JINDO, South Korea — Dozens of divers Monday resumed the search for missing passengers in the sunken ferry off the southern South Korean coast.
About 114 people are believed missing, but the search had to be suspended over the weekend because of poor weather, strong currents, and floating debris clogging the ship’s rooms.
A senior coast guard officer said most of the passengers still missing are believed to be in 64 of the ship’s 111 rooms. Divers have entered about half of the 64 rooms, but may have to go back into some because floating debris made it difficult for them to be sure that there were no more dead bodies.
An official with the emergency task force said the government is making plans to salvage the ferry once search efforts end but details would not be available until officials talk with families of the victims. So far, 188 bodies have been recovered.
Prosecutors investigating the disaster said the captain of the ferry and two crew members are facing possible life sentences for abandoning passengers as the vessel sank, Bloomberg News reported. Homicide through abandonment carries a prison term of three years to life under Korean law.
Captain Lee Joon Seok, 68, who was not on the bridge at the time of the incident, faces the abandonment charge, along with the third mate, who was steering the vessel and a helmsman, prosecutor Lee Bong Chang said.
An impromptu city has sprung up at this normally sleepy port to help the families of those lost in the disaster.
A sense of national mourning over a tragedy that will probably result in more than 300 deaths, most of them high school students, has prompted an outpouring of volunteers. More than 16,000 people have come to help.
The volunteers handle much of the care that relatives of the missing receive in Jindo as they wait for divers to retrieve the bodies of their loved ones from the wreckage of the ferry Sewol.
People from aid groups, private companies, churches, and other organizations pack a gym and roads lined with white tents, offering soup, kimchi, rice, hamburgers, taxi services, cellphone battery charging, laundry services, medicine, energy drinks, psychiatric help, and necessities like underwear, socks, and toothbrushes.
Park Seung Ki, a spokesman for the government task force, said people have come on their own or with nearly 730 organizations. About 690,000 aid items such as food, bottled water, blankets, and clothes have also arrived in Jindo since the sinking, Park said.
Some scrub toilets and bathroom floors at the gym where families sleep, keeping the amenities practically spotless. A man walks with a huge sign that says ‘‘I will wash clothes for you.’’
They cook huge pots of hot kimchi soup, distribute blankets, towels and toiletries, pick up trash, and sweep the grounds. Turkish volunteers offer kebabs, turning on spits. One truck distributes homemade tofu, another pizza.
Cab drivers from Ansan, where the high school students who make up more than 80 percent of the missing and dead were from, provide free rides to and from Jindo, a five-hour drive that would normally run up a fare of $270.
‘‘It’s time to help those who are mourning. Giving up several days of work is nothing,’’ driver Ahn Dae-soo said.