Philippine Ferry Fire Death Toll Reaches 35 as Bodies Arrive for Identification

On the morning of September 12, thirty body bags arrived at a port near Coron, a resort town in Palawan, Philippines. They had come from the M/V June Aster, a ferry that caught fire two days earlier and sank after running aground. The coast guard was already warning that the death toll of 35 would climb. Tents were being erected at the dock to receive the remains, which would be handed to police forensic teams for identification before families could be notified of their losses.

The fire had started in the cargo hold on the evening of September 9 and consumed the vessel with terrifying speed. According to survivors' accounts relayed by coast guard spokeswoman Noemie Cayabyab, the sequence was brutal in its brevity: a loud explosion, then smoke, then flames spreading through the ship in seconds. People who escaped had no time to put on life jackets. The fire moved so fast that the ordinary rituals of maritime safety—the moments that might have saved lives—simply did not exist. Cayabyab told a press conference on September 12 that the bodies had been found in the economy accommodation area of the ship, where passengers in lower fare classes were berthed.

The ferry's manifest had listed 134 crew and passengers, though two never boarded. Thirty passengers and thirteen crew members were rescued. Fifty-four people remained unaccounted for. Myra Cabilan had flown to Coron searching for her brother, Rammel Gonzaga, a 40-year-old who had taken the ferry from Manila on a business trip. His wife had given birth a month earlier to their daughter. "At dawn, I still believed he survived," Cabilan told a reporter, her voice breaking. "But he's still missing. I have lost hope." Hundreds of others were doing the same work—posting on the Facebook page of a local mayor, searching for relatives, friends, even a dog that had been aboard.

The M/V June Aster was operated by Atienza Interisland Ferries, which said on September 10 that it was cooperating fully with the investigation. But the company's statement could not contain the larger pattern that the disaster exposed. The Philippines, an archipelago of more than 7,000 islands with a population of 116 million, depends on inter-island ferries for transport. Many of these vessels are old, cheap, and poorly regulated. In January 2026, a triple-decker ferry carrying more than 340 people sank off the southern Philippines, killing at least 52. That ship, the M/V Trisha Kerstin 3, went down along nearly the same route where 31 people had died in 2023 after fire broke out aboard the Lady Mary Joy 3. The disasters accumulate. The warnings accumulate. The ferries keep running.

On the morning of September 12, as police investigators arrived at the port and forensic work began, the coast guard said it would provide an update later in the day on how many bodies still remained aboard the wreck. The retrieval was the immediate task. The investigation would come after. And somewhere in the gap between those two phases—between the work of bringing the dead ashore and the work of understanding how they died—families waited for news that most of them already knew was coming.