EDITORIAL - Christmas tragedy

The Christmas season is also a season of deadly maritime disasters in this country. It’s a peak season for travel; people want to spend the holidays with relatives and ships are fully booked or overloaded. Ship crew-members who work through the holidays celebrate the traditional way, by drinking and engaging in other forms of merriment. The worst peacetime maritime disaster in the world occurred on Dec. 20, 1987, when more than 4,300 people died in the collision of the Manila-bound ferry Doña Paz with the oil tanker Vector. An inquiry showed that most of the crew of the Doña Paz, owned by Sulpicio Lines, were drinking or watching TV, with the ship captain watching a movie on Betamax. 

It’s still not known if anyone was keeping watch when the passenger ship Catalyn B collided with the fishing vessel Anatalia near the mouth of Manila Bay last Christmas Eve. The wooden-hulled Catalyn B now lies 228 feet at the bottom of the sea. Authorities fear that many of the passengers still missing could have gone down with the ship, with no hope of being recovered. Coast Guard personnel have equipment for diving no deeper than 150 feet.

The passenger vessel, which left Manila’s North Harbor early in the morning of Dec. 24 on its way to Mindoro, stood no chance against the steel-hulled Anatalia, which was returning to the Navotas Fishport from a fishing trip in Palawan. At 2:25 a.m., the two vessels collided at the mouth of Manila Bay, opening a hole in the Catalyn B. Reports said it took only 10 minutes for the ship to sink completely. The Anatalia sustained barely a scratch.

Coast Guard officials said the two vessels apparently did not follow the rules for passing ships. The public also wants to know if wooden-hulled vessels are allowed to ferry up to 73 passengers and crew as the Catalyn B did. In this archipelago of 7,100 islands, ferries are affordable and popular modes of transportation. Yet the safety of maritime travel has improved only slightly since the Doña Paz and Vector collided. One reason is that shipowners get off lightly when their vessels figure in disasters. With no accountability on the part of the industry, and no will on the part of the state to improve and enforce maritime safety rules, the latest maritime disaster will not be the last.