3 people dead as fire breaks out from passenger ship in Dapitan City
Credit to Author: RAFFY AYENG| Date: Wed, 28 Aug 2019 05:40:06 +0000
THREE persons, including a baby and a senior citizen, died and over 200 people were rescued when a passenger ship caught fire in Dapitan City on Tuesday night, the Philippine Cost Guard (PCG) said.
Capt. Armand Balilo, PCG spokesman, identified the two fatalities as Chloe Labisig, 1 year old and 6 months, and Danilo Gomez Sr., 60.
The PCG said motorbancas, a fast craft and two cargo vessels responded to the Lite Ferry 16, owned by businessman Jun Lim.
The blaze broke out in the pre-dawn darkness as the boat sailed to Dapitan City, prompting some of the terrified people onboard to throw themselves into the water, one witness said.
A video of the incident that was posted on the Facebook page of the United Filipino Seafarers showed that the vessel caught fire at 11 p.m.
Fred Castro, a passenger, told the Manila Times that rescuers from the PCG responded late, arriving on the scene at 5 a.m. on Wednesday.
It is not clear how many passengers were on the vessel, but the PCG said 102 people had been rescued.
Search operations are ongoing on Wednesday as authorities worked to confirm the actual number of missing.
The boat’s official manifest listed 137 onboard, but many more may have been on the vessel.
Local emergency authorities said they had accounted for 215 survivors, nearly double the number provided by the Coast Guard.
“It seems many people were not listed on the manifest,” Nelson Quimiguing, a disaster management officer in Dapitan City, told AFP.
The Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, is plagued by poor sea transport, with its badly regulated boats and ships prone to overcrowding and accidents.
This latest incident occurred 30 years after another Philippine ferry, the Dona Paz, collided with an oil tanker in a pre-Christmas accident that claimed more than 4,000 lives in the world’s worst peacetime disaster at sea. AFP