Remembering Doña Paz, The Shipwreck Worse Than The Titanic
It’s five days before Christmas and the ferry Doña Paz is packed with excited passengers traveling home for the holidays. As night settles, they bed down on the decks of the overcrowded vessel, any discomfort eased by thoughts of the celebrations ahead. But then, tragedy strikes, turning the journey into a terrible nightmare at sea.
Dangerously crowded
Nobody knows exactly how many people were on board the M.V. Doña Paz when it left Leyte in the Philippines in December 1987. But it soon became clear that it was dangerously crowded on the decks of the 24-year-old vessel. And when it collided with the M.V. Vector in the perilous Tablas Strait, the outcome was brutal and swift.
The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster
Today, it’s believed that more than 4,000 people died when the Doña Paz caught fire and sank swiftly to the bottom of the Pacific Ocean. And if these figures are correct, that makes it the deadliest maritime disaster to ever occur during peacetime. But what happened on board this ill-fated vessel? And how did the incident claim so many lives?
A tragedy waiting to happen
Like the sinking of the Titanic, which went down 75 years before the Doña Paz, this was a tragedy waiting to happen. And as the dust settled, tales of incompetence and human error made the disaster even harder to bear. Now, we look back on a shipwreck that horrified the world.
The Himeyuri Maru
Built in Hiroshima, Japan, in 1963, the Doña Paz first sailed under the name Himeyuri Maru. At just over 300 feet long, it had capacity for just 600 people during this stage of its career. But 12 years into its service it was sold to the Filipino shipping operator Sulpicio Lines and tasked with ferrying passengers between the southern city of Cebu and the country’s capital, Manila.
