In the early morning of July 28, local time, a music festival held in Seongdong District, Seoul, South Korea, was urgently stopped after five participants reported difficulty breathing and were close to suffocation.
The Seoul Fire Department said it received multiple reports of overcrowding during the festival at the Sfactory Cultural Complex in Seongsu-dong. Although there were no casualties, five participants reported difficulty breathing during the event.
After receiving the report, the fire department quickly dispatched 11 fire trucks and 42 firefighters to the scene. The concert was also urgently stopped at around 1 a.m. that day.
▲The audience flocked to the exit
It is reported that the concert was originally planned to last from 9 pm on the 27th to 4 am the next day. The event was held in a four-story building. DJ performances will take place throughout the evening on the dance floors on the first and third floors of the building. The highlight of the concert was the performance by world-renowned DJ Peggy Gou on the third floor at 1 am.
According to estimates from the Seoul Fire Department, the number of people at the event that night reached about 4,500, while the first and third floors of the building had a capacity of only 1,000 people each. At 1 o'clock in the morning, when Peggy Gou's performance was about to start, the audience flocked to the performance venue on the third floor.
Korean pop culture critic Kim Do-heon witnessed this moment. He described the scene as chaotic, with so many people lining up to watch the performance that some entrances were completely blocked. "People crowded up to the third floor and were pushed back by the crowd."
The audience expressed strong dissatisfaction. They accused the organizer of selling a number of tickets that seriously did not meet the venue's capacity limit and ignored the personal safety of the audience.
Afterwards, peggy gou, who was unable to go on stage for some reason, also apologized to fans on social media and expressed regret. She wrote: "I was looking forward to this performance, but I didn't expect something like this to happen. Fortunately, no major accident occurred."
This incident once again awakened the Korean people's concerns about stampede accidents. The Itaewon stampede in 2022 occurred because nearly 100,000 people squeezed into the Itaewon street, which is about 1.4 kilometers long and only 4 meters wide. It is reported that the accident caused a total of 159 deaths and 196 injuries.
Red Star News Reporter Wang Yalin Intern Chen Hanyu
Editor He Xianfeng Editor-in-Chief Deng Haoguang
