The Sewol Ferry Disaster

13:59Josh Clark:But as you know, I just hated that because as a parent, you aren't there. You don't know what's exactly happening, although it was played out in real time on the news. So you think that the people that are supposed to be doing the right thing are doing the right thing. So you want to tell your kid, like, hey, listen to what they're telling you and not like, hey, don't listen to what they're saying. Get out of there.

14:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Go jump off the side of the ship.

14:22Josh Clark:Yeah.

14:22Chuck Bryant:You know? Yeah. Like, that's, you can totally understand where she's coming from, but I can also understand that that's her greatest regret. Oh, yeah.

14:29Josh Clark:I just, I hated it for her to, you know, all these years later to still feel that way, you know?

14:34Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah. So 8.55 a.m., 10 minutes after the ship turned and started to list.

14:44Chuck Bryant:The Suol crew makes their first distress call. Three minutes earlier, the very first distress call from the Suol was made by one of the students. Yeah. They called 119, which is 911 in Korea. And they said, like, hey, I'm on a sinking ship. Please send some help. And at first you could tell the 119 operators like, wait, what are you saying?

15:06Josh Clark:Yeah, yeah.

15:07Chuck Bryant:Because they were essentially like, so wait, you're on a ship, you're seeing a ship that's sinking? And the guy's like, no, I'm on a sinking ship. Like, please send help. This was three minutes before the crew ever did anything, like did anything about this.

15:20Josh Clark:Yeah. So they were ahead by three minutes. Over the next half hour, there were a lot of calls from the crew to all kinds of people. Coast Guard support, obviously, they called. The crew was like, hey, we're trapped on the bridge. We don't know what's going on with the passengers. The ship is definitely sinking, so there was no ambiguity about what was going on. And they said to the Coast Guard, like, should we evacuate? And they said, hey, it's a captain's decision. That's why you have a captain on board, basically. And that was over the next half hour from those initial calls. In the middle of this, at 9-14, the crew made distress calls to local fishing boats like, hey, anybody that's near us, we need help right now.

16:07Josh Clark:And a lot of them showed up.

16:09Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think there were some that had already showed up even before the call. And half of the people who were rescued who survived the sinking of the Sioux Wall Ferry were rescued by civilian fishing boats in 10 minutes. A 10-minute span, half of the survivors were rescued. This was 2030. I saw as much as 40 minutes, although I don't think that's right, before the Coast Guard even showed up. These fishing boats were there rescuing people. The first Coast Guard boat, and I think the only Coast Guard boat, bear that in mind, showed up at 935. So this is 50 minutes after the turn and 40 minutes after the call for help.

16:53Chuck Bryant:The Coast Guard finally shows up. The ship is at 60 degrees now. That's nuts. You're like standing on the wall, essentially. And the Coast Guard did what the Coast Guard is supposed to do. The crew did what they were supposed to do. The Coast Guard evacuated the crew from the bridge and got away from the ship. The crew left the ship, including the captain, who there's a very clear image of him being assisted off of the bridge and onto the Coast Guard boat, who had not, very importantly, given the order to evacuate the ship. He abandoned ship and did not explain to the passengers that they needed to get off of the ship.

17:37Josh Clark:Yeah, it's the worst thing a boat captain can do. They're supposed to be the last person off. And this guy was one of the first people off in his underwear. This, you know, you said the crew all got off. It wasn't everybody. I think there were 14 crew members that were rescued at 9.47 a.m. A few crew members, to their credit, went down with the ship and were doing everything they could. So they were, you know, there were some heroic actions going on. A helicopter shows up around this time, starts to rescue passengers. But again, a helicopter rescue, they're getting people off like one at a time, lifting them to safety.

18:16Josh Clark:And they still, these kids are still being told to stay in their room. So it's not like everyone was on top of the deck or, you know, wherever they could be seen. Right. Most of them are still in their room. And then they had life rafts. They had life rafts for like 1 ,100 people. There were 44 life rafts to carry 25 people each. And only one of them was automatically deployed. Right.

18:43Chuck Bryant:So there is a point where the water is starting to rush in so much that even somebody who's been raised their entire life in a collectivist society to just follow, you know, the orders of the people in charge are going to leave their cabin, are going to stop listening and leave their cabin. That finally happened. By this time, it was much too late for most of them. It's very, very hard to get out of a sinking ship because the water rushes into every area that has air to fill it up. There's a suction mechanism that can create the movement of the water makes it less dense, so you are likelier to sink.

19:19Chuck Bryant:It's very hard to get out of the inside of a sinking large ship. And so there were stories of some of the survivors seeing their friends like trying to get out and then see them just get sucked back into the ship in the water. And that was it. So the Sioux Wall within just a couple hours, Chuck, it went from completely above water to totally sunk, totally submerged. And there were still 304 people trapped inside when it sank.

19:52Josh Clark:Yeah. And that single Coast Guard boat, rescue boat that was there, it sat there and watched the whole thing happen. In fact, worse than that, those fishermen in the fishing boats that were there pulling passengers out, the Coast Guard ordered them to retreat and to get out of there. of those 476 I think you said 304 were trapped inside only three of those were crew members and they were young crew members who stayed aboard to try and help

20:21Chuck Bryant:two of them were an engaged couple yeah

20:25Josh Clark:alright we're getting pretty worked up and upset so maybe we should take a break and come back after this with more on the disaster

20:33Chuck Bryant:ok we'll do that

20:40Chuck Bryant:Stuff you should know

20:46Josh Clark:Hey, everybody. Support for the show today comes from Public. So it kind of feels like there's two types of investing platforms. You've got the old school brokerages that look like they were designed in like 1995. And then you have those other platforms, you know, the ones that feel less like investing and more like a casino.

21:03Chuck Bryant:Public is neither. It's the investing platform for people who actually take this stuff serious. You know, people who are serious about building their wealth. Because on Public, you can build a portfolio of stocks, options, bonds, crypto, without all the bugs or the confetti.

21:18Josh Clark:Retirement accounts? Yep. High-yield cash? Of course. They even have direct indexing. Honestly, this is what an investing platform should look like. Modern design, simple to use, and customer support that actually cares.

21:29Chuck Bryant:Go to public.com slash S-Y-S-K and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash S-Y-S-K.

21:38Josh Clark:Ad paid for by Public Holdings. Brokerage services by Public Investing.

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21:57Chuck Bryant:You know, it's hard to believe that the first phone call ever happened over 150 years ago. Just think about that, Chuck.

22:04Josh Clark:Yeah, it was a long time ago. And, you know, I'm Gen X, so I grew up talking on the phone with my friends in high school and stuff, and it was a really fond memory.

22:11Chuck Bryant:And, you know, over all these years and all these phone calls, AT &T has been there, connecting people in meaningful ways. And this is more than a story of technological innovation. It's a story of human connection.

22:23Josh Clark:That's right. Over that 150 years, there's been a lot of connection with people, whether it was me in high school or family connecting with one another long distance or those long distance relationships. And AT &T has been there for it all. Connecting changes everything. AT &T.

22:43Chuck Bryant:This episode is brought to you by Audi. We all know that feeling, a change of plans, an unexpected curve, a new opportunity. Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes?

22:54Josh Clark:Yeah, with the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is easy. The Q3 is made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up.

23:02Chuck Bryant:Yes to adventure. Yes to escape. Yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury.

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23:30Chuck Bryant:I think you said earlier, Chuck, we're back, by the way, that the syncing was broadcast on TV, essentially, all of the news just covered it constantly the entire day and then some. And there was a lot of misinformation that was coming out. You can actually hear where it began, like, very early on with the ship almost fully capsized and mostly sunk. One of the Coast Guard guys says, yeah, everybody's safe. They're all evacuated. So the families who were watching this essentially had hope and assurance that their kids were safe. They were alive as the ship was sinking. And very quickly, they learned that, no, this is not the case.

24:14Chuck Bryant:that a substantial number, 250 of them, were now dead. Or now, maybe even not dead, but trapped at the bottom of the Yellow Sea in a boat and were going to die.

24:29Josh Clark:Yeah. 75 of the students made it through. So the families, you know, almost immediately were like, we need to hold someone accountable. We need some answers for what happened out there. And they never really got answers. So when that happened, they really went hard into raising good trouble, becoming activists, basically. They had candlelight vigils. They drew together thousands of people at these things. They camped outside of the president's residence, which is the Blue House in South Korea. A lot of them shaved their heads for publicity. They went on hunger strikes. They were going to marches and speaking at rallies.

25:11Josh Clark:And because of this, and this thing just seems like it keeps getting worse and worse and worse.

25:16Chuck Bryant:It does.

25:17Josh Clark:South Korea didn't say like, yeah, we need to really get to the bottom of this. All these parents are devastated. They lost their children. So let's get to the bottom of it. Instead, these right-wing websites started putting out and commentators start putting out stories about kind of what happened in Newtown, Connecticut.

25:39Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

25:39Josh Clark:Like putting out stories about the families, like accusing them of being North Korean agents, trying to get rich off this tragedy. Not only that, the official government started trailing some of them, started staking out their houses, started tapping phones, trying to dig up dirt to use against these parents of children who were killed by negligence.

26:02Chuck Bryant:They went to great lengths and spent a lot of money and effort to deflect the focus, attention and blame from itself, the government. And discredit the parents. Onto whoever. Yes, on the parents. It's the most cynical, evil thing you could possibly do as a government in a situation like this. Yeah. When you're largely to blame. And so these families didn't stop as they were vilified. And they were there was like a huge cleaving between the formerly fully sympathetic and on their side public and these families, because now all of a sudden it's like, well, wait a minute, are they trying to get rich?

26:43Chuck Bryant:And the media was fully culpable in this. They were instrumentalized. I've seen it described by the government, went along fully. And so whatever the government wanted them to say, they would just have some prosecutors, have some journalists hang out on the record, feed them a bunch of stuff. And then the next thing, that would be the new news cycle. So the government was really able to deliberately manage all of this tragedy. And one of the things they did was scapegoat the families or get them ostracized, at least. And the families did not – this didn't shut them up at all. If anything, it created even more activists and deepened the activism in the ones that were already kind of radicalized by this.

27:29Chuck Bryant:And so over time, it became clear that there was a bunch of people to blame and the parents were not in any of the categories.

27:37Josh Clark:No, there's basically kind of five buckets of people who failed here. Obviously, the captain and the crew, except for the three that stayed behind, who were commendable, obviously. But, you know, like we said, they didn't evacuate anybody, no announcements to evacuate. Everyone was told to stay there while this thing sank. And the other thing, too, was not having that cargo secured. You know, you shouldn't have cars and trucks sliding around and construction equipment sliding around when you make a sharp turn. And making that sharp turn was also a big error.

28:10Chuck Bryant:The Coast Guard also was very, I don't think they were ever off the hook. They were blamed from the moment the whole thing happened to today. Yeah. They did not do almost anything. It's just astounding the little that they did. That's what I don't get.

28:27Josh Clark:Like, why?

28:28Chuck Bryant:Why? I don't know why, but I do know that as a direct result of this, the Coast Guard, the North Korean Coast Guard was dissolved. Everybody got removed. Like, sorry, there's no Coast Guard anymore. We have to figure out a different way to do this. That's how incompetent and negligent their response was that the Coast Guard was disbanded because.

28:51Josh Clark:Yeah. Yeah.

28:52Chuck Bryant:So I don't know why, but that's that was the result. That's how bad it was.

28:56Josh Clark:Well, and I think that's one of the more maddening, maddening things is even when they have done follow up with all this. I don't think anyone ever said like, well, there was a communication breakdown here and it happened because of this. It was right. And when you're listening to the comms in real time, it's just it's infuriating.

29:11Chuck Bryant:It was like anybody who had a finger pointed at them, what they did was just turn and point it at the next person.

29:18Josh Clark:Yeah.

29:18Chuck Bryant:There was no like, I'm account, no accountability. Well put.

29:23Josh Clark:The ferry company was another bucket. Obviously, their profits were more important than the safety of their passengers. It was overloaded, like we said. Apparently, their emergency training wasn't very robust. And the workers that they hired were apparently low paid contract workers that didn't have a lot of experience. Right.

29:41Chuck Bryant:So the ferry company's cutting every corner they can to maximize profit and putting profit ahead of passenger safety by a lot. Right. The port inspectors, too, they didn't do their job. They did their job by looking at what's called freeboard, which is the distance between the ship, I guess the main deck and the water. and they basically just eyeballed it and said, oh, it's not sitting too low in the water. So I guess it passes inspection. From what I understand, they did not go aboard the ship and actually like visually see any of the cargo. That was the inspection they did for a passenger ferry.

30:18Chuck Bryant:And it gets even worse because you might say like, okay, well, I mean, it was like, it wasn't too low in the water. Who cares if it was overloaded? The reason it wasn't too far or too deep into the water was because the ferry company had scuttled ballast to use that weight for more cargo. And not only did that, was that just highly illegal, but the lack of ballast made the ship less seaworthy.

30:49Josh Clark:Yeah, it made it very unstable. So something like a hard turn, all of a sudden you're going down, you know.

30:55Chuck Bryant:Isn't that insane?

30:56Josh Clark:Yeah, it's crazy. The South Korean government as the fifth bucket, because as you'll see here coming up in the next section, they had a terrible response to everything after it happened. There were about, I guess it's been about 12 years since this happened. Like you said, I guess it's going to be on the anniversary that this is released. But there have been nine different government investigations and inquiries, and we'll go over the litany of arrests. I mean, that's the only sort of, I mean, you don't want to call it a good thing, but at At least a lot of people served time for this, you know?

31:31Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they definitely did. One of them was the captain. His name is Lee Jun Siok. And he was put on trial for negligent homicide. His defense was that he was stunned and confused by the accident. And he just wasn't able to make decisions because he was so stunned and confused. That was his defense.

31:54Josh Clark:That's not what you want to hear out of a captain.

31:57Chuck Bryant:No, for sure. I guess he also gave conflicting testimony. In one, he lied and said that, oh, he did give the order to evacuate, but his crew didn't listen. I think he even lied and said that he used a bullhorn to tell everyone to evacuate. He definitely did not do any of those. Yeah. Later, he gave a somewhat more rational and sensible explanation. He said that essentially there's very strong currents in this area. That's true. The water is very cold. It was like 57 degrees Fahrenheit or I think 17 degrees Celsius. I don't remember. Pretty cold. And that also he didn't want people jumping in the water before there was anyone around to rescue them.

32:41Chuck Bryant:Right. All of that makes a little bit of sense, but none of it justifies or excuses or explains never giving the evacuation order, abandoning ship while it was still fully loaded with passengers. Like there is no way to defend his actions, even if some of his thinking was potentially reasonable. Yeah.

33:02Josh Clark:He said that he didn't know, he claimed to not know the status of the passengers when he abandoned ship, which in admission, you know, in and of itself is awful. And he went to trial, of course. We're going to talk about, you know, a lot of the trials here at the end. But his trial was the most sort of, because, you know, it was on TV, the captain, you know, coming out in his underwear and getting on that. It was just laid bare, like, you know, in all ways for everyone to see with their own eyeballs. So that was the trial that was really sort of the most striking publicly, I think. And he was sentenced to 36 years in prison, 14 members of the crew, the 14 that evacuated.

33:42Josh Clark:They got sentenced as well from five to 30 years, but they appealed the verdict and made it worse. He eventually got a life sentence out of this. And some of the crew members had their sentences dialed back a little bit because they were acting on captain's orders.

33:57Chuck Bryant:Right. A lot of the families were like, let's give them the death penalty. Even though South Korea hadn't used the death penalty since 1997, they believed that this was a prime candidate for the death penalty. So early on, Chuck, really early on, as the government's just doing anything it can to deflect blame or responsibility, they zeroed in on one of the owners of Chonghaejin Marine, which owned the ferry. He was a billionaire named Yoo Byung-un. He was 73. His family was the co-owner of the company and also a bunch of other companies. And the government did the same thing that it later did with the families.

34:39Chuck Bryant:It basically started feeding secretly info to the media, and the media turned around and reported on it. And all of a sudden, I saw this graph of, you know, day by day, news reports on the seawall ferry sinking. They start to go down as the reports on Yoo Byung-sun go up until there's nothing almost on the sinking and everything on this billionaire who's now fled and is on the run.

35:11Josh Clark:Yeah. So he goes on the lam. He's a very well-known guy in South Korea at the time, even before this, mainly because, well, I mean, he was a billionaire businessman, so that's one, but more so for being the founder of the Evangelical Baptist Church in Korea. So he's someone that's well-known. They issue an arrest warrant about a month later. He had fled by this point. There's a nationwide manhunt. And for many, many months, what we learned after the fact was he was hiding in a panic room at his vacation house. And then that summer in July, they found him in the woods. Basically, he was in a plum orchard, had killed himself.

35:52Josh Clark:His body was badly decomposed at that point. So he, you know, most cowardly thing he could do. He fled, hid and then took his own life to avoid responsibility.

36:03Chuck Bryant:Yeah, there's something. I mean, even though he was very much made a scapegoat by the government, that doesn't mean he was innocent or not responsible. He just wasn't the only one responsible. And then one other thing that makes this whole government thing even more cynical, they found his body a full month before they publicly acknowledged it. Yeah. Because they kept, he was just such a great way to distract the public from the actual problem, the tragedy. And when they finally did release that they had found him and the manhunt was over, it was because there was a really unpopular bill that would allow hospitals to make more profits over patient care that was making the news.

36:41Chuck Bryant:So they bumped that out of the way with the news that this guy's body had been found.

36:46Josh Clark:Yeah. Should we take our final break?

36:49Chuck Bryant:I think that's a good idea.

36:51Josh Clark:All right. We're going to take another break and talk a little bit more about the fallout right after this.

37:01Chuck Bryant:Stop your show now.

37:07Josh Clark:Hey, everybody. Support for the show today comes from Public. So it kind of feels like there's two types of investing platforms. You've got the old school brokerages that look like they were designed in like 1995. And then you have those other platforms, you know, the ones that feel less like investing and more like a casino.

37:24Chuck Bryant:Public is neither. It's the investing platform for people who actually take this stuff seriously. You know, people who are serious about building their wealth. Because on Public, you can build a portfolio of stocks, options, bonds, crypto, without all the bugs or the confetti.

37:39Josh Clark:Retirement accounts? Yep. High-yield cash? Of course. They even have direct indexing. Honestly, this is what an investing platform should look like. Modern design, simple to use, and customer support that actually cares.

37:50Chuck Bryant:Go to public.com slash S-Y-S-K and earn an uncapped 1 % bonus when you transfer your portfolio. That's public.com slash S-Y-S-K.

37:59Josh Clark:Ad paid for by Public Holdings.

38:01Chuck Bryant:Brokerage services by Public Investing. Member FINRA. S-I-P-C.

38:05Josh Clark:Advisory services by Public Advisors. SEC Registered Advisor. Crypto services by ZeroHash. All investing involves risk of loss. See complete disclosures at public.com slash disclosures.

38:18Chuck Bryant:This episode is brought to you by Audi. We all know that feeling, a change of plans, an unexpected curve, a new opportunity. Instead of overthinking, what if you just said yes?

38:30Josh Clark:Yeah, with the all-new Audi Q3, the answer is easy. The Q3 is made for the yes life, with the power and room to handle whatever pops up.

38:38Chuck Bryant:Yes to adventure, yes to escape, yes to right now. Because saying yes without hesitation, that's real luxury.

38:45Josh Clark:The all-new Audi Q3, made for the yes life. Learn more at AudiUSA.com.

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40:00Josh Clark:All right, so we're back. We have not talked yet about the South Korean government. You know, like we said, this thing was on TV for everyone to kind of see. The one thing they didn't see was their president. Park Geun-hee was nowhere. She didn't emerge. There was about a seven-hour period where she didn't come out of her residence to address anything going on. When she finally did come out, she didn't seem like she was even briefed on what was going on. She was getting a lot of the basic facts of the disaster wrong. She didn't understand that there were students trapped inside the boat. It was just, it was a real mess from the beginning, and they still don't know.

40:42Josh Clark:I believe they sealed the national security documents that have, you know, what she was doing during those seven hours. They sealed those documents for at least 30 years. So no one's ever going to know what the president of that country was doing for those seven hours.

40:58Chuck Bryant:No, the one thing that an investigation turned up that she definitely was doing was the two hours before she finally went on TV to talk about this crisis. She was getting her hair done.

41:09Josh Clark:That's right. I remember hearing that.

41:11Chuck Bryant:Hours before that, they're like that. It's sealed. It's the most suspicious thing I've ever heard in my life.

41:18Josh Clark:Yeah, it's it's so fishy. And then sealing it for 30 years just like puts the official fishy stamp on it all.

41:25Chuck Bryant:Yeah. I mean, it's bad enough if they're just keeping it quiet, but to seal it for 30 years. What was she like having sex with Satan himself or something? What was going on?

41:35Josh Clark:All of a sudden, it's a South Park movie.

41:38Chuck Bryant:Pretty much. Oh, come on, guy.

41:41Josh Clark:So obviously the, you know, politics are politics. So the political opposition is going to just jump on this moment and say, you know, they're behind the families, of course, if you're on the other side of the political spectrum. They wanted her to step down. They mounted a big nationwide sort of protest saying that she needs to get out of here. And in 2017, she became the first South Korean president to be impeached and removed from office and was convicted. But the conviction had nothing to do with this. She was implicated in a bribery scheme. Right. But they do credit the seawall probe and the backlash against her to just sort of kicking off all of this investigatory stuff that led to that conviction.

42:25Chuck Bryant:Yeah. The Park family, in fact, had a pretty they were not very good at governing. Not only was she the first president to be removed from office in South Korea history, her father was a dictator who led a coup and took power until 1979 when he was assassinated. So not exactly the family you want running your country after all.

42:47Josh Clark:Yeah. Her prison sentence is 20 years, but she was pardoned in 2022 by her successor. They said that, you know, she wasn't doing well health wise. And that's, you know, in most normal times, politics wise, a lot of times even the opposition will like issue a pardon against the person they're against, you know.

43:10Chuck Bryant:Yeah, I think it's kind of one of those, like, we need to keep that custom in order because it could be me. I've got eyes on the Oval Office four years from now, and I don't want to go to jail.

43:20Josh Clark:Wait, you do?

43:21Chuck Bryant:Yeah, might as well. I mean, same thing. So here's the thing. It's been 12 years, and it is not clear what caused the sinking of the Sioux Wall Ferry.

43:32Josh Clark:Well, yeah. You don't know. Like why it turned. I mean, in that video, I don't know if this was the thing, but when it shows that truck slamming against the wall, something burst and water starts coming in.

43:44Chuck Bryant:So, yeah, yeah.

43:45Josh Clark:Yeah. What they don't know is why it why they made that sharp turn to begin with.

43:51Chuck Bryant:Did I send this to you? I don't know if you saw it, but the third main charge when she was tried, she testified that she ordered the quartermaster to turn the rudder, turn the wheel to avoid an oncoming ship. That was very closely.

44:05Josh Clark:I didn't see that part.

44:06Chuck Bryant:And like it's nowhere. Like you like it was I found it buried and referenced in some one article. Like it's not like a big thing. I don't know why, because it was confirmed by on land radar that there was a trail out right after the ship turned going the other direction of what seemed to be another ship.

44:25Josh Clark:OK, so that might have been the reason.

44:27Chuck Bryant:Yes, the reason they turned. And then she said, well, the quartermaster turned it way too hard. And again, like you said, these were inexperienced, low-paid contract workers actually doing the ship. So it's quite possible the quartermaster just turned it too hard. He also said, the quartermaster in his defense said, I didn't turn it that hard. That ship was not made to even turn five degrees like the third mate ordered me to. Like, it just kept going and skidding, essentially.

44:54Josh Clark:Yeah. You know, we mentioned the crew and the captain that got, and the president, that all got prison sentences. Uh, the, the owner of that ferry company had taken his own life, but I think it was his son that was the CEO.

45:08Chuck Bryant:Yeah.

45:08Josh Clark:He was convicted on accidental homicide charges, but also an embezzlement thing. Um, so he got a seven year term for both of those. Uh, there was a shipping official that, you know, the ones who said, Hey, you're fine to go, uh, without checking its cargo. Um, he was sentenced to three years, uh, a couple of workers with a private company that overloaded the ship to begin with. They got two years. The ferry company and this one, they ended up getting a pretty good payout. There was a civil wrongful death civil suit. And in 2018, court ordered the government and the ferry company to pay the families what would be about five hundred and thirty thousand dollars per victim and American dollars, which is about six hundred million won.

45:51Right.

45:53Josh Clark:But, you know, I mentioned the payout being pretty good just because they deserved it, but nothing, you know, there isn't a financial compensation for something like that, you know.

46:04Chuck Bryant:No, and to their credit, they are still quite organized and still agitating for answers. We didn't say, but they actually raised the ferry and dry docked it. It's pretty astounding that they were able to get that thing out of the water, out of, I think, 120 feet of water. And they were able to recover more bodies. They were able to recover belongings to the kids. Very important stuff. But they still are like, we have no idea what caused this, what the actual cause was. But they like it took President Park to be impeached before they raised that thing because she was essentially sitting on it. She didn't want it to make the news cycle again.

46:45Chuck Bryant:But they're still together. They didn't just get their money and like and say like whatever. Another group were charged with negligence and incompetence. They were 11 Coast Guard officers that all stood trial. One of them, I think he was the commander of that one Coast Guard boat that was there on the scene. He served a four-year sentence from what I saw.

47:05Josh Clark:Yep. There was also the bucket of the illegal surveillance that happened. The obstruction that happened when the government was trying to deflect basically all attention on themselves. So from that bucket, six officers with the Defense Security Command, which is their military intelligence agency, were convicted of illegally surveilling the families, you know, the victims' families. And then two of the president's top aides were actually acquitted of interfering with investigations, but they were tried, I guess.

47:37Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Yeah. And like I said, the grieving, the parents that became activists, they created essentially a couple of groups that both have 416 in the name that are there to essentially get the truth revealed, make sure that everyone who hasn't been punished is still punished. They also have managed to get the actual classrooms removed from the high school and reinstalled, I think, at the Department of Education. Yeah. And it's now a memorial museum, the 416 Memorial Classroom. Yeah. And there's multiple classrooms that are just empty. And they redid them exactly the way that they were left when the students left to go on their field trip.

48:23Chuck Bryant:And it's eerie. I saw one picture in the April 2014 wall calendar still up.

48:28Josh Clark:Ah, geez.

48:30Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it looks really stirring.

48:32Josh Clark:Yeah, that's brutal. This sadly was not, you know, the last disaster to strike South Korea just a few years ago in 2022. In October, 159 young people died in a crowd rush during Halloween. It's known as the Itaiwan crowd crush. and they, you know, at least there were parents from the seawall disaster that came forward to get together with these parents and say, hey, you've got a friend in me and we can be together in this activism, you know, so like join up with us because we're already going strong and that's what happened.

49:12Chuck Bryant:Yeah, because I guess what I left off, the main point of what they're agitating for is better government regulation for public safety responses, for things like shipping requirements, like just basically repealing some of the deregulation that led to these unsafe conditions that allowed that crowd crush to happen, that allowed the seawall ferry to sink without enough people being rescued. So, yeah, hats off to them for continuing what they're doing.

49:39Josh Clark:Yeah, sad, tough, tough, tough one. I remember this going down. I remember seeing the images of that captain coming off that boat in his underwear and just thinking like, what is this guy doing?

49:51Chuck Bryant:And we talked about the Itzwan crowd crush in the crowd crush episode.

49:55Josh Clark:Oh yeah, that's right.

49:57Chuck Bryant:I also just want to make sure everybody goes and watches In the Absence, that New Yorker documentary. It's like less than 30 minutes long and it's really something.

50:06Josh Clark:Agreed.

50:07Chuck Bryant:Well, Chuck said yeah and agreed. So that means it's time for Listener Mail.

50:13Josh Clark:This is not a sad listener mail, so we're going to end on a little brighter note. It's about deodorant. Hey, guys, I listened to the anti-perspirant deodorant episode, and I wanted to share this with your listenership. If you, and I guess, you know, Chris here isn't into standard deodorants and has some advice.

50:32Chuck Bryant:Okay.

50:32Josh Clark:If you mix equalish parts of coconut oil with baking soda to your favorite consistency, maybe if you have a favorite essential oil if desired, you can drop that in there. It's frankly the best deodorant ever for those whose bodies laugh at anything that is supposed to stop sweat. Because personally, this chick thinks of hot dogs and sweats. So the capability of a completely masking body odor is remarkable, at least with my stubborn stink. And we get a cheers from Chris. And Chris has a little PS. If you get irritated from the baking soda, maybe just add some more coconut oil until your skin doesn't complain.

51:10Chuck Bryant:Nice. Thanks, Chris. That's good stuff. I do have to warn you, do not just willy-nilly put a bunch of essential oil in there, though. Like, I found that out the hard way when I had, I guess, poison ivy. And you were just like, just put some oil on, some essential oil on. I don't remember. I just put essential oil on it and my skin just started burning immediately. And she's like, no, you're supposed to mix it with like other oil first. Well, you didn't say that.

51:38Josh Clark:Why didn't you call Emily? But Yumi knew that. Yeah, you got to really dilute that stuff. A little goes a long way. So I would imagine a couple of drops in your deodorant concoction would be plenty.

51:47Chuck Bryant:It's like the old slogan says, a couple of drops, tops. If you want to get in touch with us like Chris did, send us an email like Chris did. You can send it off to stuffpodcasts at iheartradio.com.

52:01Josh Clark:Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app. Apple Podcasts are wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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