Fil-Am family among casualties of California boat fire

People embrace at Santa Barbara Harbor at a makeshift memorial for victims of the Conception boat fire in California. (AFP)

A broken-hearted Filipino mother posted on her Facebook page that her three daughters, their father and his wife were among those 34 killed after a dive boat caught fire off Southern California.

Susana Rosas of Stockton, California, said the five were celebrating her former husband’s birthday and were sleeping below deck when the fire started early Monday.

Rosas named her three daughters Evan, Nicole and Angela Quitasol, who were on the scuba diving boat Conception with their father Michael Quitasol and stepmother Fernisa Sison.

Eldest child Evan was a nurse at St. Joseph’s Medical Center of Stockton, where her father and Sison had worked, after attending nursing school at San Joaquin Delta College.

Sison also worked at the college teaching first year nursing students full-time in 2005 and 2006 and later as an adjunct instructor, according to the school’s spokesman, Alex Breitler.

“Everybody’s devastated. It’s a totally unexpected thing that happened,” said Dominic Selga, Sison’s ex-husband. “What caused the fire, that’s the big question, that’s what we all want to know.”

Selga said his ex-wife’s family had been on the boat five or six times and had been diving for a decade. Their families spent Mother’s Day and Father’s Day holidays together and called the Quitasols “great people.”

The 31-year-old Nicole worked as a bartender at Nicky Rottens Bar & Burger Joint, a Coronado sports bar near San Diego, while Angela, 28, was a seventh-grade Science teacher at Sierra Middle School in Stockton, the same area where she grew up in.

“Nicole was such a smart, loving, energetic and adventurous soul. She will be greatly missed,” the bar’s Bryn Butolph said.

“The biggest thing for me is that on August 17, my sisters were in my wedding,” sister Evita Olson said. “Angela was my maid of honor. She sang me a song for her maid of honor speech. Everything was so normal then…and now they’re just gone.”

Fil-Am Michael Quitasol and his four daughters, three of whom perished with him in a California boat fire.

Search operations were suspended Tuesday after divers recovered 20 bodies and spotted another four to six trapped in the underwater wreckage of the 75-foot (23-meter) boat.

“Today we will begin the process of mapping DNA profiles of the 20 victims that we have recovered so far, so that they can be compared with family samples,” Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown told a news conference.

The boat had been on a diving excursion around Santa Cruz Island, just west of Santa Barbara in southern California, when disaster struck.

Five crew members were awake and jumped into the water when flames burst out around 3:15 a.m. They were rescued by a nearby pleasure craft.

A total of 39 were on board, officials said, leaving 14 yet to be recovered and presumed dead.

Fil-Am sisters Nicole Storm (left) and Angela Rose Quitasol

Other victims included students from a Northern California charter school serving grades 7 to 12, a high school science teacher and his daughter, an Arizona couple and Kristy Finstad, a marine biologist who owned the diving company and was leading the tour.

The 41-year-old Finstad learned how to scuba dive from her parents and studied aquatic biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. She also worked at the city’s water department, according to her Facebook.

She took over her family’s Santa Cruz-based diving company in 2004.

“She’s extremely strong-willed and very adventurous,” her brother, Brett Harmeling, said. “If there was a one percent chance of her making it, she would have made it.”