The small South Korean city of Jecheon was reeling yesterday, a day after a fire ripped through an eight-story building, killing at least 29 people, mostly women trapped in a sauna, on what should have been a day of celebration ahead of the Winter Olympics.
Organizers called off a leg of next year’s Pyeongchang Winter Games torch relay as South Korean President Moon Jae-in arrived to comfort mourners.
Jecheon’s mayor told reporters the city was considering a mass funeral and planned to cover most of the costs.
All but one of the victims have been identified, including 20 women who were overcome by toxic fumes in a second-floor sauna, Jecheon Fire Department Chief Lee Sang-min said.
“Our crew on the scene said the lockers inside the facility were installed like a labyrinth and it’s a glass building with few windows, which apparently made way for the smoke from the first floor to quickly fill up the second floor,” Lee told reporters.
Investigators were still trying to find out the cause of the conflagration, but were focusing on a first-floor parking lot, he said.
“There were cars parked on the first floor, and as they were burning, a large amount of toxic gases were released,” Lee said.
Tragic stories began to emerge as victims were identified.
One man told Yonhap News Agency that he lost his mother, wife and daughter.
Another said that he received a telephone call from his trapped wife as she coughed in the gathering smoke, but was later unable to reach her again.
Heavy smoke charred the glass facade of the building as firefighters struggled to extinguish the blaze, climbing up and down a ladder in a desperate search for survivors.
“We thought that having a torch relay at a place where so many people died in a fire accident is just not right, and therefore canceled today’s event in Jecheon,” Pyeongchang Organizing Committee torch relay manager Ryu Ho-yon told reporters. “We are planning to adjust further schedules with those who want to continue the relay.”
Jecheon is southeast of the capital, Seoul, and is popular with visitors to its mountains and lakes.
The Games begin in February.
The pitch is a classic: A young celebrity with no climbing experience spends a year in hard training and scales Mount Everest, succeeding against some — if not all — odds. French YouTuber Ines Benazzouz, known as Inoxtag, brought the story to life with a two-hour-plus documentary about his year preparing for the ultimate challenge. The film, titled Kaizen, proved a smash hit on its release last weekend. Young fans queued around the block to get into a preview screening in Paris, with Inoxtag’s management on Monday saying the film had smashed the box office record for a special cinema
CRITICISM: ‘One has to choose the lesser of two evils,’ Pope Francis said, as he criticized Trump’s anti-immigrant policies and Harris’ pro-choice position Pope Francis on Friday accused both former US president Donald Trump and US Vice President Kamala Harris of being “against life” as he returned to Rome from a 12-day tour of the Asia-Pacific region. The 87-year-old pontiff’s comments on the US presidential hopefuls came as he defied health concerns to connect with believers from the jungle of Papua New Guinea to the skyscrapers of Singapore. It was Francis’ longest trip in duration and distance since becoming head of the world’s nearly 1.4 billion Roman Catholics more than 11 years ago. Despite the marathon visit, he held a long and spirited
‘DISAPPEARED COMPLETELY’: The melting of thousands of glaciers is a major threat to people in the landlocked region that already suffers from a water shortage Near a wooden hut high up in the Kyrgyz mountains, scientist Gulbara Omorova walked to a pile of gray rocks, reminiscing how the same spot was a glacier just a few years ago. At an altitude of 4,000m, the 35-year-old researcher is surrounded by the giant peaks of the towering Tian Shan range that also stretches into China, Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan. The area is home to thousands of glaciers that are melting at an alarming rate in Central Asia, already hard-hit by climate change. A glaciologist, Omarova is recording that process — worried about the future. She hiked six hours to get to
The number of people in Japan aged 100 or older has hit a record high of more than 95,000, almost 90 percent of whom are women, government data showed yesterday. The figures further highlight the slow-burning demographic crisis gripping the world’s fourth-biggest economy as its population ages and shrinks. As of Sept. 1, Japan had 95,119 centenarians, up 2,980 year-on-year, with 83,958 of them women and 11,161 men, the Japanese Ministry of Health said in a statement. On Sunday, separate government data showed that the number of over-65s has hit a record high of 36.25 million, accounting for 29.3 percent of