I Lost my parents (mom and dad) uncle, aunt and cousin. we were in deep shock that they have to take us (the rest of my siblings) away from cebu to recover.

I lost track of what happen, now i wanted to take actions and do what is suppose to be done, it has been two years and dont know who and where to ask. Help!

A thoughtful and balanced piece. Let me just point out a number of things though…

First of all, it is not true that Sulpicio Lines was the only one to have a ship sink in the storm. Sen. Richard Gordon reported that many, many dozens of big and small commercial and private vessels were sunk by Typhoon Feng-shen. Many of these sunken ships were already AT safe harbor! Notice that all by itself, this typhoon caused almost as much damage as all of our usual twenty or so annual storms. Indeed, any evaluation of Sulpicio’s safety record has to be adjudged side by side with other shipping companies and the general maritime safety record and normalized to the volume of traffic they deploy. I have a suspicion that they might not be the worst and could even rank highly in such a dispassionate and objective tally. I don’t believe that even Nenaco has a perfect record.

Second, I think we must face the fact that “Acts of God” cannot be deterred or prevented because this is just a fancy name for the term “accident” which will ALWAYS happen, especially since we are annually in the path of those twenty or more typhoons. Granted human caution and prudence can mitigate the effects, but not entirely.

I think it was Benigno or Bencard or CVJ who made the sensible observation that if we had a half-way decent insurance industry, then market forces and regulatory measures could effectively weight, punish and reward all maritime companies based on their records of service, safety and efficiency.

I think that given the unalterably perilous nature of sailing on the high seas, this is the proven method of living with and dealing with the situation.

I wouldn’t be too insistent on accountability in the form of “running them out of business” because if we look under every rock around here, we are sure to find worms. Even the passengers could be blamed, I suppose for imprudently deciding to travel in such inclement weather, probably not the first time they, or Sulipicio did it either, with no accidents, except this time.

There should be accountability, but it ought to be rational and ought not to give in to the kind of radical precautionary principle that would kill maritime commerce altogether, or impose the kind of insane panic that ensued from the endosulphan scare abetted by environmental activists and other ideological fear-mongers.

We’d all have to stay home except for when we are called out to demonstrate at the US Embassy.