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The mall collapsed, sweeping countless lives, and the shocking accident turned a sprawling building into ruins in just 20 seconds, becoming one of the worst building collapses in South Korea's history. However, to understand the truth of this incident, it is necessary to dig deep into the details behind it.
On the morning of June 29, 1995, the mall's facility manager made a routine inspection, but he did not notice the crack in the roof, after all, it was only a trace of two years old. At 10 a.m., mall employees felt a shake, but the manager blamed it on the air conditioner and turned it off. However, the restaurant owner on the fifth floor noticed the problem, noticed the cracks next to the pillars and the sunken floor, decisively notified the manager, and quickly evacuated the mall himself.
However, managers chose to ignore them and asked employees to keep secrets. As noon approached, customers began to complain about the lack of air-conditioning, and the manager finally escalated the problem to management. Although the engineer suggested emergency repairs, the management refused because the mall had the highest foot traffic.
At about five o'clock in the afternoon, there was a significant shock in the building, but the employees did not feel it. Twenty seconds before the disaster, there was a loud noise from the roof, the alarm sounded for a long time, and employees and customers fled, but in just 20 seconds, the entire building collapsed, trapping more than 500 people in the wreckage.
Once a symbol of Seoul's economic prosperity, it is in ruins, with more than 1,500 people trapped underneath. Rescue forces quickly arrived to exhume the dead and wounded, and the scene was filled with wails.
In the midst of the chaos, grieving relatives and friends searched for survivors, and rescue went on for a week. Volunteers braved the danger to join the rescue, digging up bodies every day, and the scene was shocking.
On the fourth day, a girl was rescued alive, but the next day she died of her injuries. On the seventh day, the government abandoned the rescue, causing anger among relatives and friends, who began to call for an investigation into the truth of the accident. Why did a six-year-old modern steel building collapse in just 20 seconds?
The government immediately set up an investigation team that initially suspected a gas explosion, but quickly ruled it out. Subsequently, they suspected a terrorist attack, but it was also denied because the explosion should have caused the building to collapse to the sides, which was not the case at the site. Ultimately, they focused on the building itself.
The investigation found that the diameter of the building pillars did not meet the design requirements, and the number of steel bars was also halved, resulting in a weakening of the internal support strength of the building. But even so, it was not enough to cause the collapse. The crux of the matter is that the original design consisted of only four floors, but the owners requested that one more be added and converted into a restaurant. This decision increased the weight of the floor slab and put more pressure on the load-bearing capacity of the fifth floor.
Unfortunately, after the completion of the building, a series of oversights also occurred. The migration of the air conditioners destabilized the roof, especially because these air conditioners were very heavy, causing the main pillars to be overcompressed. Eventually, the floor cracks of the 5E pillars became severe and were still under pressure until the last moment.
The whole story went from cutting corners by management to relocating air conditioners, which became one of the reasons for the collapse of the building. The incident brought management under scrutiny, but it also revealed widespread corruption and irregularities in South Korea's construction industry. The government has carried out strict building inspections, but the problem remains serious, which is the price of rapid economic development.
However, this accident is not only a construction problem, but also a torture of human nature and institutions. We must be vigilant to human greed and negligence in order to avoid similar tragedies from happening again. Because human disasters are a counterweight to human nature and an examination of the system. Only by learning from the tragedy can we avoid future catastrophes.
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