South Korea: Actions of sunken ferry captain 'akin to murder'

[yellowarse]

<header class="entry-header" style="display: block; font-size: 1.23em; line-height: 1.23em; font-weight: normal; ">Captain tells children to stay in the rooms; then he scoots off. Fucking bastard murderer. My hearts go out to the kids, Confucian obedience aside.

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South Korean ferry: death by obedience

By Ralph De La Cruz/Editorial Writer
[email protected]
<time class="entry-date" datetime="2014-04-21T13:52:50+00:00" pubdate="">1:52 pm on April 21, 2014 </time></header>
I’ve never been a big believer in the, “Because I’m the Daddy,” school of parenting. My view has always been that, if I, a thinking adult, could not impose a rule or condition on my child through logic and persuasion, perhaps the rule or condition wasn’t such a good idea.

On the flip side, if my kids can convince me – again, through logic and persuasion – of a particular cause or request, I’d consider acquiescing to it.
After all, my goal as a parent isn’t to always be right. It’s to get my kids to think.

I’m taken back to those core values as I read about the tragic sinking of the Sewol, the South Korean ferry in which 86 people are confirmed dead and another 220 are still missing — and increasingly presumed dead. Most of the victims are from a single high school.

A woman cries at a gathering area for relatives of the missing passengers of the Sewol ferry in Jindo harbor, South Korea. More than 300 people dead or missing. (Uriel Sinai/The New York Times)

The tragic tale was made even more heartbreaking amid reports that the high number of victims may have been linked to the captain instructing passengers to stay in their rooms. It’s believed that the youngsters complied, and may have been entombed in those rooms by the cold, rising water.

Here in the United States, it’s hard to imagine that, first of all, a bunch of high school kids would even listen, much less totally and faithfully comply with an adult’s instructions – even as a ship sinks.

That’s because we Americans – and certainly Texans – value the individual over the group. If that was a boatload of American students, you know they would have been finding any and every way to get off that ferry. But in Asian cultures, which place the needs of the group over the needs of the individual, compliance is de rigueur.

So, you end up with this horrendous death by obedience.

But there’s a second part to the group-first formula. If compliance and obedience are expected, then much responsibility is required of the people giving orders. Which is why South Korean President Park Geun-hye said Monday that the actions of the captain and some crew amounted to “unforgivable, murderous behavior.”

Yep. Some adults make bad decisions, shouldn’t be trusted. And that’s why I prefer to teach my kids to think rather than simply obey.

 

[yellowarse]

Cowardly bastard ...

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Video of fleeing ferry captain angers Koreans

[video=youtube;RKidcDxIlCU]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKidcDxIlCU[/video]

John Bacon, USA TODAY3:39 p.m. EDT April 28, 2014

The captain of the South Korean ferry that sank off the coast of a tourist island can be seen slipping away while hundreds of passengers remain on the doomed ship, a video clip released Monday by Korea's coast guard reveals.

The clip from April 16 shows coast guard officers throwing a rope to the steering house and Captain Lee Joon-seok, in a long-sleeved, black shirt, jumping off the listing ferry. The clip was taken shortly before the Sewol became completely submerged in the Yellow Sea — with hundreds of passengers trapped below the deck.

The clip, along with others released from that day, has reignited outrage at the captain and crew in South Korea. The Korea Times coverage of the video clip is headlined "Coward."

"As he reached the guardrail of the ship, he cautiously stepped into the rescue boat, holding onto every part of the ship he could grab so that he did not fall into the water," the Times reports. "Next to Lee were 14 lifeboats, which he never bothered to release."

The Korea JoongAng Daily notes that the videos show an empty deck. The passengers apparently followed orders and remained below.

"The video is meant to calm public anger about a rescue operation that only saved 174 of the 476 people on board," the Daily reports. "But it's likely to have the reverse effect as it shows the rescuers making no attempt to get inside the ship, where passengers — mostly 11th graders on a school trip — awaited their doom."

A 15-minute-long recording from the family of a dead Danwon High School student begins at 8:52 a.m. on that fateful April 16. Students are beginning to looking for life jackets as the boat lists. At 9:06 a.m., an announcement was made, "Attention, please, the students and teachers of Danwon High School. Do not move from where you are and wait."

The students were confused. "Ah, they need to tell us what is going on," said one student.

All 15 crewmembers involved in navigating the ferry have been taken into custody while prosecutors and a government task force try to determine exactly what happened. Lee has said he initially withheld an evacuation order because rescuers were slow in arriving, and he feared for passengers' safety in the cold, swift water.

The video clips were released on a day when storms, high winds and rough surf slowed the grim search for bodies. Divers have searched about 35 of 111 compartments on the ship, the Yonhap News Service reported, citing South Korea coast guard officials. Rescue workers had considered using small explosives to gain access to some rooms, but the plan drew negative reviews from some families of the missing passengers.

More than 100 people remain listed as missing since the 6,825-ton ship Sewol capsized with more than 470 people aboard. The confirmed death toll remained at 188. Authorities say 174 people, including most of the crew, were rescued the day of the accident, but no one has been found alive since.

On Sunday, South Korean Prime Minister Chung Hong-won resigned amid public outrage over the government's response to the disaster.

"On behalf of the government, I want to apologize for a series of problems from preventive steps to the government's initial response and follow-up measures," he said in a Seoul news conference, as translated by The Korea Herald. "Witnessing the sorrows of those who lost their loved ones and sadness and anger of the people, I felt the right thing for me to do was to take all responsibility as the prime minister."

An investigation that began after the Sewol capsized has uncovered irregularities in management of the ferry's operator, Chung said. He said rampant "corruption and malpractices" in Korean society contributed to the disaster and urged that those issues be addressed.

President Park Geun-hye's office said she would wait until the ferry recovery effort has been fully resolved before formally accepting Chung's resignation.

 

[blissquek]

why so many incident?
got air accident
now water accident
next ..shopping mall collasp with 1000 shoppers trap?

Bedok Mall...

Will PM LHL take responsibility for allowing his GLC to reap in retail rental income prior to completion of a building..

It is really not safe to allow shoppers to go into an uncompleted building. I believe this is the first... Is TOL issued..??

The towering crane above MAY COLLAPSE in a mishap and bring the whole uncompleted building down.

We may have fatalities in the hundreds..

 

[blissquek]

Bedok Mall...

Will PM LHL take responsibility for allowing his GLC to reap in retail rental income prior to completion of a building..

It is really not safe to allow shoppers to go into an uncompleted building. I believe this is the first... Is TOL issued..??

The towering crane above MAY COLLAPSE in a mishap and bring the whole uncompleted building down.

We may have fatalities in the hundreds..

...I have posted this urgent message to PM Lee on his facebook at 4.03 pm...29th apr 2014...

He has to act decisively

 

[yellowarse]

South Korean president apologizes for response to ferry sinking

By Andrew Stevens, Steven Jiang and Holly Yan, CNN
April 29, 2014 -- Updated 2236 GMT (0636 HKT)

Seoul, South Korea (CNN) -- The web of blame in the South Korean ferry sinking is getting wider, and now the country's president is accepting some of the heat.

President Park Geun-hye apologized to the nation Tuesday over the government's initial response to the Sewol ferry tragedy.
"I am losing sleep as there is no news about saving more lives and because there are many families who don't know whether their loved ones are dead or alive still," the president said.

South Korean Prime Minister resigns
"I am at a loss for words for an apology that can be enough to console the pain and suffering even for a little while over insufficiency in efforts made to prevent the accident and also in the initial response to the accident," she added.

"I am sorry, and my heart is heavy that so many precious lives are lost because of the accident."

Earlier Tuesday, Park attended a memorial in Ansan, the Seoul suburb where hundreds of students on board the ship were from. She talked to family members and laid flowers at the memorial site.
"We'll fix the problems and change our practices so we'll have safer nation and won't let them die in vain," Park said.
The ferry sank April 16 on the country's southwest coast. The number of dead now stands at 210. Another 92 are still missing.
"All we are asking for is, 'Bring the dead bodies out,'" a father wailed Tuesday. "We know they are not alive now."

On Monday, South Korean authorities arrested three people on suspicion of destroying evidence connected to the ferry sinking. Investigators also raided a Coast Guard office in a probe of how officials handled the first emergency call from a passenger.

The director and two other people with the Korea Shipping Association's Incheon office were arrested and accused of destroying evidence related to the probe of Chonghaejin, the company that owns the ferry.

The Korea Shipping Association is a trade group that promotes the interests of the country's shipping industry.

The site raided was the Coast Guard building in Mokpo, which includes the South Jeolla province emergency center -- a facility that provides 119 services, akin to the 911 emergency service in the United States.

Investigators are looking into possible dereliction of duty.

 

[yellowarse]

South Korea ferry was routinely overloaded

INCHEON, South Korea (AP) — The doomed ferry Sewol exceeded its cargo limit on 246 trips — nearly every voyage it made in which it reported cargo — in the 13 months before it sank, according to documents that reveal the regulatory failures that allowed passengers by the hundreds to set off on an unsafe vessel. And it may have been more overloaded than ever on its final journey.
One private, industry-connected entity recorded the weights. Another set the weight limit. Neither appears to have had any idea what the other was doing. And they are but two parts of a maritime system that failed passengers April 16 when the ferry sank, leaving more than 300 people missing or dead.

The disaster has exposed enormous safety gaps in South Korea's monitoring of domestic passenger ships, which is in some ways less rigorous than its rules for ships that handle only cargo. Collectively, the country's regulators held more than enough information to conclude that the Sewol was routinely overloaded, but because they did not share that data and were not required to do so, it was practically useless.

The Korean Register of Shipping examined the Sewol early last year as it was being redesigned to handle more passengers. The register slashed the ship's cargo capacity by more than half, to 987 tons, and said the vessel needed to carry more than 2,000 tons of water to stay balanced.

But the register gave its report only to the ship owner, Chonghaejin Marine Co. Ltd. Neither the coast guard nor the Korean Shipping Association, which regulates and oversees departures and arrivals of domestic passenger ships, appear to have had any knowledge of the new limit before the disaster.

"That's a blind spot in the law," said Lee Kyu-Yeul, professor emeritus at Seoul National University's Department of Naval Architecture and Ocean Engineering.

Chonghaejin reported much greater cargo capacity to the shipping association: 3,963 tons, according to a coast guard official in Incheon who had access to the documentation but declined to release it.

Since the redesigned ferry began operating in March 2013, it made nearly 200 round trips — 394 individual voyages — from Incheon port near Seoul to the southern island of Jeju. On 246 of those voyages, the Sewol exceeded the 987-ton limit, according to documents from Incheon port.

The limit may have been exceeded even more frequently than that. In all but one of the other 148 trips, zero cargo was recorded. It is not mandatory for passenger ferries to report cargo to the port operator, which gathers the information to compile statistics and not for safety purposes.

More than 2,000 tons of cargo was reported on 136 of the Sewol's trips, and it topped 3,000 tons 12 times. But the records indicate it never carried as much as it did on its final disastrous voyage: Moon Ki-han, a vice president at Union Transport Co, the company that loaded the ship, has said it was carrying an estimated 3,608 tons of cargo.

The port operator has no record of the cargo from the Sewol's last voyage. Ferry operators submit that information only after trips are completed. In that respect, the rules for domestic passenger ships are looser than those for cargo-only vessels, which must report cargo before they depart.

Details from the port documents were first reported by the South Korean newspaper Kukmin Daily.

In paperwork filed before the Sewol's last voyage, Capt. Lee Joon-seok reported a much smaller final load than the one Moon described, according to a Coast Guard official who had access to the report but refused to provide a copy to the Associated Press. The paperwork said the Sewol was loaded with 150 cars and 657 tons of cargo.

That would fall within the 987-ton limit, but it's clearly inaccurate: The coast guard has found 180 cars in the water.

An official with the Korea Shipping Association's safety team said it is beyond the association's capacity to determine whether a ship is carrying too much cargo. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't allowed to discuss the Sewol case as it is being investigated.

"What we can do is to see the load line is not submerged," he said. The load line, a marking on the outside of a vessel, indicates whether a ship is overloaded, but it does not show whether it has the sort of balance between cargo and ballast that the register report said was necessary.

"The only person on any vessel who knows the exact cargo safety limit, excluding ballast water, fuel, passengers and others, is the first mate," the official said.

All 15 surviving crew members involved in the ferry's navigation have been arrested, accused of negligence and failing to protect passengers. Prosecutors also detained three employees of the ferry owner who handled cargo, and have raided the offices of the ship owner, the shipping association and the register. Heads of the shipping association and the register offered to resign in the wake of the disaster.

The cause of the sinking remains under investigation, but experts have said that if the ship were severely overloaded, even a small turn could cause it to lose its balance. Tracking data show the ship made a 45-degree turn around the time it began sinking; crew members have reportedly said that something went wrong with the steering as they attempted a much less severe turn.

Some experts say the Sewol never should have been cleared to operate after last year's redesign because the owner would not be able to make money under the register's new cargo limits.

The ferry operator "was trying to make a profit by overloading cargos," said Kim Gil-soo, a professor at Korea Maritime and Ocean University in Busan, "and public agencies that should have monitored did not monitor that."

According to South Korean law, the association may report violations to either the coast guard or the state-run port operator, but both entities said they were never told of excessive cargo on the Sewol. The shipping association has refused to say how often it has reported violations.

A coast guard official said the shipping association should have reported any excessive cargo to the operator of Incheon port, where the Sewol last departed. An official with the port operator says it is the coast guard that should have been alerted. The coast guard official spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he was not authorized to speak about matters under investigation; the port official refused to provide his name.

South Korea, unlike many other countries, relies on a private industry-affiliated body to determine whether a ship is safe to sail. The shipping association, whose members are shipping companies and ship operators, took on that responsibility in 1973, following a 1970 sinking in which about 320 people died.

Captains submit paperwork to the association indicating how much cargo is on board as well as crew and passengers.
The shipping association, which also oversees crew education, is partly government-funded, but its biggest business is selling insurance to its members.

Its website says about 75 percent of its 110 billion won ($107 million) budget for 2014 was allocated to its insurance department. The budget for the department dealing with domestic passenger ship safety was 7.4 billion won ($7.2 million). The association has 71 safety inspectors at 13 South Korean ports and its headquarters.

Many of the association's high-level officials come from the Ministry of Ocean and Fisheries, which some say makes it tough for the ministry to scrutinize the group. Ministry officials may be reluctant to question association officials who are former senior public servants, or even their former bosses.

The register, which made the cargo limit evaluation, also is a private entity.

In Europe, North America and Japan, regulation is generally done by public bodies such as the U.S. Coast Guard and the U.K.'s Maritime and Coastal Agency. In Japan, the government checks ships once a year, and conducts unannounced inspections of crew qualification and emergency training.

At the same time, it's common for governments to rely on ship captains to report their loads accurately. It would be virtually impossible to check every boat, experts say.

Since the Sewol disaster, the oceans ministry has been considering taking the job of overseeing passenger-ship safety away from the shipping association, ministry official Kwon Jun-young said. Kwon said they are discussing which agency or agencies should take up on the job.
___
Associated Press writers Jung-yoon Choi in Seoul, Sylvia Hui in London and Yuri Kageyama in Tokyo contributed to this report.

 

[Jah_rastafar_I]

Bedok Mall...

Will PM LHL take responsibility for allowing his GLC to reap in retail rental income prior to completion of a building..

It is really not safe to allow shoppers to go into an uncompleted building. I believe this is the first... Is TOL issued..??

The towering crane above MAY COLLAPSE in a mishap and bring the whole uncompleted building down.

We may have fatalities in the hundreds..

Seriously why do you bother to ask? It's like asking do you think islamic militants will kill anyone that so much as utters a single degradtory word about their religion or if someone happens to be of a different religion.

 

[kukubird58]

hahaha......asking the pax to stay below deck and then running off is really akin to murder....
in an emrgency, the most sensible thing to do is to assemble the pax and crew near to their life boat stations...
even when the lifeboats cannot be launched ...there are still the life rafts which can be launched to save as many lives as possible...
the purpose of life rafts is meant for such emergencies..