Philippine ferry MV June Aster burns off Coron with 5 dead and 86 missing

The Philippine Coast Guard said on Thursday that at least five people are dead and 86 to 87 remain missing after fire tore through the passenger-and-cargo ferry MV June Aster off Palawan on Wednesday evening.

The vessel left Baseco in Manila with 117 passengers and 17 crew, a total of 134 people on a manifest that also listed five motorcycles, an electric vehicle, a forklift, a pickup truck and general cargo. Its licensed capacity is 330. Coast Guard spokesperson Commodore Noemie Cayabyab said the ship had passed its safety inspections.

The blaze started at 18:45 local time, about 1.2 nautical miles (2.2 kilometres) north-east of Barangay Marcilla, as the ferry neared Coron, a diving and island-hopping stop in western Palawan. Preliminary interviews with survivors point to the cargo hold. One survivor described a loud explosion before the fire spread. Some passengers were not wearing life vests.

Forty-three people have been pulled from the water or from nearby boats, including two Chilean nationals. Thirty-eight of the rescued were passengers and four were crew. Seven were taken to hospital on Culion, a larger neighbouring island with more beds. Cayabyab said rescuers have not yet been able to take full statements from the survivors.

Thick smoke was still rising from the hull at 11:00 on Thursday. Extreme heat and the risk of further explosions kept boarding teams off the vessel. The Coast Guard sent two 44-metre ships and three smaller craft. Army rescue boats, local fishermen and private resort owners joined the search overnight. One military aircraft was on standby.

The arithmetic is still moving. A 134-person manifest, 43 rescued and five confirmed dead leaves 86 unaccounted for in one official count and 87 in another issued the same morning. Families waiting in Coron and Manila are working from those two numbers.

Rai Garcia told BBC reporters that three relatives are among the missing: Mae Lorraine Galera-Navoa, her husband Elyzer Navoa, and their three-year-old daughter Hiraya Joy. The family had gone to Luzon for a funeral and was travelling home. A volunteer who helped carry bodies to hospital said the burning ship was about an hour from the main port.

The owner said it was devastated by the losses and was working around the clock. The cause remains under investigation. This sailing was not over capacity on paper. The cargo mix, the explosion report and the unused life vests will sit at the centre of the inquiry once the hull can be entered.

Coron lives on visitors who fly or sail in for limestone cliffs and wreck dives. A burning ferry 2.2 kilometres off the barangay puts that traffic and the local rescue fleet in the same frame. Resort boats that normally run tourists between islands spent Wednesday night looking for people in the dark.

Cayabyab said attempts to put the fire out were still underway on Thursday. Until the smoke drops and the decks cool, the missing stay missing. The Coast Guard's next useful figure will be a reconciled list that matches names on the manifest to names in hospitals, morgues and family reports. That list does not exist yet.

The June Aster's route is a standard inter-island run from the Port of Manila south to Coron. Night passages on that corridor are routine. What is not routine is a cargo-hold fire that is still burning 16 hours later while more than 80 people have not been found.

Philippine domestic ferries carry people and freight on the same deck plan because the archipelago has few alternatives for mid-distance cargo. An electric vehicle and a forklift in the hold change the fire load. Lithium batteries fail in ways that water hoses do not easily stop. Investigators will have to separate that possibility from a fuel or wiring fire. They cannot do that work while the hull is still too hot to enter.

The Coast Guard's public line on Thursday stayed inside what it could count: a manifest, a rescue total, a death total, a missing remainder, and a fire that was not out. Families will judge the operation by whether those four numbers converge on names. Until they do, Coron is a search zone rather than a tourist town.