My thoughts on the Sewol tragedy

Eyes have been on South Korea since the sinking of the Sewol more than ten days ago. I normally don't follow these kind of story because... news like the forty students found in on dorm with broken fingers is heartbreaking. But I've been following this story since it happened, at first with the hope of finding survivors. I've been affected by this story differently than other disasters, perhaps because so many children were on board. Knowing that those kids could have easily been my students has...

I think of the kids I teach, all their different personalities, their crushes on singers, their smiles, their laughter and I'm devastated, because even though they weren't my students, I can picture them. I can see them excited about a rare break from studying, chatting with their friends and making plans about their futures. 

Korean bonds are strong. Good friends link arms in public and there isn't really a personal space boundary, so I also can imagine the children, boys and girls alike clutching to each other in fear, yet trusting the adults to tell them what to do and I feel anger that the people they trusted, were more concerned about covering their own asses.

I've written before about ordering a salad  (at Outback in case you're wondering) and the waitress needing permission from the manager to serve it with dressing on the side. In another place, people might have ignored the directive to stay put, but decision making is not fostered in the young, often by the time Koreans become elders and therefor leaders, they still don't know how to make decisions.

For this reason, I feel strongly that it is wrong to arrest all the crew.

The crew would naturally follow the captains orders and many job contracts in Korean are writing that employees must do exactly what their boss tells them to do unless it is against the law. This means if your boss tells you to get coffee every day and take his dry cleaning to the dry cleaners,  you have to obey. There are thousands of small tasks my Korean friend is asked to do and that she must do not to break this rule, but have nothing to do with the job she was hired for. If she were in a situation where she had make a decision-- say the water main broke and her boss was taking a tap, but she was given direct orders not to disturb her boss, she would feel like she had been put between a rock and a hard place.

Now, as the story of the Sewol has developed, so have lots of broken rules. The list of those are long, including but not limited to over loading the ship, poor steer (though I suspect that has more to do with an overloaded ship), leaving the helm, etc. But there was one pivotal decision: to prepare to evacuate or not to prepare to evacuate.

Precious minutes were lost-- perhaps has many as fifteen-- getting captain from his cabin (perhaps waking him up). The crew were not dithering because they were incapable of evacuating the ship, but because they've been trained from babies that they can't make them without permission when an elder is on board. 

This is one of the reasons the captain was nearly seventy. Even if the company had the best captain in the world, if he was younger than one crew member, that older crew member could disobey orders. But simply giving orders to an older person is considered rude. (Our financial manger at Yeongju English power simply by virtue of her age and pretty much runs the roost.)

More precious time was lost with the captain trying to get the ship righted, trying and failing twice. Experienced as he was, maybe he could have done it if the ship hadn't been overloaded, but I deeply suspect that his decision to have the students remain below deck had more to do with covering his own ass. He wasn't where he was supposed to be and knew it. There are a lot of would of, could of, should of's.

But when its all said and done, there was one decision  that would have made all the difference: ordering the people on the decks below to come to the upper decks and prepare to evacuate.

There were a plethora of wrong doings, and perhaps more will come to like. But evacuation, while resulting in some life lost, would have still saved more lives than not.

My heart is with the families of the Sewol.

Disclaimer: None of the pictures are of the Sewol.

Question: Why don't ships have rope ladders everywhere, so if the shop does tilt, people can use them to escape? Why don't boats have "air bags" that can inflate to slow down the ships rate of sinking?