“I was in that alley right now with people going up and down and it’s scary. People can’t go down,” read one such call.
A total of 11 calls from citizens to the emergency service warned of the crowding and reveal a chaotic situation in the streets of Itaewon hours before the avalanche that cost the lives of more than 150 people last Saturday during the Halloween celebrations in that neighborhood of Seoul.
The South Korean National Police Agency (NPA) has made public records of these calls to the emergency number 112, many of which can be seen today compiled on the web pages of local media.
A first call made at 6:34 p.m. local time on Saturday (9:34 GMT) warned of the danger that people could be crushed in the alley that connects the main avenue of the neighborhood, Itaewon ro, with a pedestrian street that has the highest concentration of bars in the area and that is next to a subway exit and the main intersection of the neighborhood, where around 100,000 people attended on Saturday .
“I was in that alley right now with people going up and down and it’s scary. People can’t go down and there are people who are pushing trying to go up, I felt that one could be crushed to death,” explained the person who made that first call.
“It’s creepy. It’s such a narrow alley and everyone who leaves the station goes up that alley and mixes with those trying to get out, and there are also people queuing for a nightclub,” he said. this citizen who requested police presence at the place where the avalanche occurred.
Several more calls starting at 8:00 p.m. local time (11:00 GMT) they warned of chaos, that people were “falling” and “hurting themselves” and that the situation was “dangerous”.
Around 9:00 p.m. (12:00 GMT on Saturday) the calls repeated every few minutes talking about panic and of the danger of people “crushing to death” and, as in the previous cases, they were told that police officers would go to the place mentioned.
A citizen trapped in the alley made one last call when the deadly avalanche occurred, at 10:11 p.m. (1:11 p.m. GMT), which ended with screams of pain and with the person exclaiming “In the back street of Itaewon, the back street of Itaewon!”
South Korean authorities have admitted the absence of protocols in the country to deploy security assets in a large-scale event in which there is no organizer and for the moment it is unknown if the local authorities requested more means for a celebration that each year was bringing together more people in the neighborhood.
The publication of the registry has infuriated public opinion by the apparent lack of police response to a disaster which has left 156 dead so far and 29 seriously injured.