‘Almost impossible to think about’: the Seoul crowd disaster one year on
No bomb went off. No bullets were fired. No building fell down, no car veered out of control and no plane fell out of the sky. Yet still 159 mostly young people perished that night, crushed to death by nothing more than their own volume and a banal failure of planning.
“This wasn’t a concert or mosh pit or soccer game where barriers are erected for a day and maybe they’re in the wrong position,” explains Stu Schreiberg, executive producer of Crush, a two-part documentary about a deadly crowd disaster in Seoul, South Korea, last year. “This is a public street with lots of history of traffic patterns and where the choke points are and so it is almost impossible to think about how 159 died.”
More than 100,000 revellers were packed into the narrow bar-lined alleyways of Seoul’s trendy for the first full Halloween celebration since coronavirus pandemic restrictions had been lifted. They became trapped in mass panic. Witnesses described
