15 Safe, 496 Feared Dead in Sinking of Philippine Ferry

Rescuers said Tuesday that they have found only 15 survivors from a Philippine ship with 511 people aboard that was sent to the bottom of the sea by Typhoon Ruby.

The typhoon, carrying winds of up to 140 m.p.h., flattened thousands of houses and took at least 97 lives on shore. More than 100,000 Filipinos were made homeless by the typhoon, which was in the South China Sea late Tuesday, heading west with top winds of about 100 m.p.h.

Darkness and bad weather forced an overnight suspension of the search for survivors of the Dona Marilyn, a 2,845-ton passenger liner that replaced the Dona Paz on the Sulpicio Lines route between Manila and Tacloban, on Leyte Island.

The Dona Paz sank Dec. 20, 1987, after a collision with a tanker off Mindoro Island, and only 26 people were rescued. The official death toll was 1,749, but some estimates said 3,000 died because many deck passengers making the holiday trip to Manila were not on the manifest.

In suburban Manila, U.S. and Philippine helicopters rescued hundreds of people stranded on rooftops and in trees by the flooding Marikina River.

Coast Guard officials said the Dona Marilyn sank Monday in the Visayas Sea about 300 miles southeast of Manila while it was making the Manila-Tacloban run.

It was carrying 451 passengers and 60 crew members from Manila to Tacloban when it radioed a distress call, said Carlos Go, general manager of Sulpicio Lines.

Lt. Rey Esguerra of the coast guard station in Cebu said rescuers found 11 survivors on Maripipi Island and another small island while four people were found alive in the water.

Vicente Gambito, vice president of Sulpicio, put the number rescued at 18. There was no explanation for the discrepancy.

The Dona Marilyn was authorized to carry about 1,400 passengers and crew.

Officials reported 25 people missing because of Typhoon Ruby at Cagayan de Oro, a coastal city on Mindanao Island, and 15 unaccounted for after a crowded bus plunged into a swollen river Monday in Antique province. The Red Cross said 26 bodies were recovered from the bus.

Floods on Luzon and other islands caused landslides and washed away bridges.

Carlos Dominguez, the agriculture secretary, said preliminary estimates put damage to crops at nearly $46 million, but casualty and damage reports were incomplete.

Ruby’s center passed about 50 miles east of Manila early Tuesday and swept into the Tarlac, Bulacan and Nueva Ecija provinces, the archipelago’s main rice-growing region, the national weather service reported.

Typhoon Ruby was the 18th typhoon or tropical storm to strike the Philippines this year and the strongest on Luzon since Patsy killed at least 175 people in 1970.

Meteorologists said more than 9 inches of rain fell in 24 hours at the Manila airport. Domestic flights were canceled but international service continued.

President Corazon Aquino visited flooded Marikina, the hardest-hit district in the Manila area, on Tuesday and met with some of the thousands who fled their homes.

Two American helicopters from Clark Air Base joined Filipino soldiers and civilian volunteers in rescuing stranded people.

Schools, government offices, the two stock exchanges and many private businesses in Manila were closed Tuesday, and the government said schools will not open today because of widespread flooding and power outages. Some schools were being used as evacuation centers.

At least 110,000 of the nation’s 56 million people were left homeless, officials reported. The government said 400,000 people were “affected,”