One Hour from Port:

CORON, Palawan — They were one hour away from arriving. One hour from the port of Coron — one of the Philippines' most breathtaking tourist destinations, a maze of limestone cliffs and turquoise water that draws visitors from across the world. One hour, and the fire started.

"It's really heartbreaking," a fire responder who helped recover the dead told the BBC on Thursday. "I was one of the people who carried and transported the casualties to the hospital last night. They are one hour away from the main port."

The MV June Aster, a passenger ferry owned by Atienza Shipping Lines, caught fire on Wednesday evening, September 9, 2026, as it carried 117 passengers and 17 crew members from the port of Manila toward Coron in the Philippine province of Palawan. The blaze began at approximately 6:45 pm local time, first reported by a staff member on board. Within minutes, video footage shared by the Philippine Coast Guard on Facebook showed the vessel completely engulfed in flames.

By Thursday morning, five people were confirmed dead. Forty-three had been rescued from the water. Eighty-six remained missing.

**What Happened**

The MV June Aster was approximately 2.2 kilometres — 1.2 nautical miles — from the shore, off Marcilla village, when the fire broke out. The relative proximity to land allowed coast guard response teams to launch operations quickly, pulling survivors from the sea into rescue boats in the darkness. But the fire was fast and the manifest was full — 134 people on board in total, and by Thursday morning fewer than half of them had been confirmed safe.

Coast Guard spokeswoman Commodore Noemie Cayabyab, speaking to local radio on Thursday, gave the stark accounting: "Based on the data we have right now on rescued and the casualties, we still have 86 to 87 people who are unaccounted for." She confirmed the search and rescue operation was continuing, with a coast guard ship and high-speed response boats joined by a military vessel, other government boats, private volunteers and local fishermen.

By midday Thursday, the MV June Aster was still afloat but listing badly, its hull charred and gutted. Tendrils of smoke still wafted from the wreckage. The fire had been extinguished — but the search for the missing had not ended.

**The Passengers They Are Searching For**

On the Coron town mayor's Facebook page, hundreds of people left comments — desperate relatives, friends, even someone searching for news of a dog. The scale of the uncertainty playing out in real time across social media illustrated the human dimension of a disaster whose full toll was still being counted.

The Philippines is an archipelago nation of more than 7,600 islands where ferry travel is not a choice but a lifeline — the primary means of movement between islands for millions of Filipinos and tourists alike. The ferry route from Manila to Palawan is one of the country's busiest, serving both domestic travellers and the international visitors who flock to Coron's famous dive sites, shipwrecks and island scenery.

**A Dangerous History**

Philippine maritime authorities fear the MV June Aster disaster may rank among the country's worst ferry fires in recent memory — though they cautioned that the full toll would not be known until search operations concluded.

The Philippines has a deeply painful maritime history. In 1987, the MV Doña Paz collided with an oil tanker in the Tablas Strait, killing an estimated 4,000 people in what remains the world's deadliest peacetime maritime disaster. In 2023, the MV Lady Mary Joy 3 caught fire off Basilan in the southern Philippines, killing 31 passengers and crew. In 2022, a fire on the Mercraft 2 off Quezon province killed seven. The pattern — fire, overcrowded manifest, insufficient time to escape — repeats with devastating regularity across a maritime nation whose safety enforcement record has long drawn criticism from maritime regulators and human rights organisations.

Whether Wednesday's fire aboard the MV June Aster was caused by an engine failure, an electrical fault or some other source remained under investigation. What was certain was that 86 people had not come home — and that off the limestone shores of Palawan, the sea was still being searched.

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