No Known Cause

In August 2019, this 13-month investigation concluded that the cause of the accident could not be determined.

Yonhap News Agency reported that some members of the panel concluded that the sinking could have been due to problems with the ship — such as the sudden turn, excessive cargo load, or stability or buoyancy issues created by substandard refurbishing. Other members of the panel said that external factors, such as collision with a submarine or other unknown objects, could not be ruled out. The fact that the water was calm suggested to some members of the panel that it was simply impossible for the ship to list abruptly and capsize on its own.

Yonhap News Agency and all major Korean news outlets gave considerable coverage to the findings of the Hull Investigation, or lack thereof. Yonhap’s story in August 2019 – headlined “Year-long investigation into Sewol Ferry Fizzles out” — began this way:

SEOUL, Aug. 6 (Yonhap) — A state panel assigned to investigate the 2014 Sewol ferry disaster failed to pinpoint the exact cause of the ship’s sinking after a yearlong effort, it was announced Monday, leaving many unanswered questions behind one of South Korea’s worst maritime tragedies.

The panel concluded that the cause of the Sewol sinking could have been either problems with the ship or an unknown external shock. This was an important reversal from the Korean Maritime Tribunal’s report, but it received virtually no coverage in major international news outlets.

Other developments have shed light on possible causes. Hankyoreh reported in June, 2016 that the Sewol had been carrying 278 tons of iron bars meant for the Jeju military base, and that the ferry’s sailing schedule may have been adjusted due to its government work.

On Nov. 24, 2017, Sisa Journal quoted Daehan Ship Design as noting that the long-established maximum load of the Sewol, 987 tons, was in fact inaccurate. Based on the fact that the “full load line” on the hull was not being used to calculate the weight, but rather the “full water line” was, the company concluded on October 25, 2017 that the Sewol actually had a maximum capacity of 2,272 tons of cargo. This meant the ship was not overloaded on that fateful morning, casting doubt on one of the previously accepted causes.

Following the issuance of the Hull Investigation report, another government investigation was launched. This investigation was led by the Sewol Committee Special Prosecution Task Force – and announced its conclusion in January 2021. Again, the task force did not determine the cause of the sinking. Instead, much of its work was focused on the government’s mishandling of the disaster, which could be a political football well into the future.

Meanwhile, back in December 2017, yet another investigative panel, the “Special Investigation Commission on Humidified Disinfectants and the 4-16 Sewol Ferry Disaster” (also known as the “Social Disasters Commission”) had been formed by order of the Moon Jae-in administration. Its role was to investigate the Sewol sinking and a previous, heavily reported tragedy: the deaths of 100 people due to a dangerous disinfectant used to clean humidifiers.

The Social Disasters Commission released its final report in September, 2022. Its main focus was not the cause of the accident, though it again stated that a collision with an outside force could not be ruled out, even if that possibility seemed unlikely. Instead, the Commission was highly critical of the government’s investigative techniques, its use of public entities for political means, and suggested that the government had committed “state crimes” against the families of the Sewol victims.

The lack of a definitively identified cause of the sinking and the government’s refusal to disclose everything it knows about the tragedy – coupled with the extreme national trauma caused by the loss of so many children – has opened the floodgates to various theories. The most prominent of these was presented in the documentary film Intention, released in 2018 and directed by Kim Ji-young, and its follow-up, Ghost Ship, which premiered in 2020. Both were box office hits in South Korea.

Intention focuses on lapses in Sewol’s AIS positioning transmissions and conflicting records of those transmissions. The documentary notes that when the fateful turn occurred, the ship was actually 10 miles to the east of where it was supposed to have been, near a small island. By transposing the ship’s location and exact path, the filmmakers theorized that the Sewol had been riding on the edge of an underwater mountain range, perhaps deliberately. An anchor from the ship may have been dragged and then caught on the rocky environment below, resulting in the Sewol’s unusually sharp turn.

In the end, the filmmakers behind Intention do not posit a theory as to why such events would have been covered up by the government.

The various investigative bodies that examined the Sewol tragedy responded to the filmmakers’ theory in different ways. The Social Disasters Commission found some merit in the theory. As recently as April 2021, during an interview to mark the anniversary of the sinking, Park Byung-woo, the director of the commission, discussed the curious nature of Sewol’s missing signal data. He noted that by triangulating the various AIS signals obtained from different sources, the Sewol actually was roughly 6 km away from the spot the government said the capsizing had occurred.

Whatever the merits of these various revelations and discoveries, it is clear that no one truly understands what caused the sinking of the Sewol ferry.