Rescue crews were searching through the night off Busan after a 286-ton tugboat capsized east of Oryukdo on Wednesday, leaving one crew member dead and six missing. The vessel was carrying eight people, six South Koreans and two Indonesians, when it overturned about 9 kilometers offshore at around 1:29 p.m., according to Korean reporting citing the Busan Coast Guard. One Indonesian crew member was rescued by a nearby vessel. A South Korean man in his 50s was later found unconscious inside the tugboat and taken to hospital, where he died.
The accident turned quickly into a large search operation because most of the crew could not be accounted for after the vessel went down. Coast Guard units and specialist maritime rescue teams were deployed around the site, while difficult sea conditions complicated the effort. Kyunghyang Shinmun reported that high waves and strong currents were hampering the search. SBS said crews moved into an overnight operation as the six missing sailors remained unlocated.
A night search for six missing sailors
The immediate priority is finding the missing crew, but the basic circumstances also make the accident unusually serious. The tugboat had been working with a commercial vessel when it capsized. Tugboats are built for demanding maneuvers and towing loads, so investigators will need to establish whether weather, towing forces, mechanical failure, stability, or another factor caused the vessel to overturn. Those causes were not established in the reporting available overnight, and KORInform is not treating any of them as confirmed.
President Lee Jae-myung ordered authorities to use all available resources for rescue operations, according to Kyunghyang Shinmun. That instruction raises the incident beyond a routine local maritime response and puts pressure on agencies to sustain the search while there is still a possibility of survival. For the families of the missing sailors, the situation is much more immediate: six people remain unaccounted for, and every hour of the search matters.
Cause still unknown as investigators wait
The tugboat was working offshore near Oryukdo; investigators have not yet established why it capsized.
One survivor also described the speed and violence of the capsizing. Separate Korean reporting said a crew member escaped after the vessel suddenly turned over while he was preparing food, an account that underlines how little warning those aboard may have had. That testimony can help investigators reconstruct the sequence, but it does not by itself establish why the tugboat lost stability.
The search and the investigation now move on parallel tracks. Rescue teams need to locate the missing crew and determine whether anyone remains trapped in or near the wreck. Investigators will then examine the tugboat's condition, the towing operation, weather and sea data, and communications before the capsize. Until those findings are available, the confirmed picture remains stark: eight people were aboard, one survived, one died, and six were still missing after a major maritime accident off Busan.