Anxious families suffer through rescue attempt
South Korea expects death toll from ship sinking to rise as nearly 300 passengers remain missing in chilly waters
SU-HYUN LEE AND CHOE SANG-HUN
THE NEW YORK TIMES JINDO, SOUTH KOREA— The parents waited in dread through the night, huddled under blankets in this South Korean port town, staring out to sea for a sign that rescuers had found any of the 281 people, many of them high school students, still missing after a ferry sank Wednesday.
They refused to sleep in a tent set up for them, preferring to scan the horizon for helicopters returning from the rescue effort 18 km off the country’s southwest coast. As the hours passed with little news of what may be one of South Korea’s worst peacetime disasters, they demanded information from officials who said that fierce tides were keeping divers from entering the ship, which had mostly slipped beneath the waves long before.
“Why are you not going in to save them?” one woman screamed.
Another, Chung Hae-sook, the mother of a missing 16-year-old boy, echoed her rage.
“There is no tomorrow for this,” she said. “My heart is turning to ashes.”
By Thursday morning, the Ministry of Security and Public Administration, which is coordinating the rescue efforts, reported that 175 passengers and crew members had been rescued. Nine people were confirmed dead, including four 17-yearold students, two teachers and a member of the ferry’s crew. But fears of a much higher death toll were stoked as survivors said they believed that many people had been trapped below deck. According to some who spoke to the local media, passengers had been told to remain in their seats and may have stayed there until it was too late.
“People were shouting, ’Break the windows,’ but the water came up too quickly and many could not come outside,” Kim Seong-muk, a rescued passenger, told the television station YTN. Survivors reported hearing a loud noise and feeling a jolt before the ship, the Sewol, began to list and sink. Of the 462 people aboard, 325 were students from Danwon High School in Ansan, about 32 km south of Seoul. By midnight, about 75 of the stu- dents had been rescued. They had been on an overnight voyage to Jeju, a popular resort island, where they were scheduled for a four-day field trip and sightseeing. The students, in their second year of high school, were taking the trip as a break before their last year, when they must take difficult college entrance exams.
One of the students who made it out, Kim Tae-young, said he had seen people in the ferry’s cafeteria and in a game room on a level below him before the ship started listing.
“The water rushed in, up to my neck, and it was difficult to climb to the top of the boat because it was badly tilted,” he told News Y, a cable channel.
“I saw shipping containers tossed off the ship’s deck and floating in the water. I also saw a vending machine toppled and two girls trapped under it.”
The cause of the accident was not immediately clear. By nightfall, no South Korean official or analyst had raised the possibility of foul play by North Korea, which was accused of sinking a South Korean navy ship with a torpedo in 2010, a charge the North denied.
During a brief news conference Wednesday, Kim Young-bung, an executive at the Cheonghaejin Marine Co., which operated the ship, offered the company’s “deepest apology” but few details about what had happened.