“The situation is very scary right now”: they reveal that the first warning to the police came a few hours before the tragedy in South Korea

The policeman asked the caller if he meant that the flow of people was not flowing well, that they were “crushing and falling and that a big accident was going to happen.”

Yes, the caller replied: “the situation It’s very creepy right now.”.

It was the first of at least 10 calls to Seoul police over three hours on Saturday.

That night, the locals say, the presence of the police was completely insufficient.

More and more evidence, experts and a series of official apologies point to obvious flaws.

Local officials and police were simply not prepared for the crowds that had gathered and when they did arrive, they struggled to fight them.

South Korea’s police chief said on Tuesday your answer to the emergency was “inappropriate”in the first official admission that not enough had been done to prevent the tragedy.

According to some estimates, hundreds of thousands of people gathered in Itaewon, a popular nightlife spot, to celebrate Halloween.

It was a surprising number even for an otherwise crowded neighborhood.

Jeong An-sook lives two blocks behind Itaewon’s main street, about 300 meters from where the avalanche happened.

He tried to leave between 21:00 and 22:00 local time, but said the crowd on his street was so thick that he could not move. Frightened, he went home.

The restaurant owner, who returned home at 10 p.m. local time, said he couldn’t even leave Itaewon Station because it was so crowded. So he went to another station and circled home.

Another woman, an exchange worker who sold flowers for people to lay in a makeshift shrine for the victims, said she saw several policemen; local volunteers had tried to organize the crowd earlier in the evening, he said, not the police.

He also pointed out that the local business association requested the help of the police last week pasada deal with the crowd over the weekend, but I didn’t get it.

We now know that the local council, Yongsan-gu, held two meetings.

The first was with the local police, the head of the local subway station and the local trade association on October 26th.

A second meeting was held the next day, among city staff members only, to discuss how to handle the weekend’s Halloween celebrations.

According to Yongsan District’s website, they discussed covid quarantine measures, inspection of food vendors, security in large venues and subway stations, garbage collection and illegal parking.

District Mayor Park Hee-young said on October 27, “This is the first Halloween without social distancing in three years. We will do our best to ensure the safety of residents as we are concerned about the new spread of covid-19, drug incidents and other accidents.”

There is no evidence that anyone raised or discussed potential crowd control issues at any of the meetings.

Local businesses told the BBC that a Global Village festival was held in early October, which showcased Itaewon’s cosmopolitan character.

The event was organized by the city council and there was a crowd control plan in place.

But after the tragedy, Mayor Park told local media that the Yongsan City Council had done everything possible, but the fact that the Halloween celebrations did not have a single organizer las did differentlywith And Other events.

He has since apologized to the victims and their families.

Although officials continue to accuse each other, the fact is that no one stopped hundreds of people, mostly teenagers or twenty-somethings, from gathering in the alleydiagonal street, that night.

When that happened, experts say, what followed was nearly impossible to prevent.

Anxiety trapped them, and the slope caused that when one fell, a domino effect was created with the others.

people too moving in several directions at oncepushing and trying to escape the crowd.

Police are investigating claims that some people in the crowd caused a ruckus by shouting “push, push”, but experts say that is to be expected in what they call “freak crowd”.

More than five people per square meter is considered potentially dangerous, and there were at least 10 people per square meter in that alley, according to Baek Seung-joo, a professor of fire protection at Korea Open Cyber​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

He states that he made the assessment based on pictures and recordings.

“Instinctively, in a situation like this, people don’t help each other, they compete and they don’t listen to any orders… You can’t blame the youth who pushed others under a lot of pressure,” he said. “The authorities are responsible for not controlling the crowd in advance.”

Officials and experts now believe that one of the reasons so many people gathered in that alley was its proximity to Itaewon subway station, a very busy place.

Kwon Seolah, head of Chungbuk University’s Disaster Prevention Innovation Center, suggested that authorities may have forced subway trains to pass by Itaewon Station without stopping, or blocked vehicles from entering the station quarter to leave more space for pedestrians.

But the authorities blame each other for what happened. National police say they have asked the Seoul subway to prevent trains from stopping at Itaewon station on Saturday to limit congestion. However, the subway denied this, saying that they received the official request only an hour after the tragedy.

Yongsan police also said that local merchants asked them not to control crowds on weekends so as not to reduce their clientele, which the association that brings together these businesses denied.

But it seems clear that the police have not adopted even the simplest crowd control measures found elsewhere.

The seriousness of the situation saw the first call to the police hours before the death.

“No one is checking it right now,” the caller said. “The police have to control this. They should first let people out and then let them in. People keep coming in but they can’t get out.”

Additional reporting by Youmi Kim and Jungmin Choi

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