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The Post, which also scrutinized emergency call logs and interviewed dozens of witnesses, determined that the alley became dangerously crowded as early as 6:28 p.m. The first of at least 13 emergency calls came in minutes later to warn of escalating chaos, with people wedged in so tightly that there were already injuries.
At 10:08 p.m., those dynamics triggered the crush.
A few police officers and other individuals at the edge of the mayhem had been trying futilely to redirect the crowd, according to videos. At least 16 more emergency calls came in between 10:08 p.m. and 10:22 p.m., when video shows five officers struggling to pull out unconscious victims.
South Korea admits police crowd control was ‘inadequate’ before crush
Yet it wasn’t until 10:39 p.m. that emergency personnel closed both ends of the alley — a lag of roughly half an hour that allowed foot traffic to continue into the area, hampered rescue efforts and undoubtedly increased the fatalities, according to the experts’ review of the materials. Another 11 minutes elapsed before police mounted a broad response, according to department records.
The number of lives ultimately lost exceeded those in recent crowd-surge disasters at an outdoor concert in Houston and a soccer stadium in Indonesia. Almost 200 people were hurt; as of Thursday in Seoul, seven were still hospitalized.
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“This was the easiest scenario in terms of effectively overseeing crowd control and preventing accidents,” said Young Ook Kim, an expert on crowd movement and spatial layout and behavior at Sejong University in Seoul. “If you just go assess the site and discuss potential countermeasures, anyone who has the instincts and experience would have been able to foresee the situation.”
The genesis of the deadly crush
A popular nightlife district in Seoul, typically draws tens of thousands of young people. Most of the raucous celebrations take place along World Food Street — a block of restaurants and bars — and the side alleys that connect it to one of Itaewon’s main thoroughfares.
With coronavirus restrictions lifted, local businesses were anticipating bigger crowds this year. “We plan to throw an epic Halloween party since it’s the first Halloween after coronavirus. Let’s party until the sun comes up,” one bar advertised.
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The festivities were in full swing by 10 p.m. that Saturday, videos show, with throngs of costumed men and women making their way up and down World Food Street and into the narrow passageway just west of the Hamilton Hotel. A DJ party was scheduled to gear up at the 108 Hip Hop Lounge, which is in the alley.
Around 10:08 p.m., something shifted in the packed crowd by the club, video reviewed by The Post shows. People began screaming.
“This situation is extremely serious already,” noted Mark Breen, director of Safe Events, a company that specializes in safety planning for large-scale gatherings, who looked at videos provided by The Post. During the next 10 minutes, he saw evidence of crowd crush, a phenomenon that occurs when a crowd’s density crosses a critical threshold and its movement becomes almost fluid.
Kim, who also reviewed the alley videos, saw initial markers of the crush by 10:08 p.m., with some people squeezed so severely that they would have had trouble breathing.
Survivors Zara Lily, an English teacher, and Jinhyeong Yun, an ocean engineer, described what the scene felt like. “People were pushed onto each other, and there were many times where there was a wave of pushing which made people fall forwards and then back, just like ocean waves,” Lily wrote in a message from the couple’s joint Instagram account.
By 10:17 p.m., the experts agreed, the crush had taken over. Additional pressures at both ends of the alley only made it worse.
From World Food Street on the northern end, people continued turning in, unaware of what was happening. Video shows that the street itself was so congested at one point that a man tried to climb a sign on the back side of the Hamilton Hotel to escape. Meanwhile, on the alley’s southern end, partygoers on the main thoroughfare, as well as those just arriving from the Itaewon subway station, were pushing in, too.
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Just steps from the Hip Hop club entrance, videos show people pressed in hard and wincing in pain. Many were visibly gasping for air. G. Keith Still, a visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England, told The Post that in those panicked moments, people “could be dying on their feet.”
Two other witnesses said they watched as some in the crowd fell out of sight amid all the pushing, with others then falling on top of them — a human domino effect that experts label crowd collapse.
According to the Korean newspaper Dong-A Ilbo, area businesses had asked the city days earlier to require subway trains to bypass Itaewon station over the weekend because of concerns about the volume of people who often exit there. The Seoul Transportation Corp. told The Post that it did not receive an official request. Experts said shutting down the closest exit to the alley would have alleviated some of the congestion on Oct. 29.
Failings in the emergency response
The most efficient way to alleviate a crowd crush or crowd collapse is to relieve the intense pressure by removing people from the periphery as fast as possible, experts say. In Itaewon, that meant immediately evacuating people out both ends of the alley.
But The Post analysis of available video determined that it took between 26 and 31 minutes after the crush began for emergency personnel to start doing so.
By 10:22 p.m., people were already massed on top of each other at the most jammed point of the alley. The five officers on the scene had trouble reaching individuals and pulling them out given the weight of the crowd, available videos show. Meanwhile, a photo from a bird’s-eye perspective shows that foot traffic continued in from World Food Street, exacerbating the bottleneck.
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Itaewon police Sgt. Kim Baek-gyeom realized something was wrong when he and two junior officers heard screams coming from the area as they responded to an unrelated call. He radioed for backup, then he and another officer ran to World Food Street to try to keep more people from entering the alley.
“There were so many people being pushed down from the [street], pressure continued to apply to the scene, making it even more difficult to evacuate people from the pile,” he told South Korea’s Hankyoreh newspaper.
Kim said he momentarily considered whether to race to his precinct for a megaphone, then decided the situation was too dire. His desperation as he begged everyone to turn around was captured in a video mash-up that has since gone viral.
“People are dying. Move back. Please cooperate,” he implored.
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A small contingent of emergency workers was first able to clear the southern end of alley. Additional support and ambulances struggled to reach the site because of traffic along Itaewon-Ro, the main street, according to walkie-talkie transcripts.
“It’s too difficult to enter via vehicle. All responders travel via foot,” the response commander ordered at 10:29 p.m.
By 10:34 p.m., no emergency personnel had yet reached the northernmost section of the crush, videos show.
At 10:39 p.m., more than half an hour after the crush started, five firefighters and four police officers are finally visible in a video of the location. Subsequent video reveals how slowly the rescue progressed.
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