LAGOS, Nigeria. (Voice Of Naija) A passenger ferry carrying 134 people has caught fire off the coast of Palawan in the western Philippines, killing at least five people and leaving 87 others unaccounted for.
Philippines rescue teams raced against time in open water as the blaze continued to burn into Thursday morning, the Associated Press reported.
According to Channel NewsAsia, the fire broke out on Wednesday evening aboard the M/V June Aster, a passenger vessel that MarineTraffic data confirmed had departed from Manila.
The blaze erupted approximately 2.2 kilometres, about 1.3 miles offshore in waters near Coron, in the northern part of western Palawan Island, one of the Philippines’ most visited tourist destinations and home to some of the country’s most celebrated diving and island-hopping sites.
Video footage released by the Philippine Coast Guard on Facebook, and shared widely by AFP and Al Jazeera, showed the M/V June Aster completely engulfed in flames, with fire consuming the vessel from bow to stern.
Coast Guard Captain Noemi Cayabyab confirmed the toll and the scale of the emergency in a radio interview on Thursday morning, as quoted directly by the Associated Press: “Based on the data we have right now on rescues and the casualties, we still have 87 people who are unaccounted for.”
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She confirmed that five bodies had been brought ashore and that 42 people had been rescued: 38 passengers and four crew members.
With the ship’s manifest listing 134 passengers and crew in total, the numbers leave 87 people whose fate remains unknown as of Thursday.
Cayabyab cautioned that all figures were preliminary. “Just to make it clear, this is live data and may change as our search and rescue operations are ongoing,” she said.
According to ABC News Australia, coast guard teams were battling on two fronts: conducting active search and rescue operations in the surrounding waters for survivors and missing persons, while also working to extinguish the fire still burning on the vessel.
The coast guard said it had not yet been able to debrief the 42 survivors, a critical gap in the information picture that meant authorities still could not account for exactly who was on board, where passengers were located when the fire broke out, or how quickly the blaze spread through the vessel.
“However, we have not yet been able to obtain information from the rescued individuals because we have not been able to speak with them,” Cayabyab reportedly told reporters.
France24 confirmed that coast guard teams continued search and rescue operations through Thursday morning and that officials warned the figures could change as the operation progressed and as rescuers worked to establish what happened and how the fire started.
Al Jazeera notes that volunteer fishermen were also involved in the rescue effort, assisting coast guard vessels in pulling survivors from the water, an important detail from the Philippine Coast Guard’s own handout photographs, which showed local fishing boats working alongside official rescue craft in the waters off Palawan.
Free Malaysia Today, citing AFP from Manila, reported that the cause of the fire had not yet been determined as of Thursday morning, as investigators could not board and examine the vessel while it remained ablaze.
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MarineTraffic data confirmed the vessel’s route had originated in Manila before heading toward Palawan, a route regularly travelled by domestic ferry passengers moving between the capital and the island provinces of western Philippines.
The Philippines has a long and tragic history of maritime disasters, driven by a combination of factors including the country’s geography, more than 7,600 islands spread across a vast archipelago, heavy dependence on ferry and inter-island boat transport for millions of people, ageing vessel fleets, and weather conditions in the Pacific that can change rapidly.
Among the worst maritime disasters in the country’s modern history was the sinking of the MV Doña Paz in 1987, which killed an estimated 4,341 people in a collision with a tanker and remains the deadliest peacetime maritime disaster in history.
Philippine maritime safety regulators have repeatedly introduced reforms in the decades since, but ferry fires and sinkings remain a periodic and painful feature of life in the archipelago.
Philippine authorities have not yet released a passenger manifest identifying those on board by nationality, meaning it is not yet known whether any foreign tourists common in the Coron area of Palawan were among the passengers on the M/V June Aster at the time of the fire.
Palawan province and particularly the Coron area, near which the fire occurred, is a major international tourist destination, known for its UNESCO-listed natural landscapes, shipwreck diving sites, and island hopping routes that attract visitors from across Asia, Europe, and beyond.
As of Thursday morning local time, search and rescue operations were continuing; the blaze had not been fully extinguished, and the death toll and missing persons count remained subject to change as coast guard teams combed the surrounding waters.
