On the evening of April 15, 2014, the South Korean ferry Sewol left Incheon on her regular overnight crossing to Jeju, her departure delayed by fog. Aboard were 476 people — 443 passengers and 33 crew. Among the passengers were 325 students and 14 teachers of Danwon High School in Ansan, travelling on a school trip.
At about 8:49 the next morning, in the strong currents of the Maenggol Channel off Jindo island, the ship made a sudden sharp turn. Cargo loaded far beyond her permitted limit, and not properly secured, shifted; Sewol listed heavily and could not recover. The first emergency call was made not by the ship but by a student aboard, at 8:52. Over the ship’s loudspeakers, passengers were repeatedly told to stay where they were, and no timely order to evacuate was ever given. The captain and most of the crew were among the first taken off by rescuers, while most passengers remained inside as the ferry capsized and sank over the following two hours. Of the 476 people aboard, 304 died — among them 250 of the Danwon students and 11 of their teachers — and 172 survived, more than half of them rescued by fishing boats and merchant ships that reached the scene.
Korean investigators found a ship made unsafe long before that morning. Sewol had been bought second-hand from Japan and modified with extra passenger cabins that raised her centre of gravity; on her final voyage she carried about 2,143 tons of cargo — more than twice her permitted 987 tons — with far too little ballast water to compensate, and her certification had rested in part on falsified documents. The Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal’s special investigation laid the capsizing on the sharp turn acting on an overloaded, unstable ship whose cargo was free to move.
Captain Lee Joon-seok was convicted at his first trial of gross negligence and abandoning ship, and sentenced to 36 years; on appeal in April 2015 he was convicted of murder, for abandoning the ship without ordering the passengers out, and sentenced to life imprisonment — a sentence the Supreme Court upheld. The ferry company’s chief executive received ten years. President Park Geun-hye apologised to the nation and disbanded the Korea Coast Guard, whose rescue effort had been heavily criticised; a coast guard was re-established in 2017 with rescue as its first duty.
The wreck of the Sewol was raised from the seabed in March 2017 and brought ashore at Mokpo, where it remains preserved, and official examination of the sinking continued for years afterwards. In November 2024 a special panel of the Maritime Safety Tribunal concluded that the fatal turn itself had been caused by a fault in the ship’s steering gear rather than by the helmsman, acting on a vessel already destabilised by her modification, overloading and unsecured cargo. The disaster transformed South Korea’s rules for passenger ships, and it remains the country’s defining maritime tragedy.
Korea Maritime Safety Tribunal — English Pages
The tribunal’s full special investigation report was published in Korean; no official English edition exists. The link above is to the tribunal’s official English pages on its special investigation work.