Nearly 300 people are feared missing after a huge ferry capsized and sank off South Korea's southwestern coast. Carrying a group of high school students on a field trip from a high school outside Seoul, the ship was en route to Jeju, a Korean resort island known as the country's "Hawaii." Scores of rescue divers have descended on the ship, and it is feared that the death toll will rise sharply in coming days. Survivors say many people remain trapped on the ship's lower decks; 462 people were on board the ship, 281 of whom remain unaccounted for.
Somewhere between 800 and 1,000 people are thought to die in ferry accidents every year, according to Roberta Weisbrod, the executive director of the Worldwide Ferry Safety Association. While ferries in the developed world are by and large very safe, ferry safety is a serious problem in the developing world, Weisbrod said. But the true extent of the problem remains something of a mystery: The actual annual death toll from ferry disasters could be twice the current estimate, she says.
While ferry accidents such as Wednesday's catastrophe are uncommon in Korea -- its last such disaster came two decades ago -- they happen more often elsewhere in Asia, particularly in Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The Philippines and Indonesia are composed of extensive archipelagos; Bangladesh is a riverine country. As a result, water transport is a fact of daily life. What has been described as the world's worst peacetime maritime tragedy occurred in the Philippines in 1987 when the Dona Paz collided with an oil tanker and as many as 4,000 people lost their lives.
Ferries in developing countries are often old vessels, sometimes repurposed to operate in waterways for which they weren't designed. In Tanzania, for example, ferries from the calm waters of Washington ...
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