Halloween night, 2022. Five friends go to Itaewon, only two come home. What should have been a night
of celebration instead has a horrifying end. In a tragedy where the death toll rose by the hour,
so did the unanswered questions - what led to one of South Korea’s worst disasters?
Here’s what we know so far.
It’s 5 pm on October 31st, 2022. Thousands of predominantly young people have converged
in Itaewon in the center of the South Korean capital of Seoul. It's the most popular party
district and a tourist hot spot with many narrow streets and alleys filled with bars
and restaurants. The neighborhood is served by the Itaewon metro station, and videos on
social media show streams of people arriving to celebrate Halloween in the early evening.
As the crowds grow rapidly, the space becomes impossible to move. Emergency calls start coming
in, and chaos builds by the minute. Ultimately, a crowd crush leaves an estimated 156 people
dead and, initially, thousands unaccounted for. Within hours, it’s a global headline.
While the death toll climbed, it begged the question - could the
Seoul crowd crush have been prevented or at least eased? And who is to blame?
Hours before the disaster, partygoers could tell something was wrong. There were reportedly more
than 100 000 people in the area - packed into the district’s narrow sloping streets and alleyways.
One of the survivors, Nuhyil Ahammed, who had been to Halloween parties in Itaewon before,
said things were very different this year. With the bursting crowd by 5 pm,
he wondered what would happen as the night progressed. He wasn’t alone in the worry.
Around this time, social media started buzzing with people saying that the
district's streets were so crowded they felt unsafe. One video is especially
hard to forget - a lone police officer desperately trying to control the crowd.
As a known high-traffic area, a decent police presence was expected. Instead,
according to an interview with one of the policemen who was working in the Itaewon
police box, there were only 22 officers on duty. Authorities would claim there
were 137. Either way, this would become a critical aspect as the events unfolded.
An hour and a half later, just after 6:30 pm, police were called to help - a concerned
attendee pre-empting the tragedy. But even though the operator told the first caller they
would send someone "to go and check it out", - no significant reinforcements were sent for hours.
Until that point, the handful of officers there was unaware that of the disaster unfolding nearby.
There were at least ten more emergency calls from the area in the next three and a half
hours. Again, the callers were reassured that police would be sent to the scene. In reality,
the police allegedly did not dispatch anyone in response to
calls made from nine pm onwards - the hour leading up to the crush.
By ten past ten, the final call predicts the disaster that would unfold minutes later:
On the other end, the caller said, "It feels like people can get crushed here."
When a number of people on the sloping pathway fell over,
crowds pressing from both ends of the alley made it impossible to get out. Social media footage
showed some desperately trying to climb up the sides of the buildings to escape.
By twenty-five past ten, fire authorities said they received reports that ten people
were pushed down under the crowd and were experiencing breathing difficulties.
Three minutes later, the first four ambulances were dispatched, followed by six more.
They would take longer than expected to arrive as the clogged streets made it
difficult to reach the area. The worse the situation grew, the more panic increased.
By eleven pm, 30 more ambulances were deployed and more than 100 national
disaster medical assistance teams, with all Halloween events later being called
off by authorities. While response teams struggled to reach the victims,
dozens of people attempted CPR in the street. One of whom was a woman,
certified in performing CPR, who said the scene was beyond any of the training she had received.
[“Is there anyone who's a nurse or doctor? Please help them.”]
She told a news outlet, "Their faces had turned blue. Their eyes were rolled back
and mouths wide open. Some of them were desperately gasping for air. Paramedics
tried their best for those who looked like they stood a chance. Many others
were laid along the sides of the alley just waiting to be moved."
What stunned her most was that a doctor, who witnessed devastation daily, was frozen in shock.
At a nearby club, desperate partygoers grabbed at a bouncer’s arms and legs,
begging him to help them. But there was nothing he
could do…the situation was already too dire; the space too packed.
Meanwhile, other staff members in surrounding clubs tried to carry the injured in to have
enough space to perform CPR. Those in the clubs joined the attempts to pull bodies out and help.
Countless witness stories spoke of the sounds of screams coming from
the crowds while the music drowned out the disaster unfolding just steps away.
Through tears, a partygoer recalled how he desperately tried to help those who had fallen,
but there were already five or six layers of people stacked on top of
each other - many had already lost consciousness.
Some remembered the heartbreaking moment while victims’ phones were
going off nonstop - their loved ones defeatedly trying to confirm they were ok.
At the same time, emergency alerts came through thick and fast.
“Anyone near the accident scene near Hamilton Hotel in Itaewon,
Yongsan-gu, please return home as soon as possible.”
Around 1 am, after two and a half hours of trying to retrieve the bodies, authorities released the
first death toll of 59 killed. They frantically tried to transfer injured people to 18 nearby
hospitals and bodies to multiple mortuaries as well as a sports stadium to be identified.
During those early hours, the city government began receiving a flood of missing person reports.
It would take days to identify the victims.
For hours, dead bodies lay covered with blue sheets.
Within hours of the tragedy unfolding, South Korea's President Yoon Suk-yeol
had held an emergency meeting and announced an investigation into
the cause of the crush. The next morning he implemented a period of national mourning.
Meanwhile, the police came under fire for the slow response after the numerous calls pre-empting it.
It was first reported that the actual crowd crush was triggered by people swarming to a
bar to see a celebrity, but none of this has been proven as of yet. It was also
initially reported as a stampede, but this was soon changed. Although they are similar,
a stampede implies that people had a place to run to, which was not the case in Itaewon.
The consensus now is that the three-way alleyway was too small, and the loud music from nearby
clubs silenced the calls for help. It is also a popular through route from the metro because
of the shortcut nature of it. Ideally, crowd controller barriers should have been placed
beforehand; however, since there was no event organizer, there wasn’t any regulated planning.
Witnesses said calls from within the crowd to push led to a huge shove. They weren’t walking anymore;
they were being carried in a river of people and could not stop if they tried. Due to the angle
of the alleyway, those being pushed from behind started falling, which created a human chokepoint.
When people start to move in very high-density crowds, each individual physically doesn't have
enough space around them to behave normally or make rational decisions. Rather the entire crowd
starts moving like a fluid, forced forward by the pressure of the people behind. The
inability to facilitate movement can cause two issues: the risk of hitting a choke
point and the risk of someone falling over. In Itaewon, the combination of both happened.
As with the laws of fluid dynamics, the crowd can experience shockwaves that ripple up and
back through the mass of people when a push comes from any given direction. The people
at the very front of the crowd (who are not at dangerous densities) will make it
through the choke point, but the high-density crowd inevitably follows, carried by force.
In this case, the choke point was too narrow for the entire crowd to fit through; subsequently,
it became plugged up, and those at the front were further squashed by the crowd behind.
The victims didn’t die from being crushed but rather from compressive asphyxiation:
the mechanical limiting of the lung expansion by
compressing the torso that results in loss of breath.
Simply put - air was cut off from the body due to outside pressure. In Itaewon, the fallen were
suffocated by the weight of bodies being stacked on top of them, while others died standing up.
As the shockwaves rippled through the crowd, the force was enough to carry people out of
their shoes. The magnitude was captured in viral images of hundreds of pairs of shoes
at the Wonhyoro sports center, which was turned into a huge lost-and-found.
There were clear signs pointing to a crisis in Itaewon even before the deadly crush took place,
starting with the four-hour police response time. And it took another
hour to deploy additional officers. But, by then, the death toll was already high.
With the investigation in the early stages, speculation and theories are all we have to go on.
And, the investigation may never answer the key
question - why was there such a minimal police presence?
This question is fundamental when considering the norm in South Korea.
For example, when the K-pop group BTS staged a show that drew a crowd of 55
000 - only half the size of that Halloween night - the police were ready. They
assigned 1 300 officers to keep people safe. The same can be said for political protests;
however modest in size, the country’s police are famous for making careful plans to ensure
crowds do not get out of control. On Halloween night, about 6 000 officers were assigned to
an anti-government protest downtown as well as to protecting president Yoon,
who moved his office to an area not far from Itaewon earlier in the year.
So why were only 137 officers assigned to Itaewon on a known celebratory night?
Authorities earlier said they deployed more officers for this year's Halloween
festivities - the first without the pandemic restrictions - than they did for pre-Covid
parties. It was also pointed out that because there was no main organizer for the party,
no special requests were made to the police for crowd control and safety management.
The blame was also placed on two political demonstrations happening that night,
but those were over well before the crowd crush.
Again the story changed when authorities said they were unaware of a large gathering.
In contrast, an officer working at the celebration said Itaewon police knew
beforehand that people would flock there for Halloween. So they asked the Seoul government
for reinforcements to dispatch in anticipation of it. But they were denied, and he doesn't know why.
On the night itself, communication between the authorities and those on the ground was
inadequate. Police in Yongsan were not given proper orders by their higher-ups
when the emergency calls came through, and the police head only received his first
report about the Itaewon disaster one hour and 21 minutes after the accident.
There are also suspicions that, due to increased strain on the Police Station due to
having to provide security for the president, police officers were suffering from fatigue.
Response aside, another question to consider is: Was the Itaewon tragedy an urban planning issue?
In recent years, Itaewon has grown into a trendy spot with constant development. Some believe this
was one of the contributing factors to the Halloween crowd crush. For starters,
on the corner of the narrow alleyway is the Hamilton Hotel which had built
unpermitted structures, including a temporary metal wall, a booth,
and a terrace. These structures narrowed the lane even further in the choke point.
The hotel allegedly ignored orders by the local district office to remove them. Soon,
other businesses in the vicinity followed suit in constructing illegal terraces that jutted
out into the street, making the walkway even narrower than it should have been.
This theory doesn’t leave authorities in the clear, though. With knowledge of the event
and the illegal structures, they could have created barrier checkpoints, made a one-way
foot traffic system, and used megaphones to direct crowds. And, of course, if there had been earlier
enforcement against these illegal additions, the alleyway would have been bigger, to begin with.
On top of that, if the magnitude of the crowd was missed in the police planning stages,
CCTV cameras would have shown the growing crowds from early on.
By the 8th of November, 2022, 55 offices were raided, including the fire station,
the Seoul Metro headquarters, the National Police Agency, and the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency.
The raid of the fire station was related to allegations that the chief sat on a police
request to jointly respond to the Halloween crowds before the crowd collapse occurred. The metro
headquarters was because the subway operator did not take precautionary measures to help
disperse crowds by making decisions like ordering trains not to stop at the Itaewon Subway Station.
Additionally, multiple charges of professional negligence resulting
in death have been laid. President Yoon said the incident revealed the
importance of crowd management and a lack of research on the subject.
Since the devastating Halloween incident, makeshift memorials for the 156 victims - mostly
young women - have been set up around Itaewon. The 26 foreign victim’s families have had their
bodies flown home, and the investigation is in full swing. One can only hope that the
future-planned development in the area will prevent another tragedy like this.
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