|
By Xu Lingui, Xinhua
MANILA: Sitting beside her husband in a park in
the United States, with their newborn baby sleeping in her arms,
Filipina Maria Risma beamed broadly at the camera.
But Josie Bina, Risma’s 60-year-old mother,
seems to have sensed that her daughter’s smile might be frozen in
that photo forever.
“I want to see them. I want to see my family,
even if they are dead,” said a tearful Bina, holding the family
photo while sitting in a crowded waiting room at the Manila north
harbor.
On June 20, Risma, her husband and their
16-month toddler boarded the Sulpicio Lines Inc.’s passenger ferry
MV Princess of the Stars at the same place, heading to the central
Philippine city of Cebu.
The 23,824-ton inter-island ferry encountered a
powerful typhoon at sea near the island of Sibuyan on Saturday and
capsized, leaving more than 800 people missing. Sixty-seven were
confirmed dead by early Wednesday.
Bina, who has been at the Manila north harbor
for the fourth day, said her daughter had just come back from the
United States this month for a visit. “She brought my little
grandchild. We haven’t been talking much. But now, all is gone,”
Bina said.
The Philippine rescue team by early Wednesday
has only found 48 survivors. For the rest, hope of survival has
almost faded. Divers who wriggled into the overturned ferry on
Tuesday found only floating corpses. A navy spokesman said there was
“no sight of life” around the mishap waters.
“It will be a miracle if we find survivors,”
a lieutenant commander on the rescue operation told media.
Inside the Sulpicio’s waiting room at the
north harbor, where photos of loved ones and heart-breaking notes
are pasted alongside with the survivor list, families of the
passengers came to swallow the hard fact that chances of seeing
their loved ones alive have become very slim.
Relatives, mostly from poor families who can not
afford safer air travels, now hope at least they can take a last
glimpse of the loved ones and give them a decent burial.
“If it is destiny, fine, you know. But we
still need to find them,” said Marlon Traballo, who lost 17
relatives on the capsized ferry. “My relatives went to Cebu for
vacation, not to die.”
He said the ship company is not very responsive
to the family’s needs and sometimes told lies to comfort the
relatives.
Edgar Go, first vice president of the Sulpicio
Lines Inc., was grilled by irate relatives on Tuesday at the north
harbor for not transporting the dead bodies to the families or vice
versa. He said the company would soon bring relatives to Cebu, where
all recovered bodies are now gathered for the officials of National
Bureau of Investigation to identify.
“But who can better identify the dead
passengers than their families. Why doesn’t the authority let us
go?” contended Grace Carribon, a Manila woman who lost her
brother.
“We don’t need more comforting, we want to
see actions,” she said.
According to coast guard officials and recounts
of some survivors, the ferry’s engine died in the midst of
“mountain high” waves stirred by the typhoon and capsized in the
waters only three kilometers to coast.
Sulpicio-owned ships were involved in three
other catastrophic marine-time accidents in the past two decades,
including the sinking of Doña Paz ferry in 1987, the worst
peacetime sea tragedy in history, in which 4,000 people were
believed dead.
But Sulpicio Lines officials denied there was an
engine problem and said they had secured the sailing permit from the
maritime authority for the ferry’s Friday voyage, despite Typhoon
Frank’s (Fengshen) entry into the eastern part of the country.
Rescued ferry crew told reporters that “the
weather is good” when the ferry left dock on Friday night.
Go said the sudden change of course of the
typhoon is mainly to blame for the disaster. Packing maximum winds
of 140 kilometers per hour and gustiness of up to 170 kilometers per
hour, the powerful storm has taken away 291 lives before it left the
Philippines on Monday.
The Board of Marine Inquiry has issued subpoenas
to Sulpicio officials and all Sulpicio-owned ferries are now
grounded for safety overhauls. The company promised to give families
of each fatality P200,000 pesos ($4,490) as compensation.
But to relatives in despair like Bina, the
priority at present is neither the responsibility nor the money.
“I don’t want the money. I am waiting here
only for my family. If they are dead, at least I want to bury them
well,” she said, between sobs.
|
