Seoul police and authorities were targeted after the deadly stampede that killed at least 154 people during Halloween celebrations after it was revealed that only 137 officers were sent to control a crowd that was supposed to exceed 100 thousand people.
To get an idea of the scale, nearly 7,000 police officers were sent to another part of the South Korean capital on Saturday to oversee a series of protests, an event that attracted thousands of people, but smaller than the crowd that flocked to the neighborhood. popular of Itaewon nightlife.
The commission set up to investigate why the crowd arose also has 475 members, three times the number of police officers assigned to control the crowd.
A “disaster caused by human error”
As South Korea mourns, authorities face tough questions about preparations for celebrations and demands for accountability after the country’s worst disaster in nearly a decade. The national government insists on this there was no way to predict for the crowd to lose control.
Experts disagree. The deployment of so few police officers, they say, proves this the authorities were unpreparedwhile knowing in advance that there would be a large rally following the easing of COVID-19 restrictions in recent months.
According to experts, in addition to assigning more staff, officials in the Yongsan district, which Itaewon governs, should have converted some streets into pedestrians and tried to alleviate crowding in narrow alleys like the one that caused the death.
The 137 Itaewon agents were given orders to pay special attention to the drug usewhich means that, for all intents and purposes, “no one was concerned with pedestrian safety,” said Kong Ha-song, a professor of disaster prevention at South Korea’s Woosuk University.
Deaths should be considered a “disaster caused by human errorsaid Lee Changmoo, a professor of urban planning at Seoul’s Hanyang University.
Authorities have received similar criticism in national media and social networks. An editorial headline in Sunday’s Hankyoreh newspaper described the tragedy as “too avoidable”. The newspaper said its information showed that a pedestrian was hit by a crowd in Itaewon one day before the Halloween holidays, though no one was injured.
The deaths occurred on Saturday in a downhill alley that is intertwined between a dense row of shop windows and the iconic Hamilton Hotel. The path was clogged with a large crowd of partygoers before some of them collapsed “like dominoes”according to witnesses.
The members of the emergency team were so overwhelmed by the number of people lying motionless on the ground that they asked pedestrians to help them provide first aid.
But Choi Sukjae, an emergency medicine specialist and spokesperson for the Korea Emergency Medical Association, said the time to administer resuscitation is only a couple of minutes and that in many cases it would not help, as the the paramedics were late in arriving because the area was very busy.
The measures that were not organized could have helped
Kong, a teacher who specializes in disaster prevention, said more police and officials should have been called to check for potential traffic jams.
He suggested that crowding could have been avoided if the authorities had done so one-way lanes for walkingit allegedly blocked the entrance to some narrow streets and temporarily closed the Itaewon subway station to prevent too many people from moving in the same direction.
Officials could also have temporarily banned cars from Itaewon’s main street, as they did during the annual Itaewon Global Village Festival in early October, giving people more space to spread out, Kong said.
Lee, the urban planning professor, criticized Interior and Security Minister Lee Sang-min, who said, without elaborating, that having more police and fire brigade personnel on the ground it would not have prevented the tragedy.
When asked about the number of officers assigned, the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency said 137 was still more than those sent in 2020 and 2021. Police and government officials acknowledged that the crowd this year was largerbut its exact amount is not known.
Kong added that the lack of a clear organizer – young people flocked to bars to celebrate Halloween but there wasn’t a specific call-up event – may have contributed to the tragedy.
“Our country usually does a good job of following the manual and maintaining crowd control at events where there is a specific organizer,” he said. “But officials often don’t know what to do or don’t even care about events that aren’t created by a specific organizer … even if it’s those events that often require the utmost vigilance.”
Hong Ki-hyeon, a senior official with the National Police Agency, acknowledged the problem at a press conference on Monday, saying police have no definite way to deal with such encounters.
“In events such as festivals that have a specific organizer, discussions are held between connected municipalities, police, firefighters and medical experts who prepare and collaborate with different roles,” Hong said. “That’s what we got lost in connection with this incident“.
Yongsan District refused to answer questions about the preparations. District Mayor Park Hee-young instead said in a statement Monday that his office was using “all administrative resources” to support the injured and the families of the victims.
For the past two years, the district’s preparations for Halloween have been concentrated prevent the spread of COVID-19 among the partygoers.
Workers scoured bars, restaurants and nightclubs to monitor compliance with social distancing rules and checkpoints were set up in busy areas where public workers and volunteers measured the temperature of partygoers.
The sad list of Korean tragedies
Saturday’s stampede was the largest catastrophe in the country since 304 people, mostly high school students, died in the sinking of a ferry in April 2014. The sinking revealed lax safety standards and regulatory failures.
South Korea has a long history of deadly crushes and stampedes, though none are as deadly as Saturday. In 2005, 11 people were killed and dozens were injured during a pop music concert amid a crowd in the southern town of Sangju.
In 1960, 31 people died after being crushed on the steps of a train station when a large crowd rushed to board a train during the Lunar New Year celebrations.
Source AP
Source: Clarin
