SEOUL, South Korea—Shocked family members collected bodies, parents searched for children, and a country sought answers on Oct. 30 after at least 153 people were crushed to death when a crowd in South Korea surged in an alleyway during Halloween festivities.
President Yoon Suk-yeol declared a period of national mourning and designated Seoul’s popular Itaewon district a disaster zone after the Oct. 29 incident.
“This news came like a bolt from the blue sky,” said a father who burst into tears as he collected his daughter’s body from a morgue in the nation’s capital.
A huge crowd celebrating in Itaewon surged into an alley, killing at least 153 people, most of them in their 20s, emergency officials said, noting that the death toll could rise.
The partiers, some still in their teens and many in Halloween costumes, were ready to enjoy the bars, nightclubs, and restaurants where the revelry routinely spills over into narrow and often steep side streets.
Instead, the street became filled with people crying for help while emergency workers desperately sought to free trapped bodies and perform CPR on people splayed across the debris-littered ground.
Choi Sung-beom, head of the Yongsan Fire Station, told a briefing at the scene that 82 people were injured, 19 of them seriously. The deaths included 22 foreigners, he said.
Families and friends desperately sought word of loved ones at community centers turned into facilities for missing people.
At least 90 percent of the victims had been identified by midday, with delays affecting some foreign nationals and teenagers who didn’t yet have identification cards, according to the South Korean Interior Ministry.
Makeshift memorials began appearing near the site, with onlookers leaving flowers and notes.
Yoon expressed condolences to the victims and his wishes for a speedy recovery to the many injured in one of South Korea’s worst disasters and the world’s worst stampedes in decades.
Unruliness, Then Chaos
South Korean tech and mobile game firms, including Kakao and NCSOFT, pulled their Halloween promotions after the tragedy, while amusement park Everland canceled Halloween-themed events. Many regional governments and organizations have canceled or reduced festivals and other celebrations.The crush of partygoers came as Itaewon, a symbol of freewheeling nightlife in the South Korean capital for decades that was just starting to thrive after more than two years of COVID-19 restrictions, with trendy restaurants and shops replacing seedy establishments.
It was the first Halloween event in Seoul in three years to be virtually free of COVID-19 restrictions and social distancing. Many of the partygoers were wearing masks and Halloween costumes.
Twenty-four hours before, there were already warning signs that the festivities were attracting dangerous numbers of people, and victims and their relatives questioned an apparent lack of crowd control.
Early on Oct. 30, costumes and personal belongings mingled with blood spots in the narrow street. Survivors huddled under emergency blankets amid throngs of emergency workers, police, and media.
Many of those killed were near a nightclub, according to Choi. The foreigners killed included people from China, Iran, Uzbekistan, and Norway, he said.
Witnesses described the crowd becoming increasingly unruly and agitated as the evening deepened. Chaos erupted just before the 10:20 p.m. (1320 GMT) stampede, with police officers that were on hand for the event at times struggling to control the crowds, according to witnesses.
Moon Ju-young, 21, said there were clear signs of trouble in the alley before the incident. He told Reuters that it was more than 10 times as crowded as usual.
Social media video footage shows hundreds of people packed in the narrow, sloped alley crushed and immobile as emergency officials and police tried to pull them free.
Makeshift Morgue
Fire officials and witnesses said people continued to pour into the alley after it was already packed wall-to-wall, when those at the top of the slope fell, sending people below them toppling over others.One woman said her daughter, pulled from the crush of people, survived after being trapped for more than an hour.
A makeshift morgue was set up in a building next to the scene. About four dozen bodies were wheeled out on stretchers and moved to a government facility to identify the victims, a witness told Reuters.
The Itaewon district is popular with young South Koreans and expatriates alike, and its dozens of bars and restaurants were packed on Oct. 29 for Halloween after businesses had suffered a sharp decline after three years of the COVID-19 pandemic.
“You would see big crowds at Christmas and fireworks ... but this was several tenfolds bigger than any of that,” Park Jung-hoon, 21, told Reuters from the scene.
International leaders offered condolences, including U.S. President Joe Biden and Chinese leader Xi Jinping, who noted that there were Chinese were among the dead and injured.
With the easing of the pandemic, curfews on bars and restaurants and a limit of 10 people for private gatherings were lifted in April. An outdoor mask mandate was dropped in May.
Yoon held an emergency meeting with senior aides and ordered that a task force be set up to secure resources to treat the injured and launch a thorough investigation into the cause of the disaster.
The disaster is the country’s deadliest since a 2014 ferry sinking that killed 304 people, mainly high school students.
The sinking of the Sewol and criticism of the official response sent shockwaves across South Korea, prompting widespread soul-searching over safety measures in the country that are likely to be renewed in the wake of the Oct. 29 crush.
