South Korea's deadly Halloween crush was avoidable, experts say
By Joyce Lee
FILE PHOTO: Crush during Halloween festivities in Seoul© Reuters/KIM HONG-JI
SEOUL (Reuters) - Proper crowd and traffic control by South Korean authorities could have prevented or at least reduced the surge of Halloween party-goers in alleys that led to a crush and the deaths of 154 people, safety experts said on Monday.
The annual festivities in the popular nightlife area of Itaewon in Seoul also did not have a central organising entity, which meant government authorities were not required to establish or enforce safety protocols.
District authorities for Yongsan, where Itaewon is located, discussed measures to prevent illegal drug use and the spread of COVID-19 during the Halloween weekend, according to a district press release. There was, however, no mention of crowd control.
On Saturday when the tragedy occurred, roughly 100,000 people were estimated to be in Itaewon, an area known for its hills and narrow alleys. According to Seoul Metro, some 81,573 people disembarked at Itaewon subway station on the day, up from around 23,800 a week earlier and about 35,950 on Friday.
But there were only 137 police officers in Itaewon at the time, the city of Seoul said.
In contrast, at rallies by labour unions and by supporters of President Yoon Suk-yeol that drew tens of thousands in Gwanghwamun, central Seoul, on the same Saturday, up to 4,000 police were deployed, a
"Police are now working on a thorough analysis of the incident's cause," Minister of the Interior and Safety Lee Sang-min said on Monday.
"It's not appropriate to make hasty conclusions before the exact cause is determined - whether it was caused by a lack of police or whether there is something that we should fundamentally change for rallies and gatherings."
President Yoon has called for a thorough investigation into the cause of the crush as well as improvements in safety measures that can be used for large gatherings where there is no set organiser.
While South Korea has a safety manual for festivals expected to attract more than 1,000 people, the manual presupposes an organising body in charge of safety planning and requesting government resources.
Just two weeks earlier, the Itaewon Global Village Festival organised by a tourism association and sponsored by the city of Seoul and Yongsan district, had people wearing yellow vests directing the flow of movement and the main road was closed to car traffic.
But on Saturday, there were just thousands of shops open for business, normal car traffic rules and tens of thousands of young people eager to celebrate Halloween without major COVID restrictions for the first time since the pandemic.
"Just because it's not named a 'festival' doesn't mean there should be any difference in terms of disaster management," said Paek Seung-joo, a professor of fire & disaster protection at Open Cyber University of Korea.
"As there was no central authority, each government arm just did what they usually do - the fire department prepared for fires and the police prepared for crime. There needs to be a system where a local government takes the reins and cooperates with other authorities to prepare for the worst," he said.
Moon Hyeon-cheol, a professor at the Graduate School of Disaster Safety Management at Soongsil University, said this type of crush had the potential to happen in any populous city.
"We need to take this tragedy and learn to prepare for the risk of disaster," he said.
(Reporting by Joyce Lee; Additional reporting by Hyonhee Shin and Soo-hyang Choi; Editing by Edwina Gibbs)
A rule of physics dictates when a crowd crush turns deadly, like in Seoul, South Korea, where 154 died
mguenot@businessinsider.com (Marianne Guenot)
The belongings of victims are seen at the scene of a deadly stampede during a Halloween festival on October 30, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea. Photo by Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
A Halloween party in Seoul ended in at least 154 deaths after the streets became badly crowded.
The phenomenon, called crowd surging, comes down to basic physics, an expert told Insider.
If a limit of around seven people per square yard is breached, things can quickly turn deadly.
Crowd surging — the deadly phenomenon that claimed more than 150 lives in South Korea — is explained by simple physics, an expert told Insider.
At least 154 people died in Seoul on Saturday when a Halloween street party caused a crowd so dense it crushed people to death.
The crush took place in the busy Itaewon neighbourhood of Seoul, a popular nightlife spot that attracted tens of thousands of people on Saturday, The Guardian reported.
There was no single event planned, per Reuters. But crowds from bustling bars and nightclubs poured into a narrow, sloped alley connecting a subway station to a main street.
A map of the Itaewon neighbourhood of Seoul shows the location of the alleyway. Google Maps/Insider© Google Maps/Insider
Sometime after 10 p.m., the street became full beyond capacity. Social-media accounts of the night, compiled by Reuters, said that people near the top of the alley lost their footing and fell into crowds below, starting a fatal crush.
The tragedy prompted national mourning in South Korea and questions of whether more could have been done to prevent it.
Medhi Moussaïd, a research scientist at the Max Plank Institute in Berlin who studies crowd dynamics, spoke to Insider about when crowding turns deadly
"Most people don't realize the danger," he said, arguing that people should be better informed as cities become denser and big crowds more common.
Emergency services are seen in the alleyway where the crowd crush took place, pictured here on October 30, 2022. ANTHONY WALLACE / AFP/Getty Images
Crowds acting like waves
Crowd surging is driven by a simple principle. If a group of people becomes dense enough — more than six or seven people per square yard — a crowd starts acting like a fluid.
At this point, the people inside largely lose the power to control their own movement.
Related video: Eyewitnesses describe horror of Seoul crowd crush
Duration 3:01
If someone is shoved, they will push their neighbor, who will fall on their neighbor, and so on and so forth.
"Then this movement is transmitted," Moussaïd said. It is a little like a ripple through water, as these movements spread, they grow bigger
The pressure from the wave can be too intense to bear for people in the crowd, especially if they are pushed into an obstacle. As seen in Seoul, it can be fatal.
"Those waves are pretty dangerous because people can be compressed against the walls and also against one another. And whenever two waves cross, people can feel the pressure from both sides," said Moussaïd.
What to do if you get caught in a crush
In the overwhelming majority of cases, crowded events will be safe. But Moussaïd listed some things that could help if things ever turn dangerous.
The main thing is awareness: if you feel too crowded, you're probably right. Move away quickly to a less dense spot. This can protect you and also relieve the pressure on others.
"If just a small part of people start doing that, it reduces the density and solves the problem," he said.
Once the crowd reaches that critical threshold, however, the pushing wave can build very quickly. Then it is a case of survival, said Moussaïd.
"If you feel the pushing wave, don't try to resist. Go with it and keep your balance."
Do your best to stay standing. If one person falls over, it will create a wave of people toppling. Those at the bottom of the pile are then likely to be crushed by the weight of the bodies above them.
Hold your arms up against your ribcage like a boxer to make it easier to breathe. The pressure from the wave can cause people to faint and fall.
Don't struggle against the flow of the crowd. If you push back, the pressure in the system will grow, which will make the situation worse for the next couple of seconds to minutes, Moussaïd said.
Drone footage of the empty stage that hosted the 2021 Astroworld Festival where people died from crowd surging. Nathan Frandino/Reuters
Information is key
This is not the first time crowd surging has killed. Previous examples include the Love Parade in Germany in 2010 where 18 people died and Travis Scott's Astroworld Festival in Houston last year where eight people died.
With events like these, proper planning can reduce the risk by ensuring that too many people don't gather at once.
But Moussaïd said the event in Seoul was different because it was a spontaneous gathering in the streets. It would have been very difficult to prepare for.
According to Reuters, authorities had expected a crowd of about 100,000 but did not think the area required more planning than a normal Halloween weekend.
"Many people gather for Halloween every year," said an unnamed woman who identified herself to Reuters as living nearby.
"But there were just so many last night, incomparably more than before COVID," she said.
As the world population grows and more and more people are packed into urban areas, this could happen more often, said Moussaïd.
"An easy fix would be letting people know that crowds can be dangerous."
Police admit to errors as South Korea probes deadly Halloween crowd crush
Stella Kim and Thomas Maresca and Jennifer Jett -
SEOUL, South Korea — Police admitted to errors Monday as South Korea searched for answers about how Halloween festivities in the country’s capital turned into a deadly crush.
Police admit to errors as South Korea probes deadly Halloween crowd crush© Provided by NBC News
President Yoon Suk Yeol led mourners in paying respects at sites in Seoul dedicated to the more than 150 people who were killed. His government vowed to conduct a thorough investigation of the disaster, the country's deadliest in years.
Tens of thousands of people had gathered on Saturday in Itaewon — a nightlife district of the capital that is popular with foreigners — when a crowd surge began in a sloped and narrow alleyway, setting off a deadly panic.
Many of the revelers were in their teens and 20s and dressed in costume for the country’s first Halloween celebration without Covid restrictions in three years.
The death toll in the disaster increased by one to 154 as of Monday morning, including two Americans and 24 other foreign nationals. All but one of the victims have been identified, Prime Minister Han Duck-soo said. The number of injured also rose to 149, including 33 in serious condition.
At memorials in the city, mourners left traditional white chrysanthemums as well as snack foods, soft drinks and bottles of beer and the Korean liquor soju. In Itaewon, two Buddhist monks chanted and performed rites throughout the afternoon.
The country's president, who has ordered a weeklong national mourning period, paid his respects to victims at a memorial near City Hall. A second memorial has been set up at a site in Itaewon.
“I am engulfed with sorrow and responsibility as the president in charge of the lives and safety of our people as I think about the bereaving families suffering from the loss of their loved ones,” Yoon said at a meeting before visiting the memorial on Monday. “My heart breaks so much at the tragic loss especially of the young people, whose dreams now cannot see the light.”
At the meeting, Yoon ordered the government to cover the victims’ funeral and medical costs. Officials urged the public not to spread false information, hate speech or graphic video from the scene as they conducted the probe of exactly what happened.
Police said they had launched a 475-member task force to investigate the crush. The force had obtained videos taken by about 50 security cameras in the area and were also analyzing video clips posted on social media, senior police officer Nam Gu-Jun told reporters. They had interviewed more than 40 witnesses and survivors so far, Nam said Monday.
Witnesses suggested there was insufficient police presence to control the crowds, which may have been larger than anticipated.
A top police official countered that suggestion but said authorities had failed to foresee the possibility of a deadly crush.
“It was foreseen that a large number of people would gather there. But we didn’t expect that large-scale casualties would occur due to the gathering of many people,” Hong Ki-hyun, chief of the National Police Agency’s Public Order Management Bureau, told reporters Monday.
“I was told that police officers on the scene didn’t detect a sudden surge in the crowd,” he said, adding: “I regret the error in judgment call of these officers.”
According to Hong, there were 137 police officers deployed in Itaewon on Saturday, compared with 37 to 90 officers in the three years before the start of the pandemic.
“The focus was on traffic control, crime prevention and illegal activities and not on the safety of the crowd flow on the streets and narrow alleyways,” he said. Hong added that police had no manual for situations like the Halloween festivities, which had no central organizer, and that they would learn from the disaster.
As a team of police officers and government forensic experts searched the area for answers about where the crowd surge started and how it developed., experts said a failure to control the number of people allowed in the area was the ultimate issue.
“There’s a finite number of people that can fit in any space,” Keith Still, professor of crowd science at University of Suffolk told NBC News.
“Anybody moving or trying to get out, once it’s past that safety threshold, there’s very little they can do. It’s up to the people that are managing and planning the spaces,” he said.
While Halloween is not a traditional holiday in South Korea, Itaewon is known for its costume parties at bars and clubs, which have soared in popularity in recent years.
Soccer coach Kerem Kerimoglu was one of the thousands who gathered there on Saturday.
With every passing hour, he said he gets even more worried that he hasn’t heard back from the two friends he was separated from during the surge. “I’m worried if they died. The government has not showed people the ID yet,” he said.
Kerimoglu, 27, lives about a mile away from Itaewon's main street. He said he returned to the scene Sunday evening and saw dozens of mourners, clad in black clothes, gathering around a makeshift memorial site and offering white flowers.
“They were giving free flowers to everyone. I took one too and put flowers and remembered that day,” Kerimoglu said via Instagram, adding that the air smelt like “death.”
“I got goosebumps when I put the flowers on the ground,” he said.
The crowd surge is the country’s deadliest peacetime accident since the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry. That accident, in which 304 people were killed, also affected mainly young people.
Stella Kim and Thomas Maresca reported from Seoul, and Jennifer Jett reported from Hong Kong.
This article was originally published on NBCNews.com
South Korean authorities say they had no guidelines for Halloween crowds, as families grieve 155 victims
Jessie Yeung - CNN
South Korean authorities said Monday they had no guidelines to handle the huge crowds that gathered for Halloween festivities in Seoul, as families in the country and around the world mourn the 155 victims of Saturday night’s crowd crush.
CNN reporter returns to Itaewon's narrow alley one day after the Halloween disaster. See what's it like
The crush took place in the narrow neon-lit alleyways of the popular nightlife district Itaewon, where witnesses described being unable to move or breathe as thousands of revelers stood shoulder-to-shoulder in a street no more than 4 meters (13 feet) wide.
Frantic families spent much of Sunday gathering at information centers where authorities compiled details of the dead and wounded, and contacting morgues and hospitals in a desperate attempt to locate missing relatives.
With all of the victims now identified, the panic has transformed to national grief as the country grapples with one of its worst-ever disasters – while parents overseas make arrangements for their deceased children in a foreign land.
A woman pays tribute at a memorial altar on October 31 in Seoul, South Korea. - Chung Sung-Jun/Getty Images
Official memorial altars were set up in central Seoul Monday, with photos showing crowds visiting to pay their respects. Many were in tears and holding white flowers; others knelt and bowed deeply to the altar.
South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, his wife, Kim Keon-hee, and top officials including the prime minister and Seoul mayor joined the mourners.
Many shops and businesses were closed to observe a week-long national period of mourning. Parts of central Seoul were nearly deserted – a highly unusual sight in the usually bustling capital that’s home to about 10 million people.
People also paid respects at a makeshift memorial in Itaewon, outside a subway station near the alley where the crush occurred. The station entrance is adorned with rows of flowers, and offerings such as handwritten notes, bottles of the Korean liquor soju and paper cups filled with drinks.
Among the mourners was a civic group of the bereaved families of the Sewol Ferry disaster, which killed 304 people – mostly teens on a school trip – when the vessel sank in 2014.
“As one who had suffered the same pain, my heart is torn and I’m rendered speechless,” one of the group’s members told reporters at the memorial, saying the families were saddened to see “a major disaster like this repeated.”
Questions about police numbers
Just down the street, the entrance to the alley had been cordoned off, with security personnel standing guard as forensic teams clad in white protective suits scoured the area, still littered with trash and debris.
Amid the grief, questions have emerged about the government’s handling of the incident and an apparent lack of crowd control before the tragedy.
One survivor, 22-year-old French exchange student Anne-Lou Chevalier, told CNN she passed out in the crowd after being “crushed” by fellow revelers. “At some point I had no air, and we were so crushed to other people that I couldn’t breathe at all. So, I just passed out,” Chevalier said.
Several eyewitnesses and survivors said they had seen few or no police officers in the area before the situation deteriorated.
Earlier on Sunday, the minister of the interior and safety said only a “normal” level of security personnel had been deployed to Itaewon because the crowd there did not seem unusually large – whereas a “considerable number” of police had been sent to another part of Seoul in response to expected protests.
Mourners pay tribute for victims of the deadly Halloween crowd surge in Seoul on October 31, 2022. - Rebecca Wright/CNN
But – facing a backlash from Korean politicians and on social media – authorities seemed to change tack on Monday, saying they had deployed about 137 personnel to Itaewon that night, compared to about 30 to 70 personnel in previous years before the pandemic.
“For this time’s Halloween festival, because it was expected that many people would gather in Itaewon, I understand that it was prepared by putting in more police force than other years,” said Oh Seung-jin, director of the violent crime investigation division at the National Police Agency.
However, he admitted, “currently there is no separate preparation manual for such a situation where there is no organizer and a gathering of a crowd is expected.” Moreover, the police had been deployed not for crowd control – but for crime prevention and to prevent “various illegal activities.”
Kim Seong-ho, director of the disaster and safety management division at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety, echoed these comments, saying they did not have “guidelines or a manual” for such an “unprecedented situation.”
Victims emerge
The victims were mostly young people who had gone to Itaewon Saturday night, eager for South Korea’s first Halloween celebrations in years without Covid restrictions.
Of the 155 dead, 12 were teenagers and 103 were in their 20s, the Ministry of Interior and Safety said in its situation report Monday, with 55 men and 99 women killed.
Among their number were 26 foreign nationals from countries including the United States, China, Iran, Thailand, Sri Lanka, Japan, Australia, Norway, France, Russia, Austria, Vietnam, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan.
A further 149 people were injured, 33 seriously, including 15 foreign nationals.
Six students who attended schools in Seoul – one middle schooler and five high schoolers – were among the dead, as well as three teachers, said the Korean Ministry of Education.
Three South Korean military personnel were also among those killed, said a Korean Defense Ministry official.
Steven Blesi, 20, a college student from Marietta, Georgia. - Courtesy family of Steven Blesi
Two American college students were identified – Steven Blesi from Georgia, and Anne Gieske from Kentucky – both in their junior year.
Blesi’s father, Steve Blesi, said his son had “always been an adventurer.” He was an Eagle Scout, liked basketball and wanted to learn multiple languages, he said.
“Maybe in a half hour before this tragedy event took place, I texted him in WhatsApp … ‘I know you’re out and about. Stay safe. I love you.’ And I never got a response back,” Steve said. “He had an incredibly bright future that is now gone.”
Dan Gieske, Anne’s father, said in a statement Sunday evening that the family was “completely devastated and heartbroken,” calling Anne “a bright light loved by all.”
Anne had been a nursing student studying abroad in Seoul this semester, said the president of the University of Kentucky.
Anne Gieske, a student at the University of Kentucky who died in the crowd crush in Seoul. - Courtesy Beechwood Schools
The father of Mei Tomikawa, a 26-year-old Japanese exchange student who was killed in the crush, told Japanese public broadcaster NHK he was “prepared for the worst” when he couldn’t reach her.
She was studying Korean before starting school in Seoul, he said, speaking before traveling from Japan to South Korea on Monday.
“I tried calling her to warn her to be careful, but she never answered her phone,” he said, according to NHK. “She was a great daughter … I want to see my daughter as soon as possible.”
Grace Rached, an Australian woman killed in the crowd crush in Seoul, South Korea. - Australia DFAT
The family of an Australian victim, Grace Rached, also released a statement on Monday describing her as “a talented film producer who was passionate about making a difference.”
“We are missing our gorgeous angel Grace who lit up a room with her infectious smile. Grace always made others feel important and her kindness left an impression on everyone she ever met. Grace always cared about others and she was loved by all,” the family wrote.
Authorities are now working with foreign embassies and families overseas, offering support with funeral arrangements. As the week goes on, more names and faces of those who died are likely to emerge, as the nation searches for answers as to how such a disaster – in an area known to be crowded on Halloween, with festivities weeks in the planning – could have unfolded.
CNN’s Niamh Kennedy contributed to this report.
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