Five people were confirmed dead after a ferry with 257 people on board capsized off of Quezon, a Philippine province in the southern part of Luzon island, yesterday.
According to a Reuters report, the ferry was not overloaded.
A total of 252 people were rescued by the Philippine Coast Guard (PCG), which this morning said that all passengers have now been accounted for.
“All the passengers and crew are accounted for but as I have said, we will re-evaluate based on the claims of the families of the missing passengers,” PCG spokesperson Captain Armand Balilo told Reuters.
He said during a news conference yesterday that the boat, a Mercraft 3, set sail in the morning from Real Port and capsized at around noon, and that weather was a “big factor” in causing the boat to capsize.
According to a Rappler report, the ferry was allowed to leave even as the country was bracing for tropical storm Vinta because the area was not covered under any storm signal warnings.
The Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands, is plagued by poor sea transport, with its badly regulated boats and ships prone to overcrowding and accidents.
The latest incident occurred 30 years after another Philippine ferry, the Dona Paz, collided with an oil tanker in a pre-Christmas accident south of Manila that claimed more than 4,000 lives in the world’s worst peacetime disaster at sea.
In 2013, more than 80 people died off the coast of Cebu when a ferry collided with a cargo ship.
