Family of 5 among 34 presumed dead in dive boat fire

SANTA BARBARA, Calif. (AP) — High school students, a science teacher and his daughter, an adventurous marine biologist and a family of five celebrating a birthday are among those presumed dead after a fire engulfed a scuba diving boat off Southern California’s coast, trapping dozens of sleeping people below deck.

Authorities on Tuesday ended the search for survivors of Monday’s pre-dawn fire aboard the Conception. It was presumed that 34 people were dead. At least 20 bodies had been recovered and officials continued efforts to bring in other bodies spotted on the ocean bed. Some could be inside the sunken boat.

The only survivors were believed to be the captain and four crew members who were awake on the upper decks. They jumped off the front of the vessel, swam to an inflatable boat at its stern and steered it to a ship anchored nearby.

But flames moved so quickly through the 75-foot vessel that it blocked a narrow stairway and an escape hatch leading to the upper decks, giving those below virtually no chance of escaping, authorities said.

DNA will be needed to identify all the victims. Authorities will use the same rapid analysis tool that identified victims of the deadly wildfire that devastated the Northern California town of Paradise last year, Santa Barbara County Sheriff Bill Brown said.

Brown said he had heard anecdotally that those who died ranged from teenagers to people in their 60s. Most appeared to have been from Northern California, including Santa Cruz, San Jose and the San Francisco Bay Area, he said.

A broken-hearted mother said on her Facebook page Tuesday that her three daughters, their father and his wife were among those presumed dead.

Susana Rosas of Stockton, California, posted that her three daughters — Evan, Nicole and Angela Quitasol — were with their father Michael Quitasol and stepmother Fernisa Sison.

Evan Quitasol 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.”

A team from the National Transportation Safety Board arrived Tuesday to investigate the cause of the tragedy.

“I am 100% confident that our investigators will determine the cause of this fire, why it occurred, how it occurred and what is needed to prevent it from happening again,” safety board member Jennifer Homendy told reporters.

Rosas’ husband, Chris, told the Los Angeles Times that Nicole Quitasol worked as a bartender in Coronado near San Diego and her sister, Angela, was a science teacher at a middle school in Stockton.

The sisters went on the trip to celebrate their dad’s birthday, Chris Rosas said. He described them as “the most kind, most loving people I’ve ever met — and I’m not just saying that because they’re family.”

Nicole worked for a Coronado restaurant called Nicky Rottens. A GoFundMe page the restaurant to help the family described Nicole as “an adventurous & loving soul.”