Officials have banned Halloween festivities in Hongdae to help prevent congestion-related accidents. Read more at straitstimes.com.
Nearly 160 revellers were crushed to death in a narrow alleyway in Itaewon last year after huge throngs had amassed without crowd control measures.
Now, with another Halloween approaching, families say far too little has been done to make sure such a catastrophe does not happen again. But the families of the disaster victims say an underlying cause of the calamity remains unaddressed: A bureaucracy that fails to prioritise public safety and refuses to come clean on its shortcomings, shielding politically appointed bosses in a deeply hierarchical culture.
After the deaths, the government of President Yoon Suk-yeol ordered officials to stop calling the crowd crush a “disaster” and its casualties “victims,” referring to them as an “accident” and “the dead”. The families’ worst fears were confirmed when the police agency cleared its own top bosses and those at the Ministry of the Interior and Safety of any wrongdoing, while prosecutors indicted 12 local police and other officials on charges such as negligence of official duty.
Eventually, hundreds of people began to fall on top of each other as waves of revelers pushed up and down the sloping strip of pavement, jostling to go in opposite directions. On the day of the crowd crush, thousands of officers were deployed to monitor peaceful anti-Yoon demonstrators, a regular occurrence in Seoul.
People sipped beer around veranda tables, enjoying a cool October evening. From a bar floated Pharrell Williams’ song “Happy”.
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