South Korea ferry was ‘routinely overloaded’ with cargo
Sewol routinely sailed with too much cargo due to South Korean regulatory failures
The doomed ferry Sewol exceeded its cargo limit on 246 trips - nearly every voyage it made in which it reported cargo - in the 13 months before it sank, according to documents that reveal a series of regulatory failures.
The disaster has exposed enormous safety gaps in South Korea's monitoring of domestic passenger ships, which is in some ways less rigorous than its rules for ships that handle only cargo.
Collectively, the country's regulators had more than enough information to conclude that the Sewol was routinely overloaded, but because they did not share that data and were not required to do so, it was practically useless.
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The Korean Register of Shipping examined the Sewol early last year as it was being redesigned to handle more passengers. The register slashed the ship's cargo capacity by more than half, to 987 tonnes, and said the vessel needed to carry more than 2,000 tonnes of water to stay balanced.
But the register gave its report only to the ship owner, Chonghaejin Marine. Neither the coastguard nor the Korean Shipping Association, which regulates domestic passenger ships, appear to have had any knowledge of the new limit before the disaster.