Welcome to Stuff you Should Know, a production of iHeartRadio.
Hey, and welcome to the podcast. I'm Josh, and there's Chuck and Jerry's here too, and this is Stuff you should Know, part of our ongoing marine disaster suite. I guess.
Yeah, I'm glad we took a break. It's good to be back.
Yeah.
It's very sad, I mean, just sort of devastating topic today, as they usually are. This one's especially sad. I think it's more recent and involved kids. But yeah, we were on a run there for a while and we took a break, and now we're back with more maritime disaster Yeah.
In the Orang Madon short stuff, You're like, this is it for a while? Man?
I think I did. I totally Can we stop with these?
Yeah? So yeah, the Sewell disasters what we're talking about. Sewell was the name of a faery that went between the southern tip of South Korea and Jaju, kind of a tropical island resort, a resort island off of Korea, and in twenty fourteen, on April sixteenth, actually we're releasing this on the twelfth anniversary. With this tragedy, three hundred and four people died, including two hundred and fifty eleventh grade high school students who were on a class field trip.
Yeah, eleven of their teachers. Very sadly, one of the teachers who survived took his life two days after this disaster with you know, a case of sort of survivor's guilt. Yeah, and it was very the one that really the thing that really burns me up about this one is, you know,
it wasn't an iceberg or a bad storm. It was it was all sort of human caused and even once this thing started started listing and tilting to the side, there was still plenty of time to rescue everyone, and it just didn't happen.
Right. It's like Oprah should walk up and be like you're to blame, You're to blame, and you're to blame. Like everyone was to blame except for the people who died. Essentially, there's like it was just totally senseless. There was no need for it, Like it could have been totally avoided. And this had such an enormous impact on South Korean society. They call it four sixteen because it happened on April sixteenth,
much the same way we call September eleventh. Nine to eleven in the United States, And there was a public survey that was done I think by PW that said, like, what are the most important historical events in the history of Korea? And the Sewel disaster was a close second behind the Korean War. That's how important and how huge of a sweeping impact this had on the entire society.
You know what, Emily's dad calls nine to eleven?
What nine? For real?
Yeah?
Is he being facetious?
No, that's just how That's how Rick rolls. He's got his own language.
Does he. If so, if he breaks his legs as he shout called nine to eleven.
I'm not sure. Uh, all right, that's probably the last joke I'll tell I want to go ahead and get one in there.
Okay, thank you.
Uh so, let's let's start the story here. Don Juan High School is that's d A N W O N not Don Juan like Don Juan DeMarco. It is a public school. It's about an hour and a half outside of Seoul. It's in a city called Ensan. And this is, like you mentioned, a class trip. This is a sort of an annual tradition where the eleventh graders go on this trip to this gorgeous island which is also a UNESCO Heritage Site, and I think we're gonna be doing an episode on that pretty soon, right unscom Yep.
For sure.
And the whole idea is that they go before they have to sort of buckle down and get ready for their version of their the SAT, the c SAT, which is what they have in Korea. So they go for this great trip every year, sort of a last hurrah before they start their senior year, and that's what they set off for on the night of April fifteenth, twenty fourteen.
Yeah. Also, we need to do at least the short stuff on the sea set. They call it the sun Jung, which is it makes the SAT look like a walk in the park.
Yeah.
Really, it's insane. I saw one question from it. It was like, I don't know anyone who could answer this question. Oh wow, okay, yeah, it'll be an interesting one. So they embarked for Jeju from Incheon, like I was saying, and it was gonna be an overnight journey. I think it's a thirteen hour faery trip to Jaju. And there was a really heavy fog, so much so that the teachers on the trip considered like just canceling it. It was just it just seemed
that dangerous. And finally everyone read, including the crew of the Seul and the teachers, that let's just go ahead. Two and a half hours later, they finally set sail, but they were the only commercial vessel to leave port that night because that fog was so bad.
Yeah, and as you'll see, that was I guess we'll go ahead list that as number one of ways that this disaster could have been averted. A these kids not going at all, but B they you know, they're trying to go faster because they got a later start, and that seems like it affected the disaster.
Yeah, for sure. The Suwal had also been around for twenty years. It had served twenty years as a Japanese ferry off Okinawa called the Namanui, which is a Shinto shrine in Okinawa that looks over the sea and gives blessings for safe trips to the ships going in and
out of port. And the ferry which was the Namanui, was purchased and re christened the Sewal by chonghai Jin Marine, which is the company that owned the ferry, and two things to increase profits they expanded passenger decks to add basically two more passenger decks, They expanded the cargo area, and they essentially made this ship ripe for overloading. Yeah, that's number one. Number two, the Korean government had recently extended the life of ferry ships from twenty years to thirty.
The reason it got retired in Okinawa is because it's just sensible to only let them go for twenty years. In Korea South Korea, you could run them for thirty years, which is why chung Hijin Marine bought that ship and put it into service.
Yeah. I bet they got a pretty good deal on it at that age, you know.
Yeah, I'm sure the o Canawans were like you sure you want this, and they were like yeah.
So there were four hundred and seventy six total passengers on board, but there was also like you said, it was ripe for overloading, and that's what they did. They had more than twenty one hundred tons of rate on board. There were construction materials, There were cars and trucks. When you see you know, video from sort of inside this thing while it was pitching and tilting, you see like huge work trucks like being slammed against the wall and
into other cars and things like that. In the end, it was about a thousand tons over what its maximum capacity was supposed to be, so.
Like about almost fifty percent over Yeah, maximum capacity. That's insane, and we'll explain how they got away with that eventually. So, like you said, they were trying to make up for lost time, so they sailed faster than they normally would have to make it to Jaju on their schedule time. Remember they left two and a half hours late. The third mate was on the bridge in charge earlier that morning. Yeah, it's not entirely inappropriate. This was like open sea. It
should have been basically in nothing stretch. But the point is that the captain, the first make, and the second mate were not on the bridge. The third mate was in charge, and the third mate ordered the quartermaster at about eight forty five am to make a sudden turn. I don't remember if it's port or starboard. And when the ship made the turn, it turned really hard and there was a horrible crashing sign and all of a
sudden it tilted. It listed in the water and I think something like twenty degrees to start.
Yeah, so that's that's a bad start. It did not right itself, because what had happened was, you know, a lot of that stuff down there wasn't secured like it should have been. And when I said, you know, trucks went slamming against the walls and into other cars, that's what happened. All this heavy stuff shifted in such a way that it would not shift.
Back right exactly. So not only was it not going to write itself, it was going to just keep listing and listing and listening. And that's exactly what happened. There is a short documentary I thought it was produced by Laura Poetrous, which that's quality stuff. She did the essentially the film for the Snowden Files and Citizen for the documentary. Anyway. You can find it on YouTube. I think New Yorker
bought it. It's called In the Absence, and it is this almost in real time, like twenty plus minute documentary that shows the ship sinking and then against it puts the like the conversations between all the people who are supposed to be rescuing this and doing something about this, and just puts on full display man the incompetence, the indifference, the arrogance, the just the negligence, all of the enses, all the bad ences, like are just on full display.
It's so shocking to hear this and see it and know what happened and know who's inside there, and then to hear what they actually did or didn't do to to rescue them.
Yeah, like like tied to the minute. So you'll see, you know, toward the end of this documentary, it's a
hard watch, but it's well well worth checking out. You'll see like ninety five percent of this boat is underwater and sunk with all these people on board, and you'll hear in real time, like at that exact moment in time, you know, the coastguard saying like you think we can land a helicopter on this thing now and try and get some of these people out, and other people that are there, like I think, I don't think we can land a helicopter on it anymore, And it's like it's
gone basically at that point. It's just it's infuriating to watch, you know.
Yeah, even after that, the guy who's like, oh, that's a shame that we can't land the helicopter that would look really good.
Yeah, yeah, Yeah.
It's just disgusting. Right, So the kids on board they all had smartphones twenty fourteen in South Korea. Every single one of them had a smartphone, and there are a lot of viving documents and texts from the kids on board. Yeah, so we know a lot of what happened in the first Like I think all the way up for like almost an hour and a half after this ship listed of what was going on, and at first the kids were fairly calm. Twenty degree list is substantial, but it's
not panic time necessarily for everybody. It feels like people
are still in charge. Things are okay, but there's conversations between the kids that are like, is this one of those things where the only people who survive are the ones who don't follow orders, you know, Like yeah, and they're joking about how the ship is sinking and all that, and little did they know that within an hour they would all be dead, essentially from the ship actually sinking and from just the terrible guidance or lack of guidance from the people who were in charge.
Yeah. Well, the guidance was stay where you are, put on your life best and stay in your cabin. There was silence for a little while and then when you know, they came over the loudspeaker. They repeatedly, I think seven different times as this thing was sinking, they were like, stay in your cabins, stay in your cabins, and remain calm. Parents were calling or students were calling their parents from
their phones. There was that brutal interview with a one parent that it was a couple, but the mom was like her one regret was she didn't say, like, stop following their instructions, get out while you can. But as you know, I just hated that because as a parent, you aren't there. You don't know what's exactly happening, although it was played out in real time on the news, So you think that the people that are supposed to be doing the right thing or doing the right thing.
So you want to tell your kid like, hey, listen to what they're telling you, and not like, hey, don't listen to what they're saying. Get out of there.
Yeah, go jump off the side of the ship. Yeah you know, yeah, Like that's you can totally understand where she's coming from. But I can also understand that that's her greatest regret.
Oh yeah, I just hated it for her or to, you know, all these years later to still feel that way, you know.
Yeah. So eight fifty five am, ten minutes after the ship turned and started to list, the Sewall crew makes their first distress call. Three minutes earlier. The very first distress call from the Sewall was made by one of the students. Yeah, they called one one nine, which is nine one one in Korea, and they said like, hey, I'm on a sinking ship, Please send some help. And at first you could tell the one one nine operators
like wait, what are you saying? Yeah, yeah, because they were essentially like, so, wait, you're on a ship that you're seeing a ship that's sinking, And the guys like, no, I'm on a sinking chip like please send help. This was three minutes before the crew ever did anything, like like did anything about this.
Yeah, So they were ahead by three minutes. Over the next half hour, there were a lot of calls from the crew to all kinds of people. Coast Guard support obviously they called. The crew was like, hey, we're trapped on the bridge. We don't know what's going on with the passengers. The ship is definitely sinking, So there was no ambiguity about what was going on. And they said to the coast Guard, like should we evacuate and they said, hey,
it's a captain's decision. That's why you have a captain on board, basically, And that was over the next half hour from those initial calls. In the middle of this, at nine fourteen, they made the crew made distress calls to local fishing boats like hey, anybody that's near us, we need help right now, and a lot of them showed up.
Yeah, I think there were some that had already showed up even before the call. And half of the people who were rescued, who survived the sinking of the Siu All Ferry were rescued by civilian fishing boats. Yes, in ten minutes. Ten minutes spanned half of the survivors were rescued. This was twenty thirty I saw as much as forty minutes, although I don't think that's right. Before the coast Guard even showed up. These fishing boats were there rescuing people.
The first coast Guard boat, and I think the only coast Guard boat bear that in mind, showed up at nine thirty five. So this is fifty minutes after the first the turn, and what forty minutes after the call for help. The coast guard finally shows up. The ship is at sixty degrees. Now, this is that's nuts. You're like standing on the wall essentially, and the coast guard did what the coast guard is supposed to do. The
crew did what they were supposed to do. The coast guard evacuated the crew from the bridge and got away from the ship. The crew left the ship, including the captain who there's a very clear image of him being assisted off of the bridge and onto the coastguard boat, who had not very importantly given the order to evacuate the ship. He abandoned ship and did not explain to the passengers that they needed to get off of the ship.
Yeah, it's the worst thing a boat captain can do. They're supposed to be the last person off, and this guy was one of the first people off in his underwear. This you know, you said the crew all got off, It wasn't everybody. I think there were fourteen crew members
that were rescued at nine to forty seven am. A few crew members, to their credit, went down with the ship and were doing everything they could, so they were you know, there were some heroic actions going on a helicopter shows up around this time starts to rescue passengers, but again a helicopter rescue. They're getting people off like one at a time, lifting them to safety, and they still these kids are still being told to stay in their room. So it's not like everyone was on top
of the deck or you know, wherever they could be seen. Right, most of them are still in their room. And then they had life rafts. They had life rafts for like eleven hundred people. There were forty four life rafts could carry twenty five people each, and only one of them was automatically deployed.
Right, So there is a point where the water is starting to rush in so much that even somebody who's been raised their entire life in a collective of society to just follow the orders of the people in charge, are going to leave their cabin, are going to stop listening and leave their cabin. That finally happened, but by this time it was much too late for most of them. It's very, very hard to get out of a sinking ship because the water rushes into every area that has
air to fill it up. There's a suction mechanism that can create the movement of the water makes it less dense, so you are likelier to sink. It's very hard to get out of the inside of a sinking large ship, and so there were stories of some of the survivors seeing their friends like trying to get out and then see them just get sucked back into the ship in the water. And that was it. So the sew wall
within just a couple hours chuck. It went from completely above water to totally sunk, totally submerged, and there was still three hundred and four people trapped inside when it sank.
Yeah, and that single Coastguard boat, rescue boat that was there, it sat there and watched the whole thing happen. In fact, worse than that, those fishermen in the fishing boats that were there pulling passengers out, the coast Guard ordered them to retreat and to get out of there. Of those four hundred and seventy six I think you said three hundred and four were trapped inside, only three of those were crew members, and there were young crew members who stayed aboard to try and help.
Yeah, two of them were an engaged couple.
Yeah, all right, we're getting pretty worked up in upset, so maybe we should take a break and come back after this with more on the disaster.
Okay, we'll do that, I think you said earlier, Chuck, we're back. By the way that the sinking was broadcast on TV, essentially all of the news just covered it constantly the entire day and then some and there was a lot of misinformation that was coming out. You can actually hear where it began, Like very early on with the ship almost fully capsized and mostly sunk, one of the coastguard guys says, yeah, everybody's safe, they're all they're
all evacuated. So the families who were watching this essentially had and assurance that their kids were safe, they were alive. As the ship was sinking, and very quickly it turned they learned that no, this is not the case. That a substantial number two hundred and fifty of them were now dead, were now maybe even not dead, but trapped at the bottom of the Yellow Sea in a boat and we're going to die.
Yeah, seventy five of the students made it through. So the families, you know, almost immediately were like, we need to hold someone accountable, We need some answers for what happened out there, and they never really got answers. So when that happened. They really went hard into raising good trouble, becoming activists. Basically, they had candlelight vigils. They drew together
thousands of people at these things. They camped outside of the President's residence, which is the Blue House in South Korea. A lot of them shade their heads for publicity. They went on hunger strikes, they were going to marches and speaking at rallies. And because of this and this thing just seems like it keeps getting worse and worse and worse it does. South Korea didn't say like, yeah, we
need to really get to the bottom of this. All these parents are devastated, they lost their children, so let's get to the bottom of it. Instead, these right wing websites started putting out and commentators start putting out stories about kind of what happened in Newtown, Connecticut, like putting out stories about the families, accusing them of being North
Korean agents trying to get rich off this tragedy. Not only that the official government started trailing some of them, started staking out their houses, started tapping phones, trying to dig up dirt to use against these parents of children who were killed by neglige Yes.
They went to great length and spent a lot of money and effort to deflect the focused attention and blame from itself, the government and parents onto whoever yes on the parents. It's the most cynical evil thing you could possibly do as a government in a situation like this when you're largely to blame. And so the these families
didn't stop as they were vilified. There was like a huge cleaving between the formerly fully sympathetic and on their side public and these families because now all of a sudden, it's like, well, wait a minute, are they trying to get rich? And the media was fully culpable in this.
They were instrumentalized. I've seen it described by the government went along fully and so whatever the government wanted them to say, they would just have some prosecutors, have some journalists to hang out off the record, feed them a bunch of stuff, and then the next thing that would
be the new news cycle. So the government was really able to deliberately manage all of this, this tragedy, and one of the things they did was scapegoat the families or get them ostracized at least, and the families did
not This didn't shut them up at all. If anything, it created even more activists and deep in the activists, activism in the ones that were already kind of radicalized by this, And so over time it became clear that there was a bunch of people to blame, and the parents were not in any of the categories.
No, there's basically kind of five buckets of people who failed here, obviously the captain and the crew, except for the three that stayed behind, who were you know, commendable obviously, but you know, they, like we said, they didn't evacuate anybody, no announcements to evacuate. Everyone's told to stay there while this thing sank. And the other thing too is not
having that cargo security. You know, you shouldn't have cars and trucks sliding around and construction equipment sliding around when you make a sharp turn. Yeah, and making that sharp turn was also a big error.
The coast guard also was very Uh. I don't think they were ever off the hook. They were blamed from the moment the whole thing happened to the today. Yeah, they did not do almost anything. It's just astounding the little that they did.
That's what I don't get, Like why why.
I don't know why. But I do know that as a direct result of this, the coast Guard, the North Korean Coast Guard was dissolved. Everybody got removed, like, sorry, there's no coast guard anymore. We have to figure out a different way to do this. That's how incompetent and negligent. Their response was that the Coastguard was disbanded because yeah, yeah, so I don't know why, but that's that was the result. That's how bad it was.
Well, and I think that's one of the more magning, maddening things is even when they have done follow up with all this, I don't think anyone ever said like, well, there was a communication breakdown here and it happened because of this. It was and when you're listening to the comms in real time, it's just it's infuriating.
Oh. It was like anybody who had a finger pointed at them, what they did was just turn and pointed at the next person. Yeah, there was no like account no accountability.
Well put, the ferry company was another bucket. Obviously their profits were more important than the safety of their passengers. Was overloaded. Like we said, apparently their emergency training wasn't very robust, and the workers that they hired were apparently low paid contract workers. They didn't have a lot of experience.
Right, So the ferry companies cutting every corner they can to maximize profit and putting profit ahead of passenger safety by a lot, right. The port inspectors too, they didn't do their job. They did their job by looking at what's called freeboard, which is the distance between the ship I guess the main deck and the water. And they basically just eye balled it and said, oh, it's not sitting too low in the water, so I guess it
passes inspection. From what I understand, they did not go aboard the ship and actually like visually see any of the cargo. That was the inspection they did for a passenger ferry. And it gets even worse because you might say, like, okay, well, I mean it was like it wasn't too low in the water. Who cares if it was overloaded. The reason it wasn't too too far or too deep into the water was because the ferry company had scuttled ballast to
use that weight for more cargo. And not only did that was that just highly illegal, but the lack of ballast made the ship less seaworthy.
Yeah, it made it very unstable. So something like a hard turn all of a sudden, you're going down, you know.
Isn't Isn't that insane?
Yeah, it's crazy. The South Korean government is the fifth bucket because, as you'll see here coming up in the next section, they had a terrible response to everything after it happened. There were about I guess it's been about twelve years since it's happened. Like you said, I guess it's gonna be on the anniversary that this is released.
But there have been nine different government investigations and inquiries, and we'll go over the litany of arrest I mean, that's the only sort of I mean, you don't want to call it a good thing, but at least they a lot of people serve time for this, you know.
Yeah, they definitely did. One of them was the captain. His name is Lee June Siak, and he was put on trout for negligent homicide. His defense was that he was stunned and confused, yeah, by the accident, and he just did he wasn't able to make decisions because he was so stunned and confused. That was his defense.
It's not captain, that's not what you want to hear out of a captain.
No, for sure, the I guess. He also gave conflicting testimony. In one, he lied and said that, oh, he did give the order to evacuate, but his crew didn't listen. I think he even lied and said that he used a bullhorn to tell everyone to evacuate. He definitely did not do any of those. Later, he gave a somewhat more rational and sensible explanation. He said, essentially, there's very strong currents in this area. That's true, the water is
very cold. It was like fifty seven degrees farent height or I think seventeen degrees celsia, so I don't remember. Pretty cold. And that also he didn't want people jumping in the water before there was anyone around to rescue them. Right, All of that makes a little bit of sense, but none of it justifies or excuses or explains never giving the evacuation order, abandoning ship while it was still fully
loaded with passengers. Like, there's no way to defend his actions, even if some of his thinking was potentially reasonable.
Yeah, he said that he didn't know. He claimed to not know the status of the passengers when he abandoned ship, which in admission, you know, in and of itself, is awful.
And he went to trial. Of course, we're going to talk about, you know, a lot of the trials here at the end, but his trial was the most sort of because you know, it was on TV, the captain, you know, coming out in his underwear and getting on that it was it was just laid bare like you know, in all ways for everyone to see with their own eyeballs. So that was the trial that was really sort of the most striking publicly, I think. And he was sentenced
to thirty six years in prison. Fourteen members of the crew, the fourteen that evacuated, they got sentenced as well, from five to thirty years, but they appealed the verdict and made it worse. He eventually got a life sentence out of this, and some of the crew members had their sentences dial back a little bit because they were acting on captain's orders.
Right. A lot of the families were like, let's give him the death penalty. Even though South Korea hadn't used the death penalty since nineteen ninety seven. They believe that this was a prime candidate for the death penalty. So early on chuck really early on is the government's just doing anything it can to deflect blame or responsibility. They zero it in on one of the owners of Cheonghijin Marine, which owned the ferry. He was a billionaire named yubjung Un.
He's seventy three. His family was the co owner of the company and also a bunch of other companies, And the government did the same thing that it later did with the families. It basically started feeding secretly info to the media, and the media turned around and reported on it, and all of a sudden, I saw this graph of you know, day by day news reports on the Seawall
ferry sinking. They start to go down as the reports on yubjong Un go up into there's nothing almost on the sinking and everything on this billionaire who's now fled and is on the run.
Yeah, so he goes on the lamb. He's a very well known guy in South Korea at the time, even before this, mainly because well, I mean, he was a billionaire businessman, so that's one, but more so for being the founder of the Evangelical Baptist Church in Korea, so he's someone that's well known. They issue an arrest warrant. About a month later, he had fled. By this point, there's a nationwide man hunt and for many many months. What we learned after the fact was he was hiding
in a panic room at his vacation house. And then that summer in July they found him in the woods. Basically, he was in a plumb orchard, had killed himself. His body was badly decomposed at that point, so he, you know, the most cowardly thing he could do. He fled, hid, and then took his own life to avoid responsibility.
Yea, there's something I mean, even though he was very much made a scapegoat by the government, that doesn't mean he was innocent or not responsible. He just wasn't the only one responsible. And then one other thing that makes this whole government thing even more cynical. They found his body a full month before they publicly acknowledged it. Yeah, because they kept he was just such a great way to distract the public from the actual problem, the tragedy.
And when they finally did release that they had found him and the manhunt was over, it was because there was a really unpopular bill that would allow hospitals to make more profits over patient care. That was making the news, so they bumped that out of the way with the news that this guy's body had been found.
Yeah, should we take our final break.
I think that's a good idea.
All right, We're going to take another break and talk a little bit more about the fallout right after this. All right, so we're back. We have not talked yet about the South Korean government, you know, like we said, this thing was on TV for everyone to kind of see. The one thing they didn't see was their president Park Gun. He was nowhere. She didn't emerge. There was about a seven hour period where she didn't come out of her
residence to address anything going on. When she finally did come out, she didn't seem like she was even briefed on what was going on. She was getting a lot of the basic facts of the disaster wrong. She didn't understand that there were students trapped inside the boat. It was just it was a real mess from the beginning, and they still don't know. I believe they sealed the national security documents that have you know, what she was
doing during those seven hours. They sealed those documents for at least thirty years, so no one's ever going to know what the president of that country was doing for those seven hours.
Now, the one thing that an investigation turned up that she definitely was doing was the two hours before she finally went on TV to talk about this crisis, she was getting her hair done.
That's right. I remember hearing that.
Hours before that. They're like, it's sealed. It's the most suspicious thing I've ever heard in my life.
Yeah, it's it's so fishy. And them sealing it for thirty years just like puts the official fishy stamp on it all.
Yeah. I mean, it's bad enough if they're just keeping it quiet, but to seal it for thirty years. What was she like having sex with Satan himself or something? What was going on.
All of a sudden. It's a South Park movie pretty much.
Oh, come on, guy.
So obviously the you know, politics or politics, So the political opposition is going to just jump on this moment and say, you know, the you know they're behind the families. Of course, if you're on the other side of the political spectrum. They wanted her to step down. They mounted a big nationwide sort of protest saying that she needs to get out of here, and in twenty seventeen, she became the first South Korean president to be impeached and
removed from office and was convicted. But the conviction had nothing to do with this. She was implicated in a bribery scheme. But they do credit the Seawall probe and the backlash against her to just sort of kicking off all of this investigatory stuff that led to that conviction.
Yeah, the Park family in fact had pretty they were not very good at governing. Not only was she the first president to be removed from office in South Korea history, her father was a dictator who led a coup and took power until nineteen seventy nine when he was assassinated. So not exactly the family you want running your country after all.
Yeah, her prison sentence is twenty years, but she was pardoned in twenty twenty two by her successor. They said that, you know, she wasn't doing well health wise, and that's you know, in most normal times politics wise, a lot of times even the opposition will like issue a pardon against the person there against you know.
Yeah, I think it's kind of one of those like we need to keep that custom in order because it keep ticks. I've got eyes on the oval office four years from No, and I don't want to go to jail.
Wait you do, yeah, might as well.
I mean, same thing. So here's the thing. It's been twelve years and it is not clear what caused the sinking of the Sioux Waal ferry.
Well, you don't know, like why it turned. I mean in that video, I don't know if this was the thing. But when it shows that truck slaming against the wall, something burst and water starts coming in. So yeah, yeah, yeah, what they don't know why they made that short turn to begin with.
Did I send this to you? I don't. I don't know if you saw it. But the third mat in charge, when she was tried, she testified that she ordered the quartermaster to turn the rudder, turned the wheel, huh, to avoid an oncoming ship.
That was oh okay, I didn't see that part.
And like it's nowhere like you like it was. I found it buried and referenced in some one article. Like it's not like a big thing. I don't know why. Because it was confirmed by on land radar that there was a trail out right after the ship turned, going the other direction of what seemed to be another ship.
Okay, so that that might have been the reason, yes.
The reason they turned. And then she said, well, the quartermaster turned it way too hard. And again, like you said, these were inexperienced, low paid contract workers actually doing the ship, so it's quite possible the quartermaster just turned it too hard. He also said. The quartermaster in his defense said, I didn't turn it that hard. That ship was not made to even turn five degrees like the third may ordered me too. Like it just kept going and skidding essentially.
Yeah, you know, we mentioned the crew and the captain that got and the president that all got prison sentences. The owner of that ferry company had taken his own life, but I think it was his son that was the CEO. He was convicted on accidental homicide charges but also an embezzlement thing, so he got a seven year term for both of those. There was a shipping official that you know, the ones who said, hey, you're fine to go without
checking its cargo. He was sentenced to three years. A couple of workers with the private company that overloaded the ship to begin with, they got two years the ferry company and this one. They ended up getting a pretty
good payout. There was a civil wrongful death civil suit and in twenty eighteen court ordered the government and the ferry company to pay the families what would be about five hundred thirty thousand dollars per victim and American dollars, which is about six hundred million one right, but pay you know, I mentioned the payout being pretty good just because they deserved it. But nothing, you know, there isn't a financial compensation for something like that, you know.
No, And to their credit, they are still quite organized and still agitating for answers. We didn't say, but they actually raised the fairy and then dry doct it. It's pretty astounding that they were able to get that thing out of the water, out of I think one hundred and twenty feet of water, and they were able to recover more bodies, they were able to recover belongings to the kids, very important stuff. But they still are like, we have no idea what caused this, what the actual
cause was. Yeah, but they like it took President park to be impeached before they raised that thing because she was essentially sitting on it. She didn't want it to make the news cycle again. But they're still together. They didn't get their money and like and say like whatever. Another group were charged with negligence and incompetence. They were eleven Coast Guard officers. They all stood trial. One of them I think he was the commander of that one
Coastguard boat that was there on the scene. He served a four year sentence. From what I saw, Yep.
There was also the bucket of the illegal surveillance that happened, the obstruction that happened when the government was trying to deflect you know, basically all attention on themselves. So from that bucket, six officers with the Defense Security Command, which is their military intelligence agency, were convicted of illegally surveilling
the families, you know, the victims families. Yeah, and then two of the president's top aides were actually acquitted of interfering with investigations, but they were they were tried, I guess, yeah.
And like I said, the grieving the parents that became activists. They created essentially a couple of groups that both have four sixteen in the name, that are that are there to essentially get the truth revealed, make sure that everyone
who hasn't been punished is still punished. They also have managed to get the actual classrooms removed from the High school and reinstalled I think at the Department of Education, and it's now a memorial museum, the four sixteen Memorial classroom, and there's multiple classrooms that are just empty and there they redid them exactly the way that they were left when the students left to go on their field trip.
And it's eerie. I saw one picture in the April twenty fourteen wall calendars still up.
Jeez.
Yeah, it looks really stirring.
Yeah, that's brutal. This sadly was not you know, the last disaster to strike South Korea just a few years ago in twenty twenty two, in October, one hundred and fifty nine young people died in a crowd rush during Hallow.
It's known as the e Taiwan crowd crush. And they you know, at least there were parents from the seawall disaster that came forward to get together with these parents and say, hey, you've got a friend in me and we can be together in this activism, you know, so like join up with us because we're already going strong. And that's what happened.
Yeah, because I guess when I left off, the main point of what they're agitating for is better government regulation for public safety responses, for things like shipping requirements, like just basically repealing some of the deregulation that led to these unsafe conditions that allowed that crowd crush that happened, that allowed the seawall ferry to sync without people being enough people being rescued. Yeah, so yeah, hats off to them for continuing what they're doing.
Yeah, sad, tough, tough, tough one. I remember this going down. I remember seeing the images of that captain coming off that boat in his underwear and just thinking like, what is this guy doing?
Yeah, and we talked about that. It's one crowd crush in the crowd Crush episode.
Oh yeah, that's right.
I also just want to make sure everybody goes and watches in the absence that New Yorker documentary. It's like less than thirty minutes long, and it's really something agreed well, Chuck said, yeah and agreed to. That means it's time for listener mail.
This is not a sad listener mail, so we're gonna end on a little brighter note. It's about deodorant. Hey, guys, I listened to the anti Perspont deodorant episode and I wanted to share this with your listenership if you and I guess you know Chris here is into standard deodorants and has some advice. Okay, if you mix equalish parts of coconut oil with baking soda to your favorite consistency, maybe if you have a favorite essential oil desired, you
can drop that in there. It's frankly the best deodorant ever for those whose bodies laugh. Anything supposed to stop that. It is supposed to stop sweat, because personally this chick thinks of hot dogs and sweats, so the capability of it completely masking body odor is remarkable, at least with my stubborn stink. And we get a cheers from Chris, and Chris has a little ps. If you get irritated from the baking soda, maybe just add some more coconut oil until your skin doesn't complain.
Nice, Thanks Chris, good stuff. I do have to warn you do not just willy nilly put a bunch of essential oil in there, though, Like I found that out the hard way when I guess poison ivy in U. He's like, just put some oil on some essential oil line. I don't remember. I just put essential oil on my skin just started burning immediately, and she said, no, you're supposed to mix it with like other oil first.
Why didn't that? Why didn't you call Emily? But you may knew that. Yeah, you gotta really dilute that stuff. A little goes a long way. So I would imagine a couple of drops in your deodorant concoction would be plea.
It's like the old slogan says, a couple of drops tops. If you want to get in touch with us, like Chris did, send us an email like Chris did. You can send it off to Stuff Podcasts at iHeartRadio dot com.
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