South Koreans ask authorities about preparations after Halloween disaster in Seoul

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SEOUL — At first, the young woman felt like she was being squeezed into a narrow alley in the South Korean capital, where she had been enjoying Halloween festivities Saturday night.

Then the squeeze became more of a crush, and soon, the body was so tightly pressed against her that her feet were no longer touching the ground. The next thing the 23-year-old remembered was being in the crowd, her lungs flattened and her legs went numb with shallow breathing. She remembers people screaming for help, then falling silent as the corpses around her became limp.

“I thought, ‘Okay, I’ll be next,'” said Juliana Velandia Santaella, a medical student from Mexico who was pulled from the crowd by a man standing nearby. “I really thought I was going to die.”

By Sunday, those frantic moments had given way to a line of mourners arriving with white flowers and candles, and there was the question of how the celebrations turned into a thronging crowd in the worst of the disaster. At least 153 people died. of recent history.

With condolences from around the world, South Korean officials said on Sunday they had identified nearly all of the victims, including 20 foreigners from 10 different countries, including two from the United States, one of whom was 20. of old Marietta, Georgia, who spent a semester abroad. Others are from Iran, Norway, Uzbekistan and China. Most of the rest are young South Koreans in their 20s and 30s who squeezed into the narrow alleys of the historic Itaewon nightlife district, according to South Korea’s Ministry of Interior and Security.

One of the questions South Koreans asked in the aftermath of the disaster was why public safety officials didn’t anticipate the need to manage the tens of thousands of party-goers expected to attend the wildly popular Halloween festivities.

‘So many corpses’: Seoul witnesses recall truly horrific Halloween night

Just two days ago, the surrounding Yongsan district announced safety measures, including coronavirus prevention, street cleaning, restaurant safety inspections and cracking down on potential drug use. Crowd control issues are not on the list.

The alleys on the hill were packed with people on Saturday night. It was so crowded that it formed a waterfall when people on the top of the mountain fell. According to witnesses interviewed by South Korean media, many people at the foot of the mountain chanted “stop pushing, stop pushing”.

Experts say the oversight highlights the limitations of the state’s policies governing mass gatherings in public spaces. They said that while official events such as festivals require detailed safety protocols, the same approach to disaster prevention does not apply to public spaces where large numbers of people are expected to gather informally, leaving safety protocols ambiguous and no clear responsible agency.

The exact reason for the surge in crowds is under investigation.

The Halloween assassination in Seoul’s Itaewon district left more than 150 dead and dozens injured. On October 1, South Korea announced a national mourning period. 30. (Video: Julie Yoon/The Washington Post, Photo: Anthony Wallace/AFP/Getty Images/The Washington Post)

Crowds in Seoul show loopholes in South Korea’s safety rules, experts say

Mehdi Moussaïd, a researcher in crowd behaviour at the Max Planck Institute for Human Development, said the relatively spontaneous nature of the event – with no tickets and no controlled entry and exit – exacerbated the disaster.

He watched the public crush video and “saw what I usually see in these kinds of accidents – there are a lot of people, too many people in relation to the available space. [This is] Measured by density, so people per square meter. “

In this case, like the others he’s studied, he thinks there are about 8 to 10 people per square meter.

“At this density, it’s not surprising that the first few people start to faint because they’re too tight to breathe,” he said. “If this continues, that’s what happened, then that Everyone in the area will no longer have enough oxygen, even if they faint and die one by one.”

He added that the fascination in Seoul is not the same as that of a music festival or religious pilgrimage because people “are in a city, it’s not a planned event, it’s a ticket to attract a crowd. We don’t know which street people will go to.”

Itaewon alleys at the center of the crowded crowd on Saturday also looked dangerous the night before, with crowds swaying from side to side in the narrow corridor as their weight shifted from one another, one partygoer said.

Hayley Johnson, 29, who said she was out on a Friday night to enjoy the atmosphere, recalled that the crowd was “manageable” before she arrived at two famous clubs, Fountain and Atelier, which were a short distance from each other. The alley where the crush took place is only a few steps away.

When she got to the narrow street, “it was just body to body,” she said. “You’re going to see people behind you dumping left and right. It really freaks me out and my friends.”

The event could be described as a crowd squeeze or surge, but not a stampede, said G. Keith Still, visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England. A squeeze or surge occurs when people are crowded into a tight space and there is a movement such as pushing that causes the crowd to collapse. He said the stampede meant people had room to escape, which was not the case in Itaewon.

The more people in the crowd, the stronger the crowd crushing force. “The whole crowd fell together, and if you were in a confined space, people couldn’t get up again,” Steele said.

Bodies were laid out on the street shortly after the disaster, and onlookers frantically tried CPR, pulling their shirts to their faces to show their efforts had failed. Video footage seen by The Washington Post showed police running to the scene where a man was being treated with a defibrillator and a woman was covered in clothing as blood pooled around her. The others lay motionless with their mouths open.

“It’s almost post-apocalyptic. Almost all civilians, with no medical staff, are trying to save these people,” said Yoon-sung Park, a tech worker who helps transport the injured to safer CPR. “People have been lying here for about half a mile,” he added, pointing to Itaewon’s main market street as emergency workers pushed covered bodies onto ambulances. “There are so many corpses.”

Siblings Joshua and Angela Smith, both from Florida, looked out the window of their ninth-floor hotel room Saturday night as they watched the disaster unfold in the alley below. Joshua saw first responders use a hand pump to provide oxygen to three victims who were wheeled into ambulances, and he saw a fourth gurney carry a body away in a bag. Angela Smith heard screams coming from the alley.

“It was horrible, horrible,” Joshua said.

She said police brought Sophia Akhiyat, a 31-year-old doctor from Florida, to the alley to help, and she described a “bunch of people” at the top of a narrow street preventing ambulances from entering the area.

“These people, I think most of them were dying or dying by the time we were helping them,” she said.

South Korean President Yoon Se-yeol visited the scene on Sunday, and the alley is now blocked off with police tape and filled with Halloween masks and plastic candy buckets. The country has declared a national period of mourning until November. 5. The federal building is flying at half-mast.

Michelle Ye Hee Lee and Kelly Kasulis Cho reported from Seoul; Stephanie McCrummen and Praveena Somasundaram from Washington; and Annabelle Timsit from London.

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