A local daily reported Friday that poor life vest design caused the deaths of four soldiers six years ago.

According to the report, the life vest used by soldiers during a boat drill in Hangang River was designed to have higher buoyance on the back than the front, which led to the device forcing the soldiers’ face under water.

The daily claimed that investigation report obtained from the Army headquarters said that the November 2010 accident of four drownings at the Ipo irrigation pool in Yeoju-si, Gyeonggi Province, was due to the faulty design of the life jacket the soldiers wore at the time.

The report read, “If the soldiers lost consciousness while being swept in the current, it can be presumed their centroid was tilted to their torso, which could have submerged their heads under water.”

“There appears to be a need for a thorough research to improve the life jackets.”

When the boat capsized during the military drill, the soldiers were swept away in the current and were later found drowned with their backs turned up facing the sky. The floatable jackets they wore had 55 percent buoyancy on the back and 45 percent on the chest.

The military is being accused of allegedly covering up the faulty life jackets to avoid taking responsibility for the death of the four soldiers.

A military insider, whose identity was withheld to protect the source, said in an interview with the local daily that the reason the life jackets were designed in such a manner was due to misconstrued notion that it would allow the soldiers to always maintain a front-facing posture.

Unlike the army life jackets, the navy’s kapok life jackets have extra buoyancy at the front, with only one-third of chest buoyancy at the back. 

The insider claimed the jackets were not the direct cause of soldiers’ drowning, however the incident has served as a trigger to run a check on safety gears and improve on them.

“The buoyancy was corrected so that the chest would have 10 percent higher buoyancy than the back.”

The military will distribute the new life jackets to each military unit by the end of this year. A budget of 1.7 billion won ($1.5 million) was allocated to the military for this.

By Lim Jeong-yeo (kaylalim@heraldcorp.com)