Deadliest maritime disaster (peacetime)

The deadliest peacetime maritime disaster was the sinking of the MV Doña Paz, a passenger ferry operating an inter-island route in the Philippines. At 10:30 p.m. on 20 December 1987, the Doña Paz collided with oil tanker MT Vector while transiting the Tablas Strait east of Mindoro Island. The collision ignited the enormous quantity of fuel on board the Vector and the fire quickly spread to the stricken Doña Paz. Both ships sank within a few hours of the collision. Although the Doña Paz was only registered to carry 1,518 passengers, off-the-books ticket sales and poor record-keeping meant that almost three times that number were likely on board. A 1999 government report estimated the total death toll at 4,385 people.

The Doña Paz was built in 1963 by Onomichi Zosen of Japan. For the first 12 years of its service, the ship was called Himeyuri Maru and had a registered passenger capacity of 608. In 1975 it was sold to a ferry operator in the Philippines and renamed Don Sulpicio. It ferried passengers between the islands of Cebu and Luzon for four years before catching fire at sea in June 1979. There were no casualties, but the ship was written off as a total loss.

In 1980 the ship was refurbished and returned to service as MV Doña Paz. The original interior of the ship, destroyed by the fire, was replaced by one that emphasized capacity over comfort, and the ship was re-registered for 1,518 passengers. Over the next seven years, it worked the busy inter-island route between Tacloban on Leyte, Catbalogan on Samar and the Philippine capital Manila, on Luzon. It had a reputation for poor maintenance, dangerous seamanship and overcrowding, but as these problems were endemic in the Philippine shipping industry at the time, no action was taken.

Given that the entire crew of the Doña Paz died in the sinking, and that the two survivors from the Vector's 13-man crew were in their bunks at the moment of impact, it is impossible to know the circumstances that led up to the collision. According to surviving passengers, the Doña Paz's bridge crew were drinking and watching a movie as the ship motored through the Tablas Strait, with only a single junior crewman on watch. The crew of the Vector, meanwhile, had been struggling with a faulty rudder and were mostly underqualified to operate a vessel of that size. The question of who was at fault was argued in the Philippine courts for decades, with blame being ultimately assigned to the crew of the Vector.

After the collision, the fuel (including both oil and refined gasoline) pouring out of the Vector's storage tanks ignited a massive fire that quickly spread to both the Doña Paz and the surface of the sea around the sinking ships. The flames overwhelmed the ferry before any lifeboats could be launched, forcing passengers to jump, without lifejackets, from the deck into the flaming, oil-covered water below. Only 24 people survived from the 58 crew and estimated 4,342 passengers on board.

The reported 4,000+ death toll figure is disputed by some, however, who have compared the official figures with those of the deadliest wartime maritime disaster, the sinking of the MV Wilhelm Gustloff in 1945. The Gustloff was more than ten times the size of the Doña Paz by gross register tonnage (the measure of a ship's internal volume), and the people boarding it were desperate refugees and retreating military personnel. It had around 10,500 people on board when it left port. For the Doña Paz to have held more than 4,000 people, for a routine ferry voyage between two Philippine cities, it would have had to have been significantly more overcrowded than a ship involved in a wartime evacuation.