South Korea faced its worst peacetime mass casualty event since 2014 over this past Halloween Weekend, when 153 individuals died in a crowd surge in Seoul. Of the dead, more than 80 percent were in their 20s and 30s, and at least four were teenagers.
The crowd surge took place in Itaewon, which is known as Seoul’s international neighborhood. Formerly home to United States’ military headquarters, Itaewon in recent years reflected the diversity of South Korea’s international population with expat-friendly bars, restaurants and clubs.
This foreign influence was apparent in the nationalities of those killed in the surge. Foreign national victims hailed from Australia, Austria, China, France, Iran, Japan, Kazakhstan, Norway, Russia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the United States, Uzbekistan and Vietnam. The two American victims were both 20-year-old university students studying abroad this semester. Anne Gieske was a third-year nursing student at the University of Kentucky; Steven Blesi studied International Business at Kennesaw State University in Georgia.
What began as a celebratory evening of Halloween festivities after two intense years of pandemic lockdowns quickly escalated into a mass casualty event. Officials estimated 100,000 people had gathered in the expat-district that evening, resulting in overcrowded streets and bottlenecked alleyways. After a party crowd surged into a narrow downhill alley, bordering Hamilton Hotel, witnesses said people began to yell “push” and others began to fall on one-another “like dominoes.”
Nearly 800 first responders arrived at the scene at 11 p.m., approximately two hours after the first emergency calls were received from panicked partygoers. While police officials initially blamed poor response times on overcrowded streets, South Korean Home Minister Lee Sang-min on Sunday admitted the police were underprepared for a crowd surge possibility.
In South Korea, large events organized by a single entity must be reported to and coordinated with public safety officials. The Itaewon Halloween festivities were not sponsored by a single entity and therefore were not mandated to coordinate public safety concerns with officials.
Approximately 137 officers were dispatched in the Itaewon-area that evening, primarily for petty theft and harassment concerns. These deployment numbers were far higher than in years prior to the pandemic where between 34 and 90 officers had been dispatched in 2017, 2018 and 2019.
Crowd control experts are divided on what level of responsibility should be attributed to lack of police foresight. Some argue police and local officials should have identified a crowd control plan, given the sheer number of alleyways and bottlenecks in the district. Others, such as Mehdi Moussaïd from the Max Planck Institute for Human Development in Berlin, argue there was limited knowledge on the festivities and potential movement of people, thus limiting the impact of a crowd control plan.
Regardless, the sheer number of people and limited alleyway space made for a deadly combination. According to The Washington Post, a crowd surge specifically occurs when individuals confined in a small space are packed so tightly that any one person falling over leads to a “domino effect.”
As people fall over and pressure mounts, breathing becomes labored. After six minutes, people will go into compressive or restrictive asphyxia, the ultimate cause of death for most in the Itaewon crowd surge. For those who manage to remain upright, even 30 seconds of compression can restrict blood flow to the brain, complicating decision-making capacities and increasing the odds for loss of consciousness.
South Korean officials have already begun their independent investigations into the tragedy. Police have collected security footage from 50 cameras in the area and are reviewing social media postings taken within the crowd surge timeframe.
As the investigation into the causes of the crowd surge kickstarts, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol declared a week of national mourning and ordered flags in public spaces to fly at half-staff.
