Ferry’s dead at 156; families push to finish recovery

Divers searching the sunken ferry Sewol surface Wednesday off the southern coast of South Korea. Officials said divers now have to rip through walls to recover bodies.

Divers searching the sunken ferry Sewol surface Wednesday off the southern coast of South Korea. Officials said divers now have to rip through walls to recover bodies.

Thursday, April 24, 2014

JINDO, South Korea - Divers made their way deeper today into the submerged wreck of a ferry that sank more than a week ago as the death toll neared 160 and relatives of the more than 140 still missing pressed the government to finish the recovery operation soon.

At a port near the scene of divers’ efforts, relatives lined up for a daily ritual, crowding around a large sign board to read updates about bodies found overnight and the search plan for the day.

Navy divers were searching the rear of the ferry’s fourth floor this morning, officials posted on the sign board. The coast guard and a rescue company were searching the middle section of the same floor, and another team was to search the front and middle of the fourth floor.

Officials also posted new numbers at the port: 159 dead; 143 missing.

As divers plunge deeper into the ferry, the work is getting harder as they have to rip through cabin walls to retrieve more victims.

Looming in the background is a sensitive issue: When to send in cranes and begin the salvage effort by cutting up and raising the submerged vessel. The government has warned that the work might eliminate air pockets that could be sustaining survivors, but for some relatives that is a long-lost hope.

“Now we think we have to deal with this realistically,” said Pyun Yong-gi, whose 17-year-old daughter is among the missing.

“We don’t want the bodies to decay further, so we want them to pull out the bodies as quickly as they can,” Pyun said on Jindo island, where recovered bodies are taken for families to identify.

That view is not shared among all relatives of the missing, however. One of them, Jang Jong-ryul, was sensitive about the mere mention of the word “salvage” and said most families don’t want to think about it.

The number of corpses recovered has risen sharply since the weekend, when divers battling strong currents and low visibility were finally able to enter the submerged vessel. But Koh Myung-seok, spokesman for a government-wide emergency task force, said the work is becoming more difficult, and divers must now break through cabin walls.

The government has not said when it intends to begin the salvage effort, though it has said it will be considerate of families of the missing.

“Even if there is only one survivor,” Koh said, “our government will do its best to rescue that person, and then we will salvage the ferry.”

For some relatives of the missing, speed in recovering the dead is becoming more important than shrinking hopes that their loved ones might still be alive.

“I’ve seen the bodies and they are starting to smell. It inflicts a new wound for the parents to see the bodies decomposed,” Pyun said.

He and other relatives have set a deadline of today for the government to recover all the bodies, though he conceded they have no way to enforce it.

The majority of the victims of the April 16 disaster were students of a single high school in Ansan, near Seoul. More than three-quarters of the 323 students are dead or missing, while nearly two thirds of the other 153 people on board survived.

Twenty-two of the 29 members of the ferry’s crew survived, and 11, including Capt. Lee Joon-seok, have been arrested or detained in connection with the investigation. Two of the crew members were arrested Wednesday, senior prosecutor Ahn Sang-don said.

Ahn said an analysis of photos and video on the ship before its sinking showed the captain and other arrested crew members didn’t rescue passengers, though it was their duty. Ahn said the crew members were at the ship’s steering room or engine room together before fleeing the Sewol earlier than passengers.

The captain initially told passengers to stay in the cabins and waited about half an hour to issue an evacuation order. He has said he waited because the current was strong, the water was cold and passengers could have drifted away before help arrived. But maritime experts said he could have ordered passengers to the deck - where they would have had a greater chance of survival - without telling them to abandon ship.

It was not the crew but a passenger who first alerted authorities that the boat was in distress, the coast guard confirmed Wednesday.

An emergency call was made 8:52 a.m. last Wednesday to the Jeonnam 119 fire department, which transferred the call to the Mokpo coast guard office, the coast guard said in an emailed statement. The ferry made its first distress call three minutes later.

Yonhap news agency reported that the caller was a student from Ansan, and remains missing.

The cause of the disaster is not yet known. Ahn said investigators are considering factors including wind, ocean currents, freight, modifications made to the ship and the fact that it turned just before it began listing.

Tracking data show that the ship made a 45-degree turn, and that it turned about 180 degrees in the course of about three minutes around the time the vessel began to list.

A maritime professor who spoke with the Sewol’s third mate, who is among those arrested and was steering the ferry before it sank, said he suspects a problem with the steering gear caused the sinking.

Information for this article was contributed by Youkyung Lee, Jung-hee Oh, Kyeongmin Lee, Chang Yong-jun, Foster Klug, Jung-yoon Choi and Leon Drouin-Keith of The Associated Press.

Front Section, Pages 2 on 04/24/2014