I-TEAM REPORT
30-minute pre-departure inspection of ship a ‘joke’
The wreck of the Princess
By Leila Salaverria
Philippine Daily Inquirer
First Posted 03:44:00 07/24/2008
Filed Under: Sulpicio ferry disaster, Maritime Accidents, Waterway & Maritime Transport
(First of a series)
MANILA, Philippines—Before the MV Princess of the Stars sailed out of Manila on her doomed voyage to Cebu, PO1 Felix Sardan boarded the 23,800-ton ferry to do the usual pre-departure inspection.
In 30 minutes, Sardan was done with the vessel owned by Sulpicio Lines Inc., performing a task mandated to the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG) under a 2005 agreement with the Maritime Industry Authority (MARINA).
That task, on paper, meant essentially checking the seaworthiness of the seven-story vessel, its compliance with safety measures, the number of passengers aboard, provisions and informing its captain of weather conditions.
Benjamin P. Mata, 77, a retired rear admiral, calls the inspection “a joke.” He says he can’t imagine that the process can be done in half an hour. “It’s impossible to do that in 10 days,” he says.
Mata also questions the competence of the PCG boarding team, or person in most cases, pointing out the job is carried out by a petty officer when it should be done by an official with the equivalent rank and experience of a ship master.
He figures there are only about 50 PCG officers with such a rank and command experience—not enough to advise some 5,000 ships plying the nation’s waters. So, instead, a petty officer does it.
“He’s going out there blind. He doesn’t know what to look for,” says Mata, vice chief of the Board of Marine Inquiry (BMI) that investigated the June 21 sinking of the Princess of the Stars, in which more than 800 people are believed to have perished.
“If I were the captain, I’d throw him overboard,” says Mata, who resigned from the BMI in the course of its hearing after Sulpicio Lines lawyers accused him of prejudging the case.
In counting passengers, Mata says, the boarding party usually looks at the bunks and on that basis decides whether the vessel is crowded or not.
In international practice, no such pre-departure inspection takes place, he says, adding that governments rely on the captain’s signed Oath of Safe Departure, which states that everything’s been done to put his vessel out of harm’s way, and whether it is carrying a dangerous cargo. Unfortunately, here, it’s just a piece of worthless paper, according to Mata.
In other countries, governments usually just issue weather alerts. Ships take notice.
“It might be possible a typhoon is imminently arriving at that port, and therefore, the port authority, or the capitan del puerto, or whoever is in charge will close the port and then will say everybody in the port, all ships must go out and take shelter,” Mata says.
He rues that no such drill happened in Manila as the typhoon that sank the Princess of the Stars hit the capital. He recalls that in the past, violent storms had tossed ships in Manila Bay to the breakwater.
Voice in the wilderness
“I’ve sailed around the world, mostly in the Northern Hemisphere,” Mata says adding it is only in the Philippines where pre-departure arrangements are in place and ports are not shut down during typhoons.
“I’ve been with the Board of Marine Inquiry since 2004 and even before that time, I already had the feeling that’s an impossible task for the Philippine Coast Guard. Nobody wants to listen. I’m a voice in the wilderness,” he says.
Sardan, 42, who has spent 13 years in the Philippine Navy before he joined the PCG in 2001, says he merely verified the validity of documents on the ferry’s seaworthiness. “It’s MARINA that does the inspection. We just check the validity,” says Sardan, who testified at the BMI hearing and later talked to the Philippine Daily Inquirer (parent company of INQUIRER.net).
According to him, he examined the “load line,” which would show whether the vessel had too much goods aboard, checked if lashings were secure, looked around to see if marshals were on board, if the K-9 teams had done their rounds—or “paneling”—and if the number of passengers did not go over the ship’s capacity. On that day, there were many empty bunks, he says.
“The ship leaves twice a week. I’m very familiar with its interiors,” says Sardan, who has been a member of the PCG boarding party for the last three years.
As usual, he met with Capt. Florencio Marimon, who handed him the Master’s Oath of Safe Departure.
PCG lacks men
Sardan says he and two other boarding personnel inspect 18 to 20 ships a day because of the sheer number of vessels to attend to. He says the PCG’s Manila Station, which covers eight ports, has a staff of 14 men but not all of them are even qualified for the boarding team.
“We’re lacking in men, but we make do because we have a job to do,” he says.
During his meeting with the ferry’s captain, Sardan says Marimon told him he was going ahead with his scheduled departure at 8 p.m. on Friday, June 20.
A typhoon was developing in the Visayas, but in Manila only Storm Signal No. 1 was up, indicating winds of up to 60 kilometers per hour. Signal No. 2 was hoisted farther along the route, with gusts of up to 100 kph expected.
Sardan says Marimon told him he had developed an alternative route to take if the storm—designated locally as Frank and internationally as Fengshen, or God of Wind—will intensify in the Tablas Strait, dubbed a “graveyard” for the number of vessels that had met deadly disasters there.
“I agreed with the plan,” Sardan says.
Regulations allow ships of the same gross tonnage as the Princess of the Stars to sail even with Signal No. 2 raised.
The following day, the crown jewel of Sulpicio Lines, which was acquired second-hand from Japan for $5 million, sank when it encountered the monster typhoon. The ferry with 865 people aboard went belly up off Sibuyan Island in Romblon province at around noon on Saturday. Only 56 people survived.
Marimon is one of those missing.
‘Act of God’
In the initial finger-pointing, the PCG and the Philippine Atmospheric, Geophysical and Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA) were blamed for the disaster—the worst since another Sulpicio Lines vessel, the Doña Paz, collided with a tanker in 1987 and left 4,300 people dead in the worst peacetime maritime disaster.
The PCG was taken to task for allowing the Princess of the Stars to depart in the face of a brewing typhoon. PAGASA was lambasted for failing to issue timely weather bulletins.
Seeking to exculpate itself from any liability, Sulpicio Lines declared that the tragedy was an “act of God.” But Manila Archbishop Gaudencio Cardinal Rosales said it was “an act of a stupid person,” blaming the ferry for sailing onto Frank’s devastating fury.
Retired Commodore Amado Romillo, 77, dismisses a P4.45-million civil suit filed by Sulpicio Lines against PAGASA for failing to inform the ferry of an approaching typhoon.
“You do not need to look in the papers that there is a typhoon before you start getting the weather report. It’s routine. All the reports that come out the whole day, you must have that on board, even if the weather is good,” Romillo says.
Romillo had been a BMI member. He was also forced to quit after Sulpicio Lines accused him of being biased against the company.
Gov’t warns, people listen
Sardan appears unaware of the enormity of his task under the arrangement in which MARINA has delegated its authority to see to it that vessels are in tiptop shape and safety measures are in place. MARINA does not have the manpower to do the job.
Mata says that it is unfair to saddle the PCG inspection team with such heavy responsibilities.
In the first place, he says, the procedure is not necessary. “The boarding party should not be there,” he says. The government, he says, should stay out of this practice. If at all, the government should only issue warnings, such as storm alerts.
“The government’s duty is to warn and it is up to us or the ordinary people going to sea to heed that warning and do what is necessary,” Mata says.
Not subject to procedure
Mata points out that airlines are not subjected to such a procedure. It’s all left to the pilot and his crew to see to it that safety measures are complied with.
In spite of the numerous accidents that have occurred in the Philippines, including the 1987 Doña Paz tragedy, not a single captain or shipowner has been held criminally liable, Mata says.
In other maritime countries, Mata says, violation of the master’s oath means heavy fines and stiff prison terms for the captain and the shipowners. Overloading, for example, even of one person, is severely dealt with, he says.
“There have been many incidents of unmanifested passengers on board and were lost at sea. Whether that is within the knowledge of the ship company or the master, I don’t know. But when there is a disaster, we find there are many unmanifested people,” Mata says.
He says that he has been urging the passage of a law that will make it a crime to allow an unmanifested passenger aboard the vessel. The master and the shipowner should be fined heavily and meted out long jail sentences for violating this law, he says.
Clean profit
“The unmanifested passenger is a source of income that doesn’t have to be declared. It’s clean profit,” Mata says. During disasters, victims are deprived of insurance cover. Worse, the PCG is in a quandary on exactly how many people it is supposed to rescue, he says.
Initial reports by the PCG showed that the Princess of the Stars carried 626 passengers and 121 crew members—way below its capacity of 1,992 people. Sulpicio Lines later issued a supplementary manifest, and the National Disaster Coordinating Council on June 29 put the number of people aboard the ferry at 865—141 crew and non-crew members and 724 passengers.
In the 1987 Doña Paz disaster, the PCG initially reported that the ferry’s manifest listed 1,493 passengers. The final death toll of around 4,300 people showed the number of actual passengers was more than double those listed on the manifest.
Rep. Emmylou Taliño-Mendoza of North Cotabato says Sulpicio Lines generated P5.7 billion in revenues in 2007, up 10 percent from the previous year and 57 percent from 2001, citing documents the company submitted to the Securities and Exchange Commission.
Mendoza says Sulpicio Lines reported a “cash hoard” of P467.2 million at the end of 2007, “mainly on account of rapid population growth (that is) a key driver of strong demand for domestic sea travel.” With a report from Norman Bordadora
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