“Isn’t this the kind of situation when they tell you, ‘Stay put; it will be O.K.,’ and they run away for their lives?” A teen-age girl is talking with a group of friends, in footage that seems to be cell-phone video. The walls of the ferry they are riding, the M.V. Sewol, are leaning at a distressing angle. But the scene is surprisingly calm. No one is running or shouting—the group is patiently waiting for further instructions from the intercom, which has just told passengers to stay where they are. The girl in the video recalls a subway accident in which passengers were similarly told to stay put. “But only the people who didn’t follow the order survived.”
Disasters are marked by moments not only of chaos and terror but of indecision and confusion, as minds race to make choices with incomplete and disorienting information. When one is taking a routine ferry trip, the kind of crossing that occurs dozens of times a day without incident, and that ferry begins to tilt violently and sink into the sea, how do passengers decide what to do? A perfectly rational reaction, on first instinct, is to follow authority and believe that the crew, the captain, and those trusted with operating, commissioning, and regulating the ferry service will know the best course of action. But what happens when leadership breaks down? The above video, “In the Absence,” shows what happened inside the M.V. Sewol, the passenger ferry that sank while travelling between the South Korean city of Incheon and Jeju Island, on April 16, 2014.
During one of the first emergency calls from the M.V. Sewol, at 8:52 A.M., an operator asks a passenger for the ship’s location. The passenger tells the operator that he does not, of course, know the exact location. It’s a large, sinking vessel in the middle of an open body of water—difficult to place but hard to miss. Minutes later, an announcement goes out over the intercom: “Please don’t move. Stay put,” a woman’s voice says. “And stand by.”
Just after 9:20 A.M., a transportation official urges the captain to make a decision on whether to begin evacuation procedures. Reports would later show that the captain would wait another ten minutes to deliver the command to evacuate. Most survivors did not recall hearing any such command, and the absence of an orderly and structured escape plan multiplied the losses.
Nearly an hour after the first emergency calls, the captain jumped a railing, landed on a patrol boat, and abandoned ship. More than a hundred passengers were still sheltering in place onboard. A hundred and seventy-two passengers and crew survived the disaster; three hundred and four died in the sinking, most of them high-school students on a class trip.
How many could have been saved if the evacuation had taken place immediately, or if there had been clear procedures and a hierarchy of communication in place? What if the people onboard, instead of obeying misguided orders and waiting for instructions that never came, had decided to fend for themselves? South Korean law enforcement and the families and friends of the victims have grappled with these questions in the aftermath.
The captain and fourteen other members of the crew were convicted on charges related to the sinking. Yoo An-sil, the mother of Yu Mi-ji, one of the passengers who died in the sinking, describes a final phone conversation with her daughter with immense regret. “I told her to follow the teacher’s guidance,” she says. “I should have told her to escape quickly. But I didn’t know the situation.”
