118 Safe, 393 Feared Dead in Philippine Sinking : Typhoon Also Kills 100 Ashore, Leaves 100,000 Homeless

MANILA — Philippine coast guard rescue teams continued their grim search for bodies today in the Visayan Sea as the nation faced its second major maritime disaster in a year, the sinking of a passenger ferry in a major typhoon that also devastated the Philippine agricultural heartland.

At noon today, government radio reported that 118 survivors had been found from the 3,000-ton passenger ship, the Dona Marilyn, which left Manila carrying 511 passengers and crew members shortly before Typhoon Ruby struck the Philippines on Monday.

Navy Capt. Samuel Cortez, district coast guard commander in Cebu, said 23 survivors were found on the islet of Maripipi. Government radio reported later today that 95 survivors had been found on the shores of nearby Samar Island. The report also said that the bodies of 20 victims, mostly women and children, had been bound washed ashore on Samar.

Reports from rescue ships said the survivors spoke of additional passengers who swam safely to nearby islets after the ferry reported engine trouble and took on water in the stormy seas north of the central Philippine island of Cebu.

As rescuers continued recovering bodies from the choppy waters and shorelines near where the Dona Marilyn radioed its final distress call Monday, the ship’s owner braced for its second major disaster in 10 months.

The Dona Marilyn is owned by Sulpicio Lines, the private shipping corporation that also owned the ill-fated Dona Paz, which sank last Dec. 20 with the loss of more than 2,000 passengers in what officials consider the world’s worst peacetime maritime accident.

As with the overcrowded Dona Paz, which carried hundreds of unmanifested passengers when it collided with a tanker off Mindoro Island and sank, there were widely conflicting reports on the number of passengers on the Dona Marilyn. Sulpicio Lines spokesmen said the ship’s manifest showed 451 passengers and 60 crew. But local news reports quoting passengers’ relatives indicated that the ferry was carrying more than 511 people.

Typhoon Ruby, with its winds of up to 140 m.p.h., also inflicted heavy damage elsewhere in the Philippine archipelago.

On land, the death toll stood at about 100, as toppled coconut trees and power poles crushed homes, and swelling rivers and landslides engulfed entire villages. A third of the deaths occurred when high winds swept a bus carrying nearly 50 passengers into a river gorge in the central province of Antique.

Disaster officials said more than 100,000 people were left homeless in the storm, which is expected to hurt President Corazon Aquino’s ambitious economic recovery program.

Agriculture Department officials estimated Tuesday that the storm destroyed more than $5-million worth of the banana crop on central Luzon Island, the country’s principal growing area north of Manila. Additional damage was done to coconut and rice crops, but officials were still estimating the losses today.

In Manila, many neighborhoods remained flooded and without power. Heavy rains continued to hamper repair efforts today, and schools, government offices and many businesses remained closed.

Major roads were littered with felled trees and power lines, and emergency shelters were packed with thousands of residents evacuated from their submerged or flattened homes.

Heroic Rescue Operations

Philippine air force rescue team members were heralded as heroes today after a daylong drama in the city’s inundated Marikina district, where helicopter pilots and daring ladder-rescue experts battled high winds and torrential rains to pluck hundreds of victims from trees, telephone poles and rooftops.

At Clark Air Base, U.S. Air Force officials appealed to all personnel at the sprawling installation to conserve water after the typhoon knocked out the base’s water distribution system.