors

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times

MANILA: Hopes faded Monday that more survivors would be found in what could be one of the worst Philippine sea disasters as rescuers failed to find signs of life inside a capsized ferry that had held more than 800 passengers and crew members when Typhoon Fengshen struck Saturday.

Rescue officials said only 38 people had been rescued, including 28 passengers and crew members who came ashore Monday after drifting at sea since Saturday. A total of 13 bodies believed to be from the ferry Princess of the Stars have been recovered, including 9 that washed ashore Monday.

The known dead from the ferry brought the death toll from the typhoon to at least 176, the Philippine National Red Cross said. Fengshen, packing winds of up to 195 kilometers per hour, or 120 miles per hour, struck the central and northern Philippines on Saturday, knocking down power lines, causing landslides, flooding rivers, and inundating entire communities.

Divers who beat against the hull of ferry Monday in search of survivors heard nothing that indicated life.

‘‘We just approached the hull of the ship, we got near and then banged, knocked in order for us to give a sign if ever there are still people inside,’’ Lieutenant Colonel Edgard Arevalo of the coast guard said Monday. ‘‘Unfortunately there was no response.’’

The Philippine government has approached other countries, particularly the United States, for help in the recovery operations. A U.S. Navy ship from Okinawa, Japan, was expected to arrive early Tuesday near Sibuyan Island south of Manila, where the ferry sank, said Jesus Dureza, press secretary of President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo.

Officials said helicopters on the U.S. ship could help survey the general area for survivors.

Eleandro Madrona, a congressman of Romblon Province, where the ferry sank, flew over the area Monday afternoon, but reported seeing only a tugboat near the ship’s wreckage.

‘‘I was thinking, where could these 700 people be?’’ Madrona said, according to The Associated Press.

Elsewhere, officials tried to assess the losses from the typhoon.

Iloilo, a central Philippine province, was the worst hit, with fatalities approaching 100 as of Monday, officials said. It was too early to determine damage to agriculture and infrastructure, but officials said it could run up to millions of dollars.

Another concern was the welfare of the nearly 70,000 people throughout the country who were displaced by the typhoon and are now living in evacuation centers. On Sunday, Arroyo ordered all government agencies to help in the relief operations, while private companies have begun campaigns to collect donations of food, clothing and bottled water.

The president also ordered tighter maritime regulations. ‘‘Pending a review of Philippine Coast Guard protocols, no vessel sails if it would pass a possible typhoon path,’’ Arroyo, who is on a visit in the United States, said in a video conference with her advisers on Monday.

The government has suspended the operation of all vessels of Sulpicio Lines, which owns the 24-ton ferry, which was certified to carry 1,992 people.

Distraught relatives of the ferry passengers have trooped to the Manila office of Sulpicio Lines since Sunday, many of them blaming the company for the disaster. An advocacy group for crime victims, Volunteers Against Crime and Corruption, announced Monday that it was filing a class action suit against the company.

Officials of Sulpicio Lines, however, said that they had tried to set in motion a rescue operation as soon as they learned that the ship had encountered problems. But ‘‘severe weather condition delayed the rescue efforts both from the sea and on air,’’ Carlos Go, the Sulpicio chief executive, said in a statement Monday.

‘‘Our company also assures the families of all unfortunate passengers who perished in this incident that they will be properly compensated,‘‘ Go said.

Coast guard officials told reporters Monday that they had cleared the ferry to leave Manila for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, on Friday night because the initial forecast for Fengshen showed that the storm would only hit the eastern part of the country, away from the ferry’s route.

But according to the government weather bureau, the typhoon changed direction Saturday, moving toward the center of the country, running right into the ferry’s path.

Coast guard officials said they had advised the ferry to seek shelter, but that the boat’s engine had failed after the ship was battered by strong winds and waves, thus leaving it even more vulnerable to the intensifying storm.

In a television interview, Senator Richard Gordon, who is also the chairman of the Philippine National Red Cross, quoted a survivor as he described what happened next. According to the survivor, ‘‘It was high noon but it was so dark, and there was too much rain and the waves were just too much for the ship,’’ Gordon quoted the survivor as having said.

Sulpicio Lines is one of the largest Philippine shipping companies, with 22 ships, both freight and passenger, plying the waters of the Philippine archipelago.

Its ships and ferries have figured in many of the worst maritime disasters in the Philippines. In December 1987, an overloaded Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker off Mindoro Island, killing 4,386 people.

A year later, in October 1988, another Sulpicio Lines ship, Doña Marilyn, sank near Leyte Province, killing 300 passengers and crew. In 1998, 200 died when the Princess of the Orient, also a Sulpicio liner, capsized near Manila during a storm.

Hundreds feared dead in Philippines storm

By Carlos Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 23, 2008

MANILA: The death toll from the powerful typhoon that killed more than 100 people in the Philippines last weekend could rise sharply after a ferry carrying more than 700 passengers and crew members capsized in the central part of the island chain , officials said.

The Red Cross reported that at least 137 people had been killed in the hurricane, not including those confirmed dead after the ferry sinking. Glenn Rabonza, executive director of the National Disaster Coordinating Council, said casualty figures were difficult to confirm because of extremely bad weather that was hampering search and recovery operations.

On Sunday, the coast guard said it had reached the spot near the island of Sibuyan where the passenger ferry, the Princess of the Stars, had capsized a day earlier.

Officials said they found no survivors apart from four passengers rescued earlier in the day.

Officials said the bodies of four passengers had also been recovered earlier in the day.

Nanette Tansingco, mayor of San Fernando, Sibuyan’s largest town, told DZMM radio on Sunday that witnesses had described “the boat upside down with a big hole in the hull.”

She said island villagers had reported seeing slippers and other belongings washing ashore, and other witnesses offered similar accounts.

One of the survivors, Jesus Gica, told a radio station that he saw passengers losing consciousness and children unable to wear their life vests. “Many of us jumped from the ship,” he said. “The waves were big.”

He also said elderly people, unable to escape, had been trapped underneath the sunken ferry.

Dozens of relatives of the passengers went to the ferry company’s office in Manila, demanding to know what happened to their loved ones.

“I’m very worried,” Felino Farionin told The Associated Press. “I need to know what happened to my family.” He said his wife, son and in-laws were on the ferry.

According to the government, the ferry was carrying 702 passengers, 45 of them children and infants, and 121 crew members.

The typhoon, Fengshen, made landfall on Saturday and battered several provinces. Its wind and rain knocked down power lines in the capital and elsewhere, caused landslides and capsized small boats.

Fengshen, its winds at more than 90 miles per hour, caused more destruction in the northern Philippines but was headed out of the country on Sunday afternoon, weather officials said.

The bad weather hampered efforts to locate the Princess of the Stars and its passengers, coast guard officials said.

“They haven’t seen anyone,” Lieutenant Senior Grade Arman Balilo, a spokesman for the coast guard, told The Associated Press. “They’re scouring the area. They’re studying the direction of the waves to determine where survivors may have drifted.”

Officials were checking reports that some people reached a nearby island and that a raft was spotted off another, said a coast guard spokesman, Commander Antonio Cuasito, The Associated Press reported. “We can only pray that there are many survivors so we can reduce the number of casualties,” he said.

President Gloria Macapagal Arroyo, who is in the United States for a state visit, scolded coast guard officials during a teleconference on Sunday for allowing the ferry to sail despite warnings about the typhoon. She ordered government agencies to coordinate rescue and relief efforts.

The coast guard said the Princess of the Stars was allowed to leave Manila on Friday evening for Cebu, a city in the central Philippines, because the storm had not yet made landfall.

Coast guard officials said the ferry should have been big enough to sail and that a warning issued earlier on Saturday barred only small boats from traveling.

In Iloilo Province, in the central Philippines, the governor, Neil Tupaz, reported that 59 people had died and that more than two dozen others were missing. “Iloilo is like an ocean,” Tupaz said in a radio interview.

Officials said tens of thousands of displaced residents were moved to evacuation centers. Flights were canceled and Monday classes suspended.

Each year, about 20 typhoons slam into the Philippines, an archipelago bordering the Pacitic in the path of the storm systems.

Militants free Philippine TV reporter and 2 others

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 18, 2008

MANILA: Abu Sayyaf militants have released members of a news team they abducted in the southern Philippines last week, among them one of the country’s best-known television journalists, officials said Wednesday.

The police said no ransom had been paid for the release Tuesday night of Ces Drilon, her cameraman and a guide. Drilon’s driver was released on June 12 after local officials paid the kidnappers 2 million pesos, or about $45,000, which officials refused to call a ransom.

Drilon and her crew were abducted June 8 on their way to interview members of Abu Sayyaf. In a news briefing Wednesday, Drilon said that someone had betrayed her group.

“There was betrayal involved, which was why we were kidnapped,” she said without elaborating.

ABS-CBN, the country’s largest network, where Drilon works as a senior reporter, had repeatedly said that it would not pay a ransom. The militants had demanded a payment of 15 million pesos by noon Tuesday.

Officials said the kidnappers had relented only when told that the network was adamant about its no-ransom policy and that, in lieu of a ransom, the kidnappers could get “a livelihood package.”

They did not explain what this might entail, but officials had said that the lagging economy in the Muslim areas of the south was a factor in the rise in kidnappings there. Alvarez Ishaji, the mayor of Indanan, said after the release that the package might involve promoting jobs in the region.

Avelino Razon Jr., the chief of the Philippine National Police, said Wednesday that the release mainly had been the result of negotiations between the kidnappers and officials of Sulu, an island province in the troubled south where Abu Sayyaf is active.

The police also credited a senator, Loren Legarda, a former colleague of Drilon’s at ABS-CBN, for the successful negotiations.

“We were treated well, in a perverse kind of way,” said Drilon, whose face bore marks of mosquito bites after spending nine days in the jungles of Jolo. But she said the kidnappers, at one point, had threatened to cut off her driver’s head.

Abu Sayyaf, a group mainly known for its banditry in the south, has been blamed for several of the more serious terrorist attacks in the Philippines in recent years. They have kidnapped, and sometimes decapitated, their victims, including several foreigners.

Television news crew believed kidnapped in Philippines

By Carlos H. Conde
International Herald Tribune
The New York Times
Published: June 10, 2008

MANILA: A television news team from the Philippines’s largest network was believed to have been abducted by members of the militant group Abu Sayyaf, officials said Tuesday.

Ces Drilon, a senior reporter for ABS-CBN and one of the country’s best-known journalists, was with a cameraman and driver when they were intercepted Sunday by armed men in Sulu, a province in the south where the Abu Sayyaf and Islamic extremists are known to operate, the police said.

With the crew was Octavio Dinampo, a professor at Mindanao State University who, according to the police, accompanied the news team on their way to meet with members of Abu Sayyaf.

Abu Sayyaf, whose stated goal is a separate Islamic state, is notorious for its kidnap-for-ransom activities and has victimized Filipinos and foreigners. The group has been blamed for several major terrorist attacks across the Philippines in recent years and is the target of a sustained military campaign supported by the United States.

Although U.S. and Philippine officials say that the campaign has considerably weakened the group over the past five years, analysts say Abu Sayyaf remains a high security threat.

Chief Superintendent Joel Goltiao, chief of police in the Autonomous Region in Muslim Mindanao, to which Sulu belongs, said Tuesday that the police had sent “feelers” to the Abu Sayyaf in the hope of a negotiation “but the abductors have not yet said anything,” he said, according to The Associated Press.

Goltiao told reporters Tuesday that the crew was abducted on the island of Jolo by a group led by Albader Parad, a known Abu Sayyaf leader.

“This can give a bad signal because Ms. Drilon is a very popular figure in the country,” said Lorelie Fajardo, a spokesperson for President Gloria Macapagal-Arroyo. She said the president had already ordered the police to do its best to locate the four abductees.

ABS-CBN, in a short statement made Tuesday, confirmed that its crew has been missing but stopped short of calling it a kidnapping. “All efforts are under way to find them and bring them home,” the network said.

The incident once again highlighted the security problems that Filipino journalists face. According to local and international media groups, the Philippines is among the most dangerous countries in the world for journalists.

“It is great cause for concern that this volatile southern region of the Philippines remains insecure for the press, and we call on local authorities to work diligently to secure their safe and swift release,” said Bob Dietz of the Committee to Protect Journalists, which is based in New York.

This would not be the first time that journalists pursuing a story on Abu Sayyaf had been kidnapped by their subjects. In 2000, Abu Sayyaf seized a group of 16 local and foreign journalists who were covering the kidnapping of 21 people from a Malaysian resort.