Investigation Clarifies Timeline of Former President Park During Sewol Ferry Tragedy

The whole “7-Hour Mystery” talking point involving former President Park Geun-hye and the sinking of the Sewol has never made any sense to me and the revealing of the actual timeline by investigators only further confirms this:

On the day of the sinking of the Sewol ferry in 2014, then-President Park Geun-hye spent crucial early hours when people could have been saved in her bedroom. As the hours passed, Park met with confidante Choi Soon-sil and got her hair done before starting to deal with the unfolding tragedy, according to a prosecution announcement on Wednesday.

The prosecution concluded that the entire timeline offered by the Park administration about her activities the day of the accident, which killed 304 people, was a fabrication aimed at covering up her slow responses.

The Seoul Central District Prosecutors’ Office announced the outcome of its investigation into the Park government’s handling of the ferry disaster. Park’s absence in the critical early hours of a lackluster rescue operation generated enough controversy to be branded the “seven-hour mystery.”  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

Here is how the timeline played out:

According to the prosecution, the Sewol sent its first distress signal at 8:58 a.m. on April 16, 2014, and the Blue House’s crisis management center noticed the situation around 9:19 a.m. through a media report. The situation was shared among presidential aides at 9:24 a.m. using a text message system and the crisis management center completed its first situation report at 9:57 a.m. by contacting the Coast Guard.

That report was sent to Park’s residence around 10:12 a.m., but did not reach her. She was in her bedroom and the report was left on a table outside the room.

Around 10 a.m., Kim Jang-soo, who was head of the National Security Office, tried to telephone Park but she didn’t answer. He contacted An Bong-geun, a presidential secretary, and An drove to the residence and called to the president from outside her bedroom, the prosecution said. Park then came out from the bedroom and telephoned Kim around 10:22 a.m.

The prosecution said the first telephone briefing of Park, therefore, took place at 10:22 a.m., although the Park Blue House had earlier said the call took place at 10:15 a.m. Although Park ordered Kim to make sure there were no casualties in the accident, the most crucial hours of rescue operation had already passed, the prosecution said.

So the first report was sent to her at 10:12 AM, but was left outside her door.  The supposed Golden Time for rescue operations ended at 10:17.  Even if the first report to her was immediately received at 10:12, to paraphrase Hillary Clinton, what difference would it have made?

If a rescue was going to happen it was going to have to be by first responders from the ROK Coast Guard. The Coast Guard office in Mokpo immediately sent a vessel to the accident site after receiving emergency phone calls from passengers.  The vessel arrived at the scene before the sinking, but did not order the passengers to evacuate:

West Sea Coast Guard station ship 123 was tasked with patrolling the waters in Coastal Zone 3 near Jindo, South Jeolla Province the morning of the accident on Apr. 16. After the first 119 emergency call on the sinking from high school student Choi Deok-ha (who was later found dead), the Mokpo Coast Guard station situation room issued an order at around 8:57 to send ship 123 to the scene. At roughly 9:14, the vessel’s captain, surnamed Kim, was appointed commander for the accident scene. The boat was tasked with surveying the accident and performing a swift rescue effort according to the Coast Guard search and rescue manual.But after arriving at the scene at 9:30, Kim issued no evacuation order for the Sewol, despite ship 123 having a microphone system rigged up.

The manual’s instruction for capsizes is to “confirm the response from remaining personnel on the vessel and send a signal via loudspeaker.” Instead, the 47 minutes of “golden time” until the Sewol’s deck was fully submerged at 10:17 were wasted.The revelations about Kim‘s lack of urgency while in charge of rescue efforts at the accident scene were seen by many as especially disturbing. At the Gwangju District Court trial of Sewol crew members, Park Hyeong-ju of the Gachon University Interdisciplinary Skyscraper Disaster Prevention Center presented simulation findings showing all passengers could have been evacuated in six minutes and 17 seconds if ship 123 had given the order when Sewol captain Lee Jun-seok, 69, was rescued at 9:45.  [Hankyoreh]

This was incompetence by the ROK Coast Guard that was clearly unprepared to deal with such an accident and not something Park Geun-hye was going to be able to resolve in 5 minutes from the Blue House.  If people want to criticize her for lax government regulations that allowed the overweight ferry to operate and the poor disaster response by the Coast Guard I think that is fair.  However, to claim she could have personally did something to save those people that morning, but instead hung out in her bedroom is completely unfair in my opinion.