In 1995, there was an extremely serious accident in South Korea, a large shopping mall collapsed, burying 1,500 people alive in 20 seconds, of which 502 people were killed and 937 were injured, and the economic loss caused by this accident was as high as 66.7 billion won (equivalent to about 356 million yuan).
Those who investigated the accident found that the cause of the collapse of the building was closely related to the chairman of the mall (the equivalent of the chairman of the Chinese board)! Before the disaster, there were several opportunities to avoid this accident, but he missed them all, which is really jaw-dropping!
So what did he do? Why did the South Korean people take to the streets in a state of anger because of the accident? Let's take a look at the beginning and end of the collapse of the Mitutoyo Department Store.
1. Before and after the collapse
Mitutoyo Department Store, located in a prime location in Seoul, South Korea, receives an average of 40,000 customers a day and a daily turnover of $500,000.
The president of Mitutoyo Department Store is named Li Lian, who is also the culprit of the accident. On June 29, 1995, more than three hours before the disaster, Li Lian received a call from his manager, Li Yongzhou.
Li Yongzhou said that not long ago, there was a brief shaking in the restaurant, and a huge crack appeared in one of the pillars of the restaurant, so he asked Chunyuan Restaurant to suspend business for safety reasons.
It didn't take long for guests on the lower floors to report that they felt a slight tremor. After listening to Li Yongzhou's description, Li Lian immediately convened several executives for a meeting to discuss the cause of the tremor and the solution.
After observing the building, Lee He-su directly indicated that the cracks had spread along the pillars to the roof, and that the situation was quite dangerous, and it was best to close down the business immediately and find someone to repair it.
Lee He-so's proposal was approved by almost everyone, but Chairman Lee Lian said: "There are a lot of customers in the mall now, and the loss of closing the business is too great. "Ask the executives in the room to come up with a better solution.
In a blink of an eye, the time came to half past five in the afternoon, and Li Lian and others were still discussing countermeasures, but the situation in the mall was not optimistic at this time. The crack in the column grew bigger and bigger, and after 17 minutes, the column could no longer bear it, and it broke in an instant, and the pressure was transferred to the other pillars of the restaurant.
By 5:52, the other pillars of the restaurant could not bear it, and with a loud bang, the entire Mitutoyo department store collapsed, and the customers in the mall were buried by the collapsed gravel before they had time to react.
People outside the mall were also shocked when they saw the tall building in front of them turn into ruins in an instant, and hurriedly called for help. When rescuers arrived at the scene, they found that the situation was quite bad.
Thousands of tons of debris buried in five floors above ground, making it extremely difficult to rescue the victims, and rescuers then called in cranes to clear the rubble and search for survivors. Ten hours later, rescuers had rescued more than 200 people, but they knew there were far more people buried underground.
Over the next few days, rescuers rescued hundreds of injured people from the rubble, and on the 17th day of the rescue work, something unexpected happened to all the rescuers.
From under a large rock, they found a surviving girl. No one expected that after 17 days, there would still be people alive. According to the girl, Park Seung-hyun, a 19-year-old salesperson at the children's clothing store on the basement floor of Mitutoyo Department Store, said that the only thing she had eaten during the days she had been trapped was a few drops of water that had fallen into a crack in the gravel when the firefighters who came to the rescue sprinkled water.
Relying on this little bit of water, it has to be said that it is a miracle that she can support it for so long.
Her survival also rekindled the hope of rescuers, who believed that there must be other survivors underneath, but unfortunately, the miracle created by Park Seung-hyun was not replicated by others, and the rescuers found all corpses, not half of the living people.
After the rescue mission ended, the investigators took the place of the rescuers and walked into the ruins. They need to know why a large shopping mall collapsed in less than half a minute.
2. The President's Fatal Choice
At first, investigators suspected that the attack was by terrorists, but after searching, they found no traces of explosives, so they suspected that something was wrong with the building itself.
After a series of inspections, the investigators found that there was nothing wrong with the strength of the building materials in the department store, which left the investigators puzzled, what was the problem?
Later, they learned from surviving mall staff that before the mall collapsed, there were cracks in the pillars of the restaurant on the fifth floor. Investigators found architectural drawings of the building, glanced at the design of the columns, and realized that something was wrong.
It turned out that it was clearly marked on the architectural drawings that the diameter of the load-bearing column was 80cm, and at the same time it was matched with 16 steel bars, after calculation, such a design was indeed very strong, but the problem was that the actual diameter of the load-bearing column of Mitutoyo Department Store was only 60cm, and the matching steel bars were only 8.
As a result, the load-bearing strength of the department store is greatly reduced.
Is this the construction team cutting corners, or is there another reason? In the course of the follow-up investigation, the investigators found the answer, and it was Li Lian, the president of the department store, who changed the diameter of the load-bearing column!
His reason for changing the diameter of the load-bearing columns was to make more room for the installation of escalators, but Li Lian not only insisted on weakening the load-bearing strength of the building, but even asked the construction team to add an additional floor.
In the early days of the construction of the department store, Li Lian told the construction team that as long as the building was built with four floors, the load-bearing was designed according to the four-story building, but during the construction process, Li Lian suddenly changed his mind and said that he would build another floor to build an ice rink, but this would increase the load-bearing burden and was likely to cause a collapse crisis, so the construction team rejected Li Lian's unreasonable request and explained the risks to him.
If Li Lian had been able to "turn back" and listen to the opinions of professionals, the tragedy would not have happened, but he insisted on going his own way, believing that building a floor would make more money in the future, so he simply dismissed the disobedient construction team and found another construction team to take over.
This is the second mistake made by Li Lian, the construction team he found was very unprofessional, when installing the steel bars in the concrete floor slab, the steel bars were actually placed in the wrong place, according to the original design, the steel bars should be 5cm away from the surface, but they were placed 10cm away from the surface.
As a result, the thickness of the floor slab decreases and the load-bearing strength plummets.
Li Lian then made a third mistake, he reversed himself and changed the ice rink that was originally going to be built on the fifth floor into a dining area, which seemed like a small change, but with the construction of the mall and the establishment of several restaurants on the fifth floor, the problem arose.
Because the Korean food culture is not quite the same as China, most of the Chinese are sitting on chairs, but Koreans like to sit on the ground when eating, so the restaurant will be equipped with floor heating, which is installed, and brings great pressure to the floor load-bearing.
If Li Lian builds the skating rink according to the original plan, even if the strength of the floor slab decreases, it can still be supported, it can only be said that Li Lian has made the most wrong choice at every step.
An even more fatal mistake was that Li Lian purchased several large water-cooled air conditioners and placed them on the top floor.
When these air-conditioners are filled with water, they can weigh more than 80 tons. Moreover, the air-conditioners are placed close to residential buildings, and the noise emitted seriously affects the lives of nearby residents.
After receiving complaints from residents, the mall staff moved the air conditioners, but their way of moving was very simple and rude, directly under the air conditioners to pad wheels and then drag them away, in the process of forcibly dragging, the floor slab could not withstand the huge pressure, there were several subtle cracks, the staff saw but did not care.
These cracks then slowly spread to the restaurant on the fifth floor, causing the pillar of the Chunyuan restaurant on the fifth floor to break on the day of the disaster, affecting the whole body and causing a huge disaster.
It was Li Lian's several wrong decisions that caused huge flaws in the originally reasonable design, which caused disasters to fall from the sky.
Even before the disaster happened, Li Lian was given one last chance, and if he could evacuate the guests in time, he could also minimize the damage caused by the disaster.
But for the sake of that day's turnover, he took the lives of 502 people, and the face of a vicious businessman who put interests first was exposed.
3. Social Tremor
When the ins and outs of this case were made public, it sparked the anger of the South Korean people, who demanded that the police strictly punish the management of Mitutoyo Department Store headed by Li Lian, and it was their selfish greed that triggered the tragedy.
However, the subsequent verdict made the South Korean people feel extremely disappointed. Li Lian, who indirectly killed 502 people, was sentenced to 10 years and 6 months in prison for "negligence causing death", and was later commuted to 7 years.
At the same time, some South Koreans have also asked the government to inspect other large shopping malls in the vicinity to see if their buildings meet safety standards.
This is not a small fuss made by the Korean people, in 1995, South Korea is in a period of rapid economic development, many capitalists in order to seize the market, quickly established large shopping malls in some prime locations, Mitutoyo Department Store is one of these shopping malls to stand out, the most representative, Mitutoyo Department Store has problems, those other shopping malls that have been established in a short period of time, naturally there are also potential safety hazards.
Under pressure from the public, the government launched a survey of many large buildings in the surrounding area, and the results were shocking. Among the buildings surveyed, less than 2 percent of the buildings fully meet the national requirements, and nearly half of the buildings have great potential safety hazards! If the collapse of Mitutoyo Department Store had not made the people and the government aware of the importance of building safety, then these time bombs would very likely explode at some point in the future, triggering a series of disasters.
The most hateful thing about this disaster is that even though the South Korean people tried hard to get the initiator Lee Lian sentenced to death, they failed to do so in the end, which is a more terrible thing than the collapse of Mitutoyo Department Store.