Thursday, July 03, 2008 Search to stop for 3 months
MV Princess of the Stars will be refloated to retrieve bodies stuck inside the vessel, Transportation Undersecretary Maria Elena Bautista said yesterday.
The process will stop efforts to recover bodies for up to three months.
Amid anger at the slow-moving recovery operation, the government and ferry owners abandoned plans to bore a hole in the 24,000-ton vessel to pull out the bodies and agricultural chemicals that threaten the marine environment.
A salvage outfit hired to execute the plan, as well as Filipino and US military divers, have left the site off Sibuyan Island, Bautista said.
“Subsea (the salvage firm) is pulling out because we will refloat the vessel,” Bautista told AFP.
“The re-floating operations could take two to three months,” she added.
Upon hearing this, upset cries were heard from groups of relatives gathered at the action center set up at the Cebu City Sports Center.
Bautista told them the retrieval of bodies proved tedious and difficult.
She said that because the vessel’s cabins are filled with water, bodies are now floating and are up against what originally was the ship’s floor.
Divers are experiencing difficulties in pulling the bodies out of the cabins because these are too heavy to be pulled out and would continue to float back to the top of the
cabin.
To pull out bodies, divers attach counterweights to the corpses to make these sink and allow divers to pull these out of the vessel.
Grim
After more than a week of being submerged in water, the bodies have increased in body mass. Bautista said even the task of pulling bodies out of the hull’s door was too difficult.
If bodies would be forced through doors, these might suffer damage, she said.
Bautista also said the presence of endosulfan posed danger to divers, although the toxic pesticide was safely sealed and locked in a container van.
With the vessel’s inclined position, the container van holding the endosulfan has slipped to the bottom of the vessel, along with other containers.
“And since the vessel is now upside down, the truck carrying the container van is now on top of the van, making things difficult,” Bautista said. Pulling out the endosulfan container would be close to impossible, she said.
Bautista also said that if they bore a hole at the side of the vessel, it would be difficult to pull out the container vans one by one. She said there was also a risk that if divers pull out the container vans, they might accidentally open the van carrying the toxic pesticide.
Danger
The Princess of the Stars sank on June 21 during Typhoon Frank. Only 57 of the 850 passengers and crew survived, making it one of the country’s worst maritime disasters.
While tests showed waters have not been contaminated with the ship’s endosulfan pesticide cargo, there was concern that containers could corrode, allowing the chemical to leak and contaminate the area.
“The potential danger to marine life is a major factor in the decision,” a coast guard biologist, who asked not to be named, told AFP.
Coast Guard chief Wilfredo Tamayo said the contractor, Singapore-based Titan, had experience refloating sunken vessels.
He said refloating the ship would cut the risk of divers being contaminated by leaking pesticide.
An Air Force helicopter circled the ship, whose bow is still jutting above the water, yesterday and dropped pink, yellow and white flowers in a ceremony to mark the end of the divers’ efforts to recover bodies.
Government officials were meeting with representatives of Sulpicio Lines “on how they will go about refloating the vessel,” Bautista said.
Meanwhile, 24 more bodies arrived in Cebu yesterday. Of the bodies, 11 are female and 13 are males.
Bodies
Ryan Go of Sulpicio Lines Inc. said the bodies were mostly exhumed from Burias Island and two nearby islets.
After being underwater for more than a week, bodies are now in a “far advanced stage of decomposition,” said National Bureau of Investigation (NBI) 7 Medico-Legal Officer Rene Cam.
Cam said the bodies could hardly be recognized, with most of them just flesh and bones.
As of yesterday morning, NBI Medico-Legal Division Chief Dr. Renato Bautista said that they managed to process only 39 bodies of the 100 corpses that arrived last
Tuesday.
He said that because of the public viewing and the lack of submitted records, body processing has been slow.
In order to speed up the identification, the NBI and Andreas Klausser, forensic specialist of the International Commission for Missing Persons, asked relatives to submit all necessary requirements as soon as possible. (EPB/AFP)
