SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — The South Korean government is scrambling to fix what the prime minister calls the “deep-rooted evils” that contributed to last month’s ferry sinking, which left more than 300 people dead or missing.
As investigators probe cozy links between the shipping industry and its regulators, Seoul has promised new monitoring and regulations for domestic passenger ships, which are not governed by international rules.
The ministry says all information about passengers will be processed electronically beginning in June, with similar changes for vehicles and cargo beginning in July. The measures are meant to fix a system that produced uncertainty about how many people were on the Sewol when it sank, and especially about the amount of cargo it was carrying.
Under the current system, passengers write down their names, genders, birthdays and contact numbers. Many people, including cargo truck drivers who use ferries on monthly passes, didn’t bother filling them out. Authorities believe 476 people were on the Sewol when it sank, and only 174 of them are known to have survived.
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