Search for bodies inside sunken Philippine ferry continues

Manila: The gruelling task of searching for the remains of hundreds of victims of the Princess of the Stars tragedy continued without let up on Saturday even as most Filipinos paused to honour their dead throughout the country.

Rodrigo Bella, of Harbour Star, the company contracted by the authorities to retrieve the remains of the victims of the tragedy off Masbate province's Sibuyan Island, said work continued just as any other working day searching fatalities' remains.

"We can't pause to grieve for our own dead. There is no let up in our work even on a holiday like this. We have to get the bodies to their waiting families," Bella explained.

As most Filipinos mark All Saints Day (November 1) and All Souls Day (November 2), hundreds of families of victims of the accident in the sea were left to spend the day they traditionally honour their dead without a tomb or a shrine to grieve over.

Delay

The Princess of the Stars was carrying some 825 passengers and crew enroute to Cebu from Manila when the ferry sank off the coast of Masbate's San Fernando town on June 21 in storm Fensheng.

Some 52 passengers and crew survived the tragedy but hundreds of victims who were trapped inside the ship's cabins remain unaccounted for.

Bella said divers working to recover the remains of the victims said they expected to retrieve more than a dozen bodies by Saturday.

Since actual recovery operations for the remains of the victims started on October 26, divers of the Harbor Star have recovered more than 80 bodies.

Toxic chemicals

Rescue and retrieval workers suffered several months' delay in retrieving the bodies because the authorities were worried that toxic chemicals inside the ship's cargo hold of the ship could make its way into surrounding waters and further add to the damage caused by the ferry tragedy,

The 23,000-gross-tonne M/V Princess of the Stars was carrying some 10 tonnes of the pesticide Endosulfan and other toxic chemicals when it sank near off Sibuyan Island.

Although Harbor Star had already accounted for the chemicals by early October, families still had to wait for several weeks more until all the bunker fuel inside the ill-fated ship had been siphoned off the vessel.