Why did the captain of the capsized Korean ferry Sewol not order the lifeboats to be launched? ‘That’s easy,’ says maritime author John Guy in his latest blog post: ‘The Sewol has no lifeboats.’ Read his full blog post here on SWZ online.
From John Guy’s blog:
‘That’s right, the ferry which sank claiming the lives of around 300 school children did not have any lifeboats. International rules require passenger ships to have lifeboats, but the Sewol was licensed only for the Korean coastal trade, so had to comply only with local rules. That appears to mean it needed only inflatable liferafts. Which are very much harder to deploy and get into than lifeboats.
An article on the quirky US maritime website gCaptain by Fred Fry looks into this and shows the liferafts in place after the ship began to list.’
‘A lot of the kids who died were around 16 years old. I can still remember when I was that age, trying to board a liferaft in the freezing waters of the Solent. That was a drill from a sail training ship, under more or less controlled conditions. It convinced me never to use a liferaft in an emergency unless I had to.’
Sewol Captain Wanted to Wait for Rescue Craft
‘The reason why coastal ferries don’t have lifeboats is because they are supposed only to trade close to the coast, meaning that rescue craft can get to them quickly. The captain of the Sewol is recorded as saying he did not want to order the evacuation of the ship until there were enough rescue craft close to the ship.’
‘When you know there were no lifeboats you begin to see his reasons. He could have ordered the children to begin abandoning ship into the rafts, knowing that he was sending a fair few of them to a certain death in freezing cold water and strong currents, because they would certainly not have been able to board the rafts safely. He chose not to do that. He thought he had enough time to wait for rescue craft to evacuate safely.’
Being too Close to Home Cost Lives
‘We know now he made the wrong choice. But before you rush to condemn him, think what choice you might have made under the same circumstances. An international passenger ferry would have had other options. The coastal safety standards were wrong, and many of those kids died because they were too close to home.’
‘Leaving aside all the other questions as to why the incident happened, the enquiry into the Sewol has to ask one big question: Is it safe to have a ship which relies only on liferafts? Anyone who has ever tried to board one knows the easy answer. No.’
About John Guy
John Guy served on merchant ships and warships for sixteen years before becoming a ship inspector and then a journalist. He advises companies and organisations working in the global shipping industry on media and crisis management and wrote two maritime novels, “The Golden Tide” and “The Reluctant Pirate”. He also has a blog on his website.
SWZonline kindly thanks John Guy for his permission to re-publish his blog post here.
