Dozens jump ship after ferry fire
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More than 150 people were missing after the fire forced passengers to jump ship.
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MANILA, Philippines (Reuters) -- Passengers leapt into the sea in the middle of the night or huddled in the bow to escape a raging fire after an explosion ripped through the engine room of a luxury Philippine ferry on Friday.
One person was killed and 153 were missing after disaster struck the 877 passengers and crew about an hour into their overnight journey from Manila to Bacolod in the central part of this nation of islands.
"We climbed down on a nylon cord and swam to the nearest fishing boat," Jetro Restiza, one of 43 marine engineering students who were training on the ferry, told Reuters.
"Our instinct was to save ourselves and jump from the ship."
Still clutching orange life vests and wearing their night clothes, dozens of survivors separated from relatives in the chaos had tearful reunions on shore as others waited anxiously.
Rodel Castillo turned on his mobile phone on Friday morning to an alarming text message from his wife, who was taking their 15-day-old daughter to visit her family.
"Our ship is on fire. Don't worry, we're safe, but I got separated from our baby," she wrote in a mixture of English, Tagalog and the Visayan dialect. "Please pray for our baby."
After hours of anguish, Castillo learned his daughter and wife were being brought back to Manila on different boats.
Coast Guard officials would not speculate on the potential death toll but said the number of missing was likely to fall as more rescue ships returned to port from the mouth of Manila Bay.
Eleven people were hurt, including several with severe burns.
Dozens of small fishing boats plucked people from the choppy water as Coast Guard, navy and cargo ships raced through the darkness to the stricken ferry.
"We were already lying down to sleep when we heard a loud bang," Mary Jane Silverio, who was travelling with her sister, told Reuters on the deck of a Coast Guard ship.
"We ran like everyone else to the lower part of the ship. Some jumped over the side, but I did not."
Festival ship
There was no hint the Super Ferry 14 was overloaded -- a common cause of maritime disasters in the Philippines in the past -- as it had a capacity of 1,126 passengers, according to details on the Web site of the owners WG&A.
Billed as the "festival" ship, the ferry entered service in October 2000 and featured a beauty parlour, business centre, dining salons and a karaoke room.
"Allegedly the fire started in the engine room, caused by an explosion of undetermined origin," Rear Admiral Danilo Abinoja, the Coast Guard deputy commander for operations, told reporters.
The 723 people rescued included 104 crew members, he said.
The ferry was being towed to Bataan island with smoke billowing into the air when another blast erupted, said a Reuters photographer. Flames flared again after having died down under the spray from firefighting boats.
WG&A, a consortium of three shipping lines, said it was too early to speculate on the cause of the fire as it concentrated on helping survivors and their families.
"We will attend to their medical needs," WG&A communications manager Gina Virtusio said in a television interview.
"For the fatality, we will attend to their burial needs."
Maritime accidents are relatively common in the Philippines, a country of more than 7,000 islands linked by networks of passenger ferries and cargo ships.
In the world's worst peacetime shipping disaster, more than 4,300 people died in a collision between the ferry Dona Paz and an oil tanker in Philippine waters just before Christmas 1987.
Copyright 2004
Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
