Filipino ferry's capsizing kills at least 38

Rescuers help passengers from a ferryboat that overturned Thursday off Ormoc city in the Philippines.
Rescuers help passengers from a ferryboat that overturned Thursday off Ormoc city in the Philippines.

MANILA, Philippines -- At least three more bodies were recovered today from a ferry that capsized in choppy waters in the central Philippines, raising the death toll in the accident to 38 with 15 others missing, the coast guard said.

At least 134 people from the M/B Kim Nirvana were rescued by nearby fishing boats and coast guard personnel or swam to safety off Ormoc city on Leyte Island, said Cmdr. Armand Balilo, a coast guard spokesman.

Balilo said two passengers initially listed in the manifest did not board the ferry, lowering the total number of people on board to 187 from 189 earlier reported by the coast guard.

Regional coast guard commander Capt. Pedro Tinampay said rescuers were using cranes to move the overturned boat to make it easier for divers to find more bodies.

Balilo said the wooden outrigger ferry was maneuvering out of the Ormoc port heading on its routine voyage to Camotes Islands, about 27 miles to the south, when it was lashed by strong waves Thursday.

He said the captain and some of the crew were rescued and were in custody pending an investigation.

Coast guard officials and survivors said it wasn't immediately clear what caused the 36-ton ferry, which was carrying a heavy cargo of construction materials and bags of rice, to overturn.

Survivors said the bow suddenly rose from the water before the vessel flipped on one side, then turned upside down and trapped passengers underneath.

Among the passengers who survived were at least three Americans and a Canadian.

Lawrence Drake, 48, a retired firefighter from Rochester, N.Y., said he used mouth-to-mouth resuscitation to revive a woman who wasn't breathing while they were in the water.

Drake said he also saved the woman's pregnant daughter and an 8-year-old boy. He said he saw at least seven bodies floating in the water, including two children.

Many of the passengers were screaming in panic, he said.

Drake's Filipino wife, Mary Jane, said the ferry was pulling slowly out of the port when it suddenly listed to the left in strong waves.

"No one was able to jump out because it overturned very swiftly. There was no time to jump," she said.

Cloudy weather at the time of the accident did not pose any danger that would have prompted the coast guard to stop sea voyages, officials said.

A brewing storm in the Pacific was 344 miles east of Ormoc and was too far away to affect any part of the Philippine archipelago, according to forecasters. They said winds in the Ormoc region were not strong enough to whip up dangerous waves.

Ormoc, a regional economic and transportation hub of about 200,000 people, is in a disaster-prone eastern region that is regularly hit by some of the approximately 20 tropical storms and typhoons that blow in from the Pacific each year.

The city was among those devastated by Typhoon Haiyan, one of the most ferocious storms on record to hit land, which left more than 7,300 dead and missing and leveled entire villages in November 2013.

In 1991, a storm set off flash floods in the Ormoc region that killed more than 5,000 people and swept homes and vehicles into the sea.

Frequent storms, badly maintained vessels and weak enforcement of safety regulations have been blamed for many past sea accidents in the Philippine archipelago, where small, rickety inter-island ferries are a main mode of transport.

In 1987, the ferry Dona Paz sank after colliding with a fuel tanker, killing more than 4,300 people in the world's worst peacetime maritime disaster.

Information for this article was contributed by Jim Gomez of The Associated Press.

A Section on 07/03/2015

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