Ferries

There was a collision of two ships just off Cebu last night, with one of them, a passenger ferry, sinking. About twenty people are known to be dead thus far, but at least a couple hundred more are missing.

Rescuers in helicopters and boats are desperately searching for nearly 300 people missing after a ferry sank in the Philippines, with at least 24 already confirmed killed. 

The Thomas Aquinas ferry was carrying 870 passengers and crew when it collided with a cargo ship on Friday night in calm waters near the port of Cebu, the Philippines' second biggest city, authorities said. 

While 572 people had been rescued by Saturday morning, 24 bodies had been retrieved and 274 were still unaccounted for, said Rear Admiral Luis Tuason, vice commandant of the Philippine coastguard. 

The accident occurred in the mouth of a narrow strait leading into the port between two and three kilometres from shore, authorities said.

Prayers would be a good idea.

I enjoy riding the ferries here. They’re slower than planes, obviously, but I’m not in a big hurry and have traveled several times by ferry between Cebu and Manila. The company I use is the same as the one that sank, and I’ve found them to be good.

Ferries are one of the main modes of transport across the archipelago of more than 7,100 islands, particularly for the millions of people too poor to fly. 

But sea accidents are common, with poor safety standards, lax enforcement and overloading typically to blame. 

The world's deadliest peacetime maritime disaster occurred near the capital, Manila, in 1987 when a ferry laden with Christmas holidaymakers collided with a small oil tanker, killing more than 4,300 people. 

In 2008, a huge ferry capsized during a typhoon off the central island of Sibuyan, leaving almost 800 dead.

Having said I like the ferry company I’ve used, the company that operates the cargo ship involved in this collision, Sulpicio Lines, is another matter entirely.* Those two disasters mentioned in the preceding paragraph were both Sulpicio ships. The Dona Paz, which went down in 1987, was carrying more than four thousand people although the passenger manifest reportedly only showed fifteen hundred.

But nothing was done about it.

* To be fair, no one yet knows who is at fault in this instance.