hankyoreh

A woman headed to the funeral hall at Soonchunhyang University Hospital in Seoul’s Yongsan District in search of her missing child pauses, overcome by emotion, to cry. (Baek So-ah/The Hankyoreh)

A total of 154 were confirmed dead and 132 injured as of 10:30 pm on Sunday after the worst crowd crush in South Korean history, which occurred in Seoul’s Itaewon neighborhood on Saturday evening.

The massive tragedy happened as crowds of people visiting the neighborhood to enjoy the weekend ahead of the Halloween holiday on Monday ended up caught and smothered in a narrow, sloping alley. Many of the victims were young people in their 20s.

Whereas crowd crushes and stampedes typically occur in settings with restricted entrances such as religious and sporting events, the Itaewon tragedy happened in an open setting in the heart of Seoul, amid previous predictions that over 100,000 people would be visiting the neighborhood for the festivities. For that reason, many are increasingly calling the crush an “administrative disaster” resulting from a failure to establish safety measures ahead of time.

According to accounts from the tragedy’s survivors and witnesses and announcements from firefighters and police, the crush happened at around 10:15 pm on Saturday in a sloping alley measuring 3.2 meters across and 40 meters in length (10.5 ft by 131 ft) next to Hamilton Hotel in Itaewon.

Within the narrow alley, crowds of people exiting clubs on the road behind the hotel ran into crowds coming up from Exit 1 of Itaewon Station (Seoul Subway Line 6) on the main road in front of the hotel. The people wedged in the middle were left unable to move.

Survivors described how people in the crowd “fell down like dominoes.”

“That narrow alley was packed with people. One by one, they started toppling over,” said survivor Lee Chang-gyu, 19.

“The people on the ground were yelling, ‘Get back! Get back!’ but the others weren’t moving. It looked like they might get killed,” he recalled.

Madison Frost, 23, said, “I heard that someone famous was at one of the clubs, and all of a sudden people began screaming and falling over by Hamilton Hotel.”

Two minutes after the first reports of the incident were received, a rescue team was sent in from Yongsan Fire Station at 10:17 pm. But with tens of thousands of people crowding the narrow side streets, team members had difficulty even reaching the scene.

Witnesses said that while rescue workers and members of the public struggled to extricate the fallen victims, the crowd was too tightly tangled to remove them. The situation continued this way for over an hour.

Video footage taken at the scene showed people in the middle passing out on their feet, unable to breathe amid the intense pressure as hundreds of people pushed against each other within the confines of the 125-square-meter alley, which was blocked to both the left and right.

Forty-five people were pronounced dead immediately at the scene. Due to the massive scale of the tragedy, it took until after 4 am on Sunday for all of those killed or injured to be transported to nearby hospitals.

Of the 154 killed, 98 were confirmed to be women, while 26 were foreign nationals.

Police have obtained closed-circuit camera footage from Hamilton Hotel and other buildings in the area and are currently working to determine the cause of the incident.

Many are blaming the local government and police for their hands-off approach to basic safety management.

With the full-scale lifting of pandemic-related social distancing restrictions, tens of thousands of people had flocked to Itaewon on Friday ahead of the first mask-free Halloween in three years. Even bigger crowds were expected on Saturday, but the local government and police did not impose additional measures such as increased safety staffing.

The police had 137 officers stationed as a preventive measure for drug- and sex-related crimes, and the Yongsan District Office did not develop a safety management plan or request traffic controls.

In a briefing at the Central Government Complex in Seoul, Minister of the Interior and Safety Lee Sang-min said, “The size of the crowds was not large enough to raise particular concerns in comparison with the past.”

“This was not a matter that could be resolved by stationing police and firefighters ahead of time,” he added.

In a statement to the public presented at his office in Yongsan on Sunday morning, President Yoon Suk-yeol announced plans for a thorough investigation of the tragedy.

“A tragedy and disaster that should not have happened took place in the heart of Seoul last night,” he said.

He also declared a national mourning period through Nov. 5 and designated Yongsan District a special disaster zone.

After an emergency countermeasure meeting at the Central Government Complex in Seoul, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo promised to “provide all necessary support, including financial support to the victims’ family members and those injured.”

The ruling and opposition parties each held emergency supreme council meetings Sunday to discuss countermeasures, while suspending all political activities and other party-level events.

The central government, local governments nationwide, and major businesses also canceled scheduled festivals, concerts, and Halloween events.

By Jang Na-rye, staff reporter; Kim Mi-na, staff reporter

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