April 17, 2014 12:59 a.m. ET
Rescuers in South Korea worked into the night on Wednesday to rescue passengers believed to be stuck in a ferry that sunk earlier in the day. Most of the missing passengers are high-school students who were on a spring vacation.
SEOUL—The race to rescue possible survivors from a sunken South Korean passenger ferry intensified on Thursday, as rain, strong currents and low visibility hampered the search for nearly 300 people, including many missing 16- and 17-year-olds on a spring-break trip.
More than 500 professional divers from South Korea's coast guard and navy, along with 29 aircraft and 169 vessels, have been deployed to locate the victims, according to the government's anti-disaster agency.
The rescuers, assisted by a private shipping company, also are preparing to lift the submerged ferry from the water, using three large crane barges and tow boats.
There were 475 passengers and crew on board. As of early Thursday afternoon, nine people were confirmed dead, coast guard officials said, and at least 179 were rescued.
On the quay of the Pangmok Port, where some 60 grieving family members of passengers had gathered to follow the rescue work, anger was boiling over against officials, who they blamed for acting too slowly.
Photos
Part of the ferry Sewol is seen sinking in the sea off Jindo, South Korea, on Wednesday. Reuters
Huddled in blankets against the chilly wind and rain, one old woman collapsed on the ground, wailing and shouting: "Bring back my daughter Minji!"
Most of the passengers were students from Danwon High School near Seoul, traveling to Jeju for a brief vacation. Just 75 of the 325 students who were on board were among the rescued, authorities said.
Harsh conditions made the search difficult. "It is so murky that you can hardly see anything," Hwang Jang-bok, a civilian diver supporting the rescue work, said in an interview with Korean television station YTN.
Mr. Hwang said divers were planning to run oxygen through a hose into the capsized ferry, hoping to supply any trapped survivors with air to breathe until help arrives.
"The important thing is to find and rescue any survivors," said Mr. Hwang.
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The passenger ferry was traveling to the resort island of Jeju from a port near Seoul when it flipped over and sank in just two hours. The cause of the disaster wasn't clear.
The ship sent out a distress signal around 9 a.m. local time Wednesday close to the island of Jindo, off the southwest coast of the Korean peninsula, where it capsized.
Survivors spoke of a loud thumping sound and then a sudden lurch by the boat to one side. "Students were tumbling in all directions," survivor Kim Hong-kyong, 58, told South Korea's Yonhap News.
Teams of divers searched the ship in relays as concerns rose that many of the passengers and crew may have been caught in the vessel as it rolled over. Only a small part of the bow of the ship remained above the waterline Thursday.
In the initial rescue effort, video from local TV stations showed South Korean navy forces clambering across the walls of the ship as it lay on its side, pulling passengers through hatches and windows. Helicopters lifted survivors away.
Other passengers emerged from the ship after it had almost fully rolled over and scrambled onto small boats. Air escaping from the sinking ship created a huge spray.
The USS Bonhomme Richard, which had been on patrol in the Yellow Sea, joined the rescue effort.
Mr. Kim said he and other passengers made a rope out of curtain cloth to pull children up from lower levels of the boat. Other children remained behind because they were advised by the ship's crew to wear life vests and wait for the right time for their rescue, he said.
Parents gathered at the high school seeking news about the sinking. In chaotic scenes at the school auditorium, some yelled at school officials and tried to make phone calls to their children.
With details about survivors haphazard, about 200 family members took buses provided by the school to Jindo, where many of the survivors were taken. Authorities said that changes in the number of passengers and crew that had been rescued were due to duplicate counting.
Kim Byong-ok was one of dozens of parents anxiously awaiting news of her son.
"He called me last night and said he didn't feel well," she said. "This morning I called him to ask if he is OK now, and he said he's fine, though he didn't eat much since last night. That was my last chat with him.
"I should have told him I love him," she said.
Many of the family members were angered that the government stopped rescue work when darkness fell. "Why is the government preventing them from going near the ship and rescuing our children?" said Jung Myung-kyo, whose son was on the ferry. "If their sons and daughters were there, would they just sit here and wait until the next morning?"
At the high school in Ansan, a suburb of Seoul, dozens of students spent the night in the auditorium overnight, waiting for an update. Apart from the occasional sob, the silence was broken only by the morning wake-up alarms on students' mobile phones. Students from the school who were on the ferry were taking a spring excursion before the pressure of college entrance examinations takes over a year later.
The Danwon High School has been shut down temporarily until at least Monday.
In the second-year student classrooms, handwritten messages from schoolmates and friends covered the chalkboards.
"Hurry back!! Please," one message read. Said another: "Friends, please come back safely!" A third message read, simply, "Live!"
Of the nine confirmed deaths, one body was of a female crew member and five were high-school students. The others hadn't been identified.
The 264-mile route of the ferry from Incheon to Jeju is one of the most common in South Korea. The 6,825-ton vessel named Sewol—meaning "time and tide" in Korean—could carry up to 921 passengers and was operated by Chonghaejin Marine Co.
The company plies the route twice a week. The coast guard said weather conditions were clear and calm in the area where the ship sank, with visibility also good. An official at Chonghaejin Marine said he didn't think the ferry had deviated from its usual route.
Company officials said the captain of the ferry, who was rescued, is a 69-year-old veteran skipper with a career of over 20 years in operating ferries. Identified only by his family name, Lee, the captain has been on the Incheon-Jeju ferry service for eight years since joining the company in 2006.
An official for South Korea's Security Ministry said Thursday that it was questioning the captain and crew of the ship
The sinking marks a second accident for Chonghaejin in less than a month. A smaller ferry operated by the company collided with a fishing boat on March 28 in the Yellow Sea. The firm attributed the accident to dense fog, and no casualties were reported.
The worst passenger ship incident in South Korean history was in December 1970, when a ferry carrying nearly 340 people capsized near Busan, South Korea's second-largest city—killing more than 320 people. Investigators found that ferry, the Namyeong, which was traveling from Jeju, had been overloaded with cargo and passengers.
In October 1993, another ferry, the Seohae, sank in the Yellow Sea off the coast of Busan with 362 people on board—more than 100 over the ship's maximum capacity. The incident left 292 people dead.
—Jonathan Cheng contributed to this article.
Write to Kwanwoo Jun at kwanwoo.jun@wsj.com, In-Soo Nam at In-Soo.Nam@wsj.com and Min-Jeong Lee at min-jeong.lee@wsj.com
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