Butterworth ferry terminal tragedy 1988

A few days ago, while I was just beginning my recuperation after the cataract operation, a story appeared in The Star newspaper revisiting the Butterworth ferry terminal tragedy of 1988. I’ll reproduce that story at the end of this posting, but first I want to say this: I was there when the terminal platform collapsed. This is my story too. My experience, my memory.

Almost 40 years have passed since that day. July has always been the time when the St Anne’s Church in Bukit Mertajam holds its annual novena, culminating in the Feast of St Anne, usually observed on the weekend closest to the 26th of July, with the candlelight procession drawing the biggest crowds. Every year the festival draws huge crowds from all over Malaysia and even from neighbouring countries. Not just Catholics, but people of other faiths as well, though perhaps not so much the Protestants or Muslims. In those days, many still crossed over from the island to the mainland by ferry, on foot or with their cars and motorcycles, even though the Penang Bridge was already there.

In 1988, also around July, there was another major event. The committee of the Kong Hock Keong temple had announced that a once-in-60-years procession of Kuan Imm, the Goddess of Mercy, would take place on Penang island. That alone was enough to stir the imagination of the Chinese community. A rare chance to see the Kuan Imm images from this and other temples taken out and paraded through the streets of George Town.

Unlike the St Anne’s Feast, where people made a beeline for the church itself, the Kuan Imm procession would have people lining the streets to watch the floats go by. Since Kong Hock Keong was located right in the heart of George Town, long before UNESCO heritage status came into the picture, the ferry remained the natural way for people from the mainland to cross over.

At that time I was working in Ban Hin Lee Bank. I was living in Seberang Jaya then, newly married, and my daily routine was simple enough. I would drive to Pantai Road in Butterworth, park the car in the compound of a private house, walk to the Sultan Abdul Halim ferry terminal, cross over to the Raja Tun Uda terminal on the island, and then walk the last stretch to the bank in Beach Street.

A few days before 31 July 1988, I suggested to my father and my father-in-law that we should go together to watch the procession. Everyone agreed. So on that Sunday, we drove to Butterworth, I parked in my usual spot at the old couple’s house, and we made our way to the ferry terminal.

We thought it would be easy enough to cross over, but we were wrong. There were already several hundreds of people there, and more were arriving all the time. Add to that those returning from St Anne’s Church, and you were probably looking at a few thousand people packed into the terminal building.

The three of us edged forward slowly with the crowd. The ferry service was still running, but between ferries the whole mass would stop and wait. Then when boarding was announced, those at the back would surge forward. At the front of the enclosed terminal, the pressure built up on the steel structure and the wooden flooring.

Somewhere in that slow, relentless push, my father became separated from me. I could see him ahead, but the distance between us kept widening. But my father-in-law was still beside me. By about 4.30pm, we had cleared the ticket turnstile. We thought we might finally be able to board the next ferry. Spirits lifted a little. My father-in-law next to me, my father perhaps ten feet ahead. Kuan Imm procession, here we come.

Then came a tremendous vibration followed immediately with a loud whoosh.

At first I thought it was a jet flying low overhead. The sound was something like that. And then, in an instant, everything changed. One moment we were enclosed within the terminal structure, the next moment I was staring at open sky. The roof had given way. Hardly 20 feet away, the platform in front of me had collapsed, taking with it everyone standing there.

Panic broke out immediately. The crowd surged backwards. My father-in-law and I had no choice but to move with it. But where was my father? I couldn’t see him anymore. Was he on that section that gave way? There was no way to know.

We were pushed all the way back towards Pantai Road. Nobody could go forward, only back. Somehow my father-in-law and I made our way out of the terminal area. But I knew I had to go back and look for my father.

As I tried to push against the flow, I suddenly saw him. He was walking unsteadily towards me, holding on to his cane. He was alright though. Shaken, but alright. I gave him a hug, more out of relief than anything else, and we made our way back to the car. Not long after that, we drove home in silence.

The incident happened on a Sunday. The next day, Monday, it was back to work for many of us. But how were we to cross over to the island when the terminal had collapsed? I didn’t know what to expect, but to my relief, the ferry service was still operating. The damaged terminal was cordoned off, and foot passengers were diverted to the vehicular ferries. For the next few weeks, until the authorities sorted things out, the lower deck of those ferries was opened to foot passengers. There were no benches, so we stood all the way from Butterworth to George Town and back again every day.

In the end, although the debris was cleared and investigations concluded, that old terminal, built in 1956, was never used again. The vehicular terminal was modified instead to handle both vehicular and foot passengers.

It still feels a bit unreal. One moment we were just three people trying to catch a ferry to see a procession, the next moment we were part of something far bigger and far more serious. Time has moved on, the old terminal is gone, and life has carried on. But memories like this have a knack of staying with you, surfacing when you least expect it.

This past Chinese New Year, for instance, my daughter was talking to her old schoolmate when the topic of the tragedy was raised. They were only one-year-old when it happened. Later, she mentioned it to me in passing and I could see the look on her face when she realised just how close her grandfathers and father had come to being caught in it.

So when I came across this recent article in The Star, it brought everything back in a way I hadn’t quite anticipated. I reproduce it here for the record.

Revisiting the 1988 Butterworth jetty tragedy
Story by ANGELIN YEOH, 18 March 2026

THE year was 1988, and The Star reporter Paul Gabriel found himself at the district hospital in Butterworth, Penang. It was past 10pm on a Sunday and he had set himself a crucial task.

Paul needed to get into the morgue. Five hours earlier, Paul had arrived at the Pengkalan Sultan Abdul Halim jetty where a wooden platform collapsed under the weight of a crowd estimated at around 10,000 people.

The crowd was due to the Buddhist Guan Yin (Goddess of Mercy) festival taking place in George Town on the island, with the annual St Anne’s Feast being celebrated in Bukit Mertajam on the mainland on the same day. The Guan Yin procession was touted as a once-in-60-years event, with tourists coming from as far as Hong Kong, Taiwan and Singapore.

Paul remembered the chaos that followed the collapse of the jetty platform - sirens blaring, helicopters hovering overhead and blood-stained ambulances rushing the injured to hospital.

For a reporter, the most important detail is to uncover and be accurate with the number of casualties – a figure that will let readers understand the full scale of the tragedy.

“It was getting late into the evening and the police were not ready with the full casualty list. I wanted to go the extra mile to get as close a figure as I could,” he said.

Paul was 25 and was a year into his stint as The Star’s Butterworth correspondent. He was familiar with the district hospital grounds as he had covered VIP visits and interviewed victims involved in other incidents.

But stepping into the morgue was new territory for him. He approached a security guard with a story that he was looking for a missing relative.

“I said I was concerned for a relative who had gone to the jetty. I pleaded with him to let me in just for a while,” he recalled.

It took some time for Paul to convince the unsuspecting guard to let him in.

Eventually, he was granted access and went in alone. Then in the dimly-lit morgue, Paul saw black body bags and began counting, notebook and pen in hand.

“I took it that the large bags were that of adults and the small ones that of children,” Paul said, adding that as nervous as he was, he tried to keep calm to get the counting over with as fast as he could.

“I was purely in reporter mode. My thoughts were focused on covering the news and getting the facts as best as I could.”

Paul said he was done in about 10 minutes and left the morgue with the grim task of reporting to his editor that 31 people had died.

Later, police confirmed that there were 32 casualties with more than 400 injured.

The story didn’t end there as Paul said there was more work to be done to interview survivors and ferry officials. Ultimately, how did things go wrong and who was responsible?

He knocked on the door of then-Penang Port Commission (PPC) chairman Datuk Seri Syed Mohamad Aidid Syed Murtaza's office seeking answers.

“I asked him point-blank what he was going to do.... how much of a responsibility he would take.”

Paul remembered how Syed Mohamad Aidid looked him in the eyes to say: “I will not quit. I am not going to run away from this tragedy. I will stay and put things right. That is my commitment.”

Ironically, the PPC chairman was among those who narrowly escaped death, being just five metres away from the crashing platform and metal beams.

Paul said covering the tragedy was one of the biggest stories of his career, one that had also taken him to shootouts and a tour bus hijacking during his time in Butterworth which was notorious for crime back then.

He had no regrets about counting body bags in the morgue. "There was no time to ponder. It was a challenge I had to rise to. Back then, there was no Internet or social media. Everyone was waiting for the news. People would wake up and grabThe Star  first thing in the morning! We had to be the best in delivering the news.

"As a child, Paul had fond memories of the ferries in Penang. He looked forward to being in the vehicular deck as his father drove the family across to the mainland.

“The sea breeze, the seabirds and yes, I think we also saw dolphins from afar!”

But now, whenever he returns to Penang and passes the Butterworth jetty on the mainland, memories of that fateful day 38 years ago come flooding back.

"The scene of the jetty platform collapse and bodies lying on the road is still etched in my mind," he said.

**On Sept 21, 1989, a 200-page report of a Royal Commission of Inquiry set up up to investigate the mishap found the PPC to be negligent. It said the ferry manager ought to have known the limitations of the upper deck, and that the duty of anticipating the passenger load lay squarely with operations which had figures from previous festivals.

The report concluded that overloading of passengers in the waiting area of the terminal caused the platform to collapse, and that the PPC’s operations department had pleaded ignorance on the maximum number of passengers allowed there.