To the small and insufficient number of police officers in charge of crowd control who celebrated Halloween in the streets of Itaewon, Seoul last Saturday, was added another mistake that contributed to the stampede in which at least 156 people died in Korea. South: there was 11 calls the emergency services to warn of the impending tragedybut they were not contemplated by the authorities.
This was confirmed after the South Korean National Police Agency (NPA) make public recordings of communications to the emergency number 112.
The first phone call, recorded at 6:34 pm (local time), was energetic: it warned of the danger that people could be crushed in the alley that connects the main avenue of the neighborhood, Itaewon ro, with a pedestrian street that has the greatest concentration. of bars in the area, that is, near a subway exit and the main intersection of the neighborhood, where about 100,000 people attended on Saturday.
“I’ve been in that alley with people going up and down, and it’s scary. People can’t go down and there are people pushing trying to go up, I felt that one could be crushed to death“explained that person, not imagining that his warning would come true hours later.
It is completed: “gives the chills. It’s such a narrow alley and everyone who comes out of the station goes up that alley and mingles with people trying to get out, plus there are people queuing for a nightclub. “
Several other phone calls after 8pm referred to the chaos, that people were “falling” and “getting hurt” and that the situation was “dangerous”.
Around 9 pm, the communications were repeated every few minutes and revolved around panic and the danger that many people “will be crushed to death”. In all cases, it he assured them that the police officers would go to the place mentioned.
At 10:11 pm another call was recorded. But this time it was not as a warning, but to ask for desperate help in the face of the deadly avalanche that just happened. “Itaewon’s back road, Itaewon’s back road!” they managed to scream.
The publication of these documents infuriated South Korean society, which harshly criticized the police’s lack of response to the tragedy.
The measures that were not organized and that 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 that city’s annual Global Village Festival in early October, giving people more space to spread out, Kong said.
Lee, the professor of urban planning, criticized Minister of Internal Affairs and Security Lee Sang-min, who said, without elaborating, that having more police and firefighters on the ground 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,” he added.
With information from EFE.
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Source: Clarin
