By Xu Lingui, Xinhua,
Manila : Sitting beside her husband in a park in the United States, with their new-born baby sleeping in her arms, Filipina Maria Risma beamed broadly at the camera.
But Jose 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.
Last Friday, Risma, her husband and their 16-month toddle boarded the Sulpicio Lines Inc.’s passenger ferry “M/V Princess of the Stars” at the same place, heading to 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 in 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 be 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 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 vocation, 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., were grilled by irate relatives on Tuesday at north harbor for not transporting the dead bodies to the families or vice verse. 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 the authority doesn’t 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 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 Dona 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 marine-time authority for the ferry’s Friday voyage, despite typhoon Fengshen’s 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 kph and gustiness of up to 170 kph, 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 200,000 pesos (4,490 U.S. dollars) 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.