If you are one of those free market types who question why we should have coercive government regulations over the activities of the private sector, watch this cautionary edition Seconds from Disaster. Its about the Sampoong Superstore collapse in Seoul in 1995, which killed over 500 people and injured more than 900. Reading more on Wiki just now, I learned that, remarkably, this was at the time the deadliest accidental building collapse in history since the catastrophic seating collapse at the Circus Maximus in Rome in 140AD, which killed a reported 13,000 people! Unbelievably, in the hours before the collapse, even though the Sampoong building manager was alerted to a TEN CENTIMETRE WIDE crack that had opened up in the concrete floor at the base of a support column on the 5th floor restaurant level, no action was taken to evacuate (!). As well as the horror of the collapse, there are some remarkable survival stories, most notably that of shop assistant Park Seung Hyun, who was rescued alive after an incredible 17 days trapped in the rubble! The public outcry and investigation that followed led to a huge shakeup in South Koreas building industry, and exposed a pervasive culture of negligence, corruption, malpractice and mismanagement that had evolved during the economic boom in the 80s and 90s. Subsequent nationwide building inspections uncovered the staggering scale of the problem, revealing that only one in 50 high-rise buildings met national safety standards!
Posted on: Tue, 11 Nov 2014 13:17:09 +0000
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