The dock of C.C shipyard Co. Ltd. refurbished the South Korean ferry Sewol in 2012 by adding space and weight to the vessel.Kim Kyung-Hoon/Reuters
A few times an hour, the number ticks one higher and a nation's pride sinks lower.
The grim toll of bodies removed from a capsized ferry submerged off South Korea's southwestern coast reached 121 on Tuesday evening. As Seoul marshals a massive response — 550 divers, 212 ships, 34 airplanes – the ranks of the missing are slowly diminishing. If no one is found inside alive, 302 will have died in the Sewol ferry disaster.
The dead, many of them schoolchildren, are a heart-rending human disaster. For Korea, the grief is also casting a harsh new light on a shipping industry that has long suffered safety troubles.
South Korea boasts the world's fastest Internet, its biggest smartphone manufacturer and a burgeoning culture of innovation that has cemented its reputation as an oasis of modernity.
That image has, for many Koreans, been deeply shaken as the ferry's aftermath brings reports of poor safety practices, with at least one of the ship's crew saying he had never so much as rehearsed an evacuation.
South Korean President Park Geun Hye said on Monday that the captain's conduct "was akin to murder," suggesting that human error is to blame in the accident, and the subsequent failure to evacuate most on board. The ship's captain and several officers have already been charged with negligence and acts contravening maritime law; nine have been arrested in total.
Speaking to reporters on Tuesday, one official said the crew were unable to reach lifeboats because they "slipped."
But South Korean prosecutors have also trained their attention on a 2012 renovation to the ferry itself, which added a deck that both raised the ship's passenger capacity and its weight. That has raised suspicions that the Sewol vessel may have been vulnerable to capsizing. Korean media have reported that if investigators find problems, prosecutors may also direct their attention to those responsible for regulating and inspecting Korea's ships.
Marine safety problems are particularly problematic for a country that prides itself on building ships. Korean and Chinese docks combined construct nearly three-quarters of the world's ocean-going fleet, by deadweight tonnage.
But problems with Korean vessels, at least those sailing under the country's flag, are long-standing.
Researchers at Southampton Solent University, a British institution with a long history of maritime expertise, recently compared 54 countries by the percentage of their registered fleets lost – that is, irreparably damaged – from 1997 to 2011. South Korea ranked 39th, behind Azerbaijan, Liberia, Vietnam, Bangladesh and Bulgaria. It barely beat out Sierra Leone. (Canada was fifth, Japan fourth.)
The researchers showed that roughly 1.5 per cent of the South Korean fleet had been lost over that time.
South Korea also spent years on the U.S. Coast Guard's "target list" of countries whose ships had unusually high rates of safety inspection failures. In a 2009 report, the Coast Guard listed Korea alongside Turkey, Panama, Belize, Italy and the Netherlands as countries with a "detention ratio" more than double average. That ratio is a measure of how frequently ships have problems severe enough to prompt U.S. safety interventions. In 2009, Korean ships were examined 73 times, with 24 exams showing "deficiencies." (Canadian-flagged ships had 83 exams, 18 with deficiencies.)
The most recent Coast Guard report showed improvement, with Korea being removed from the "target list." Its detention ratio still exceeded the global average, however. Accidents involving Korean ships have risen in recent years, from 636 in 2008 to 941 in 2012, according to the country's Maritime Safety Tribunal.
The waters around South Korea are among the world's most dangerous for shipping accidents, as they are crisscrossed by busy shipping lanes, frequented by sometimes poorly maintained "tramp" ships, and often pounded by severe weather.
In a 2012 report, Allianz, the insurance company, called the area around Japan, Korea and North China an "accident black spot," home to 12.4 per cent of the world's ship losses from 2001 to 2011. Only two other areas were worse: the waters between the Philippines and South China, at 17 per cent of losses, and the Black Sea and Mediterranean, at 13 per cent.
For Korea, this is not the first time a critical transportation industry has been forced to re-examine the way it works.
A series of air crashes in the 1990s, including the 1997 crash of Korean Air Flight 801 that killed 228 in Guam, led to a wholesale remaking of Korea's aviation safety and training systems. Systems were changed, rules were rewritten. Authorities went so far as to hire some foreign pilots, amid worries that safety had been hurt by a deeply hierarchical system whose cultural roots made it hard for junior cockpit staff to question bad decisions by senior captains.
The effort was hugely effective. By 2008, Korea's air safety regime had become the most rigorous on earth.
The ferry disaster, and the national mourning it has prompted, will almost certainly trigger a similar rethinking of the country's marine safety. Such soul-searching has numerous historic precedents. Substantial portions of modern international marine safety code were written after accidents dramatic and devastating enough they can be invoked merely by the vessels involved, like the Titanic and the Exxon Valdez.