Editorial and comments on the Biliran sea tragedy
Lost at sea
(Editorial, Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 15, 2002.)
MANY may be tempted to view the death of Josephine, the wife of Biliran ferry owner Alfredo Malanan, as karmic justice of unusual precision. She died last Saturday, one of 19 victims - all women and children - of the country's latest maritime tragedy.
Relatives described the owner of the 60-foot motorized outrigger boat MT Nilode as distraught, unable to speak to reporters because he was still in a state of shock. Many of us may have thought of Malanan's loss - even fleetingly, and not without a little guilt - as divine comeuppance.
We would be missing the point. Josephine's death teaches us, not that those who risk their lives blithely will somehow end up paying for it, but that in the end all of us risk our lives unnecessarily, unthinkingly. To put it in terms even a politician-averse officers of the Coast Guard can understand: we aren't safety-conscious enough, not even when our lives, or those of our loved ones, are at stake.
The real reason that tragedies like Saturday's accident off Naval, Biliran or last month's gutting of MV Maria Carmela continue to happen, then, is because our standards of safety are not objective, but subjective in the extreme.
The Nilode accident is an open-and-shut case. It demonstrates, almost too neatly, what happens when safety rules are violated with impunity. The overloading of the boat, up to or even beyond its 30-passenger capacity, is not disputed - not by the Coast Guard, not by the survivors, not by the ferry's surviving crew. One of the crewmen, in fact, recalled instructions being shouted to the passengers, which ordered them not to move too much; literally, not to rock the boat.
The immediate cause of the accident is also a matter of record: passengers riding on the roof of the central cabin stood up and moved over from the left side to the right when the afternoon sun broke through the clouds.
In their attempt to seek some shade, the passengers immediately shifted the boat's center of gravity, causing the wooden ferry to turn over on its right. (A telling detail from our correspondents from the PDI Visayas Bureau: the passengers riding on the cabin roof shared the space with some 10 sacks of rice.)
The attempts of the Coast Guard to stop the boat from sailing are also not in doubt; there is even a so-called apprehension report, signed by Malanan, which the Coast Guard presented to him because of the marked overloading.
There is also no dispute about the casualty toll: 19 dead, 70 hospitalized, an entire province grief-stricken.
What needs to be determined is whether there were really politicians who persuaded the Coast Guard to give the green light. Finding out who they were will not mitigate the Coast Guard's liability. But like the fact of Josephine's untimely death - it will help us face the reality of tragedy, Filipino-style. Our standards of safety are not objective, but subjective in the extreme.
Consider the Coast Guard's decision to give the go-ahead. A boat overloaded to thrice its approved capacity does not become less overloaded simply because a politician says so. A certified naval engineer may be able to argue the case for more passengers, although that is doubtful, but a politician? It is obvious that reasons other than those involving safety were what finally persuaded the Coast Guard to signal the green light. We do not know what they were; they may be as simple as a favorite politician assuring an officer that all would be well. But the consequences have been nothing less than tragic.
It is apparent that the Coast Guard officials manning the Naval outpost were made in the classic mold of the bureaucratic time-server. When lives were obviously at stake, they issued an apprehension report - instead of apprehending those dead set on risking life. When a local politician came calling, they revised their standards of risk and safety accordingly. When faced with the pressure to dispatch an overloaded vessel, they forgot their study of maritime sciences and their duties as public servants, and turned bureaucrat.
No wonder so many lives are lost at sea.
Generals came and stayed the night
("Letters," Philippine Daily Inquirer, May 24, 2002.)
THIS is to correct the wrong impression created by the inaccurate reporting of your PDI Visayas correspondent, titled "They came, saw, but didn't stay" (PDI, 5/13/02), regarding the ferry sinking in Biliran.
At about 6 p.m. of May 11 (the tragedy occurred at about 4:30 p.m.), presidential assistant for Eastern Visayas Vic Domingo informed Maj. Gen. Romeo Dominguez, commanding general of the Army's 8th Infantry Division, of the incident. At that time, he was with Maj. Gen. Jacinto Ligot, commander of the Central Command, AFP visiting troops in Northern Samar. As the rescue helicopters were not capable of night flight missions, the Comcentcom directed the Naval Forces Central to send a ship to the incident while the Coast Guard, 8ID ordered the dispatch of medical and security elements who arrived at Biliran before midnight. They were led by Col. Eusebio Ramos, 802nd Bde Comdr.
At the break of dawn, scheduled troop visits were cut short as the military officers onboard the helicopters proceeded to Biliran to undertake search, rescue and recovery operations. The rescue helicopter, with Ligot onboard, hovered over the site of the incident before finally landing in the Naval wharf at about 6:15 a.m.
On the ground, Maj. Romeo Argenio of the 19th Infantry Battalion and board member Romulo Bernardez of Naval, appraised the military officers of the situation and reported that all 94 passengers have been accounted for, to wit: 19 dead, 10 hospitalized and 65 escaped unharmed. This notwithstanding, the SAR helicopter was dispatched to fetch, rescue divers and equipment from the Mactan Air Base to complement the efforts of divers of the Philippine Coast Guard, and to ferry ranking government officials from Cebu to Biliran. Ligot and Dominguez remained in the island and conferred with local executives on succeeding actions. Thereafter, the military officials returned to the wharf to discuss the incident with PCGG officials.
With the pullout of the rescue divers from the incident site at about 9 a.m., Ligot proceeded with the Southern Leyte-Bohol leg of the scheduled inspection while the division brigade and battalion commanders remained to supervise the termination of search, rescue and recovery operations. Dominguez left Biliran at around 11 a.m. for the five-hour land trip to Catbalogan.
- CAPT. CONSTANCIO M. ESPINA II (Inf), PA
Public Information Officer
8th Infantry Division
Philippine Army
Camp Lukban
Catbalogan, Samar
I WRITE in response to the comments of Major Generals Jacinto Ligot and Romeo Dominguez related to the item I wrote about their visit to Naval aboard two Air Force helicopters in the morning of Sunday, May 12.
I was in the crowd at the portion of the Naval wharf near the MT Nilode, bottled up by the Army security cordon, when military officials landed on board the Sikorsky rescue helicopter around 6:30 a.m. Before their arrival, I was taking pictures of the half-sunk boat that had been docked at the wharf.
The military officials were met and briefed by Gov. Rogelio Espina and a provincial board member near the helicopter landing site. I did not see Rep. Gerardo Espina there.
Somebody then pulled what I saw as a military map and pointed to the location where the boat sunk. Minutes later, the officials boarded the helicopter that took off shortly.
The whole episode that I witnessed did not last 30 minutes.
The other helicopter, a Huey, just flew up in the air and did not land at all in the wharf.
My original dispatch did not include the names of the visiting military officials. But when requested by the PDI Visayas Bureau, I called up both Governor Espina and Representative Espina separately, and they provided me the complete names of these officials and their stations.
I only witnessed and wrote about the helicopter landing on the Naval wharf and verified what I saw through running commentaries of Representative Espina over the local radio most of Sunday morning.
I saw a flying white Sikorsky helicopter on my way out of the house to file my report around mid-morning. But I thought it was the chopper that transported Presidential Assistant Gabby Claudio and Rep. Prospero Pichay to Naval.
Anyway, there was no more need for outside help and attention by Sunday morning. The local population and officials had completed their own voluntary search and rescue operations the evening before and had taken care of the dead and the survivors.
- ROLANDO O. BORRINAGA
PDI Visayas Bureau