MANILA, Philippines—The focus of media reports on the passage of Typhoon “Frank” is the sinking of Sulpicio Lines’ Princess of the Stars off Sibuyan Island, where countless passengers and a deadly cargo of pesticide still lie entombed in the upended ship. Forgotten or unknown are at least 22 other big vessels that were lost at sea during the typhoon. So far, 44 have been confirmed dead and 89 still missing in these additional sinkings. These were the bodies washed ashore in Quezon and nearby islands who were at first thought to be passengers of Princess of the Stars but are now confirmed to have come from these other boats.
A happier report is that of 19 seamen rescued after floating helplessly in the high seas for 12 days. That is a good story any day, but media missed that one.
These were reported to the Kapihan sa Manila media forum last Monday by Sen. Richard Gordon, chair of the Philippine National Red Cross (PNRC), and former secretary of social welfare Corazon Alma de Leon, now PNRC executive director.
The reason there were so many ships sank, the two Red Cross officials said, was that, according to usual practice whenever there is a typhoon warning, ships at sea immediately rushed to designated safe havens nearby. Unfortunately, the erratic Typhoon “Frank” also rushed to these supposed havens that were no longer safe but were the worst places to go. (There is a joke going the rounds that the typhoon was looking for Justice Secretary Raul Gonzalez, which was why his home city of Iloilo was the worst hit.) Instead of finding safety, the boats headed into the maelstrom.
On the part of Princess of the Stars, it is now obvious from the photographs that the ship captain tried to beach the ship to save as many passengers as possible. That is why it sank so near to shore, which lies less than a kilometer away. Any fairly good swimmer can swim or float that far to safety.
But by the laws of nature, the nearer waves get to the shore, the bigger they get because the shallow beach pushes the water up. So the big waves capsized the ship (because there was no water in two of the four ballast tanks designed to stabilize the ship?).
Proof of the ferociousness of the waves was that two of a boatload of survivors from the ship drowned close to shore when big waves hit them. One was washed out of the boat by a big wave, and the other was already walking ashore and had already taken off his life vest when big waves carried him out to sea.
Congressmen during Monday’s televised congressional hearings of the disaster were bullying and browbeating the poor chief of Pagasa for allegedly incorrectly predicting the path of the typhoon, thus resulting in many vessels being caught by the storm. They were obviously grandstanding for the audience.
Yet they were the most to blame for the disaster. While not failing to provide themselves with billions of pesos in pork barrel, most of which ended up in private pockets, they did not provide the PAGASA weather bureau with enough funds to acquire modern forecasting equipment. And anyway, the PAGASA provided the Philippine Coast Guard with regular updates on the path of the typhoon as it zigzagged across the Philippines. It was the Coast Guard’s duty to inform the vessels at sea.
At one point, two congressmen demanded to know why the ships were communicating to shore by cell phone instead of by regular ship-to-shore radio. Again they themselves are at fault. Not many of those ship-to-shore radios are available, no thanks to the stingy congressmen. The ship crews were making do with cell phones.
In fact, there was a time not so long ago when even airline pilots also lacked communication with airports and had no homing beacons to guide them. They had to rely on regular radio programs from local radio stations to guide them during the “pink eye” flights, or night flights when visual landmarks were not visible. Two of my cousin-pilots who used to fly these night flights, related how they tuned to local radio stations to tell them where they are. (Remember how in movies about the Dec. 9, 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Japanese pilots were guided by Hawaiian music from American radio stations in Honolulu?) That’s not true now in the big city airports, but those were harrowing days for domestic pilots in the backward days. That situation of the pilots then is now being experienced by ship captains.
Not only that, the few remaining lighthouses in the Philippines that are the beacons of safety to ship captains during dark nights are being neglected by the Philippine government, again due to lack of funds from Congress. In contrast to their generosity in enacting budgets for projects that give them huge kickbacks, congressmen (who like to repeat that they have “the power of the purse”) are very stingy with funds for necessary and lifesaving equipment for agencies like the weather bureau, the Philippine Coast Guard and the agency in charge of lighthouses. It seems that, like the dinosaur, lighthouses are being driven to extinction by neglect. Today, the quaint lighthouses are good only as tourist spots. But at the same time, Congress is not providing the communication equipment necessary to replace lighthouses in making sailing ships safe. And yet we are a maritime country.
Maybe things will improve if the law mandates that congressmen go by ship, not by plane, when they travel.
