Sunken ferry raised after three years
SOUTH Korea’s sunken Sewol ferry emerged from the waters yesterday, nearly three years after it went down with the loss of more than 300 lives and dealt a crushing blow to nowousted president Park Geunhye.
Television pictures showed one side of the 145m-long vessel, its white structure rusted and filthy, above the waves between two giant salvage barges.
Almost all the dead were schoolchildren and it is thought that nine bodies still unaccounted for may be trapped inside the ship.
Raising the ferry intact has been a key demand of the families of the victims.
Several relatives watched the complex operation unfold from a boat near the site.
“To see the Sewol again, I can’t describe how I’m feeling right now,” Huh Hong-hwan, whose 16-year-old daughter was killed in the accident, said. Her body has not been found. Huh and his wife have for years maintained a bitter, defiant vigil in Jindo along with a handful of other relatives of missing victims.
Another parent, Lee Keunhui, tearfully called for public support to help move the ship onshore intact and for a full inquiry into the sinking.
“It breaks my heart to see the ship coming up,” she said. “My daughter has been trapped in such a dirty, dark place for all these years.”
About 450 workers are involved in the painstaking efforts to lift the ship, which has a displacement of 6 825 tons but is now estimated to weigh about 8 500 tons including the silt piled up inside.
Dozens of salvage operators walked over the hull after it came to the surface.
By late afternoon the top of the wreck was 8.5m above the waterline, Seoul’s maritime ministry said.
Once it is raised to 13m, the ferry will be moved onto a semi-submersible ship, which will carry it to the port of Mokpo.
“We believe that it will take about 12 to 13 days to lift the ship and move it to Mokpo,” a ministry official said.
The vessel was lying more than 40m below the waves off southwestern South Korea and the operation, originally scheduled for last year, had been pushed back several times because of adverse weather.
The Sewol sinking left the country deeply traumatised, and a steady stream of citizens made their way yesterday to a memorial altar on Jindo to pay their respects to the ferry victims, bowing and placing white chrysanthemums before a wall of photos of the young victims.
The disaster was a crippling blow to the now-ousted leader Park Geun-hye, whose dismissal over a corruption scandal was confirmed by Seoul’s top court only two weeks ago.
She stayed at her residence for the first few critical hours after the disaster while officials were frantically sending updates and asking for guidance.
She has never specified what she was doing for the seven hours.
Investigations into the disaster, in which 304 people died, concluded it was largely man-made – the cumulative result of an illegal redesign, an overloaded cargo bay and inexperienced crew.
Even though the vessel took around three hours to sink, many of those on board never heard any evacuation order, while the crew were among the first to escape to safety.
Captain Lee Jun-seok was sentenced to life in prison for “murder through wilful negligence” and 14 other crew members were given terms ranging from two to 12 years. – AFP