Almost 600 rescued in RP ship incident

Almost 600 rescued in RP ship incident

MANILA (Reuters): Almost 600 survivors were plucked from rough seas after a Philippine ship packed with passengers returning home for Christmas sank shortly before dawn on Thursday.

Officials said 591 people had been rescued, nine were dead and 58 were still missing by 6 p.m. (5 p.m. Jakarta time), about 13 hours after the accident in the Visayan Sea in the central Philippines.

"While there were those who perished, the biggest Christmas gift from above was that the casualties were not of previous proportions," Defense Secretary Orlando Mercado told Reuters.

The Philippines, an archipelagic nation where sea transport is widely used, has a poor maritime record. In 1987, some 4,300 people were killed when a ferry collided with an oil tanker near Manila in the world's worst peacetime sea disaster.

That accident also took place in the week before Christmas, when people in this Roman Catholic nation jam airports, bus stations and ports looking to get home for the celebrations.

"December is the season wherein some people are a little lax about their travel plans and the vessels about their maintenance... They might have been taking too many chances during the Christmas season," Mercado said.

"There's also this eagerness on our part to go home. This is part of the danger.

"The problem usually is old, creaky and unseaworthy ships compounded by overloading and a lack of compliance with safety measures, which are poor to start with."

The MV Asia South Korea, carrying 606 passengers and 52 crew from the central city of Cebu to Iloilo, left on Wednesday night on what should have been a 12-hour voyage.

It sank off Bantayan Island, 500 km southeast of Manila, at 5 a.m. after being buffeted by high waves, Mercado said.

A massive rescue operation was immediately launched. Naval ships, other merchant vessels, helicopters and fishing boats converged on the area, plucking people from the water.

"They can still hear people calling...they won't leave until they pick everyone up," said Andriano Afuego, a civil defense official in Cebu.

Television footage showed people bobbing in the sea with bright orange life-vests strapped around their chests as motorboats moved in.

Soaked and shivering survivors clambered on to rescue vessels. Many women and children were rescued from lifeboats while those in life-jackets and in the sea were mostly men.

Officials said the sea was rough at the accident site, some 10 nautical miles from Bantayan Island, and that rescue operations would continue into the night.

"Even at this point and time the search and rescue operations are still ongoing," said William Acosta, vice president of operations for Trans-Asia Shipping, the ship's owner.

"We have dispatched more vessels through coordination with other shipping companies...within this area. We are just thankful to the Lord that all our efforts were quite successful at this time."

Trans-Asia said the vessel underwent extensive seaworthiness checks in September.

Coast Guard Commander Franklin Llanto said departure clearance at Cebu was delayed "because when we conducted pre-departure inspection, we found out that there were excess passengers, about 80 or more than 80 of them".

He said the ship had a licensed capacity for 614 passengers and the excess passengers were off-loaded.

Despite frequent sea disasters, ferries remain the most popular means of long-haul transport in this largely impoverished archipelago of more than 7,000 islands because fares are cheaper than air travel.