29 killed, 29 hurt in South Korea fire

SEOUL: Flammable materials on the outside of a South Korean building fuelled a major blaze that killed 29 people, experts said on Friday, evoking comparisons with the Grenfell Tower disaster in London.

The fire engulfed an eightstorey tower in the southern city of Jecheon, killing 29 people and injuring 29 more. Twenty of the dead were found at a female sauna and others elsewhere in the build center and restaurants.

The husband of one of the victims received a phone call from his wife, pleading for help.

“My wife was screaming on the phone, asking for help, but she was coughing badly because of the smoke,” he told the Yonhap news agency.

The man, surnamed Yun, immediately alerted the emergency services. “Then I called her back, but she did not answer this time,” he said.

Experts said the structure - ishing materials and illegally parked cars blocking access to emergency vehicles.

Street surveillance video footage smoke billowing from the ceiling - neath the stilted building, which stood on pillars.

The fire spread quickly upwards along the outside walls of the tower, which contained cheap and highly flammable

“There were three or four ex upwards along the outside walls,” said one eyewitness.

It reportedly took only seven minutes for the entire building to

Barber Kim Jong- Su, 64, was working at the men’s sauna—one floor above the women’s facil

the windows,” he said.

He stayed at the premises for around five minutes, helping a dozen customers to safety down an emergency staircase— many of them in their underwear—before he was hospitalised with smoke inhalation.

South Korean President Moon Jae-In visited the scene Friday to receive a report on the accident

Engineering Professor Chung Sang-Man at Kongju University said the tower had cladding materials made of a cement and foam sandwich, which are widely used for insulation but prone to

- als have been a great source of problems in major blazes,” he said, citing the Grenfell Tower inferno in June that killed 71 people, among other disasters.

faulty refrigerator on the fourth local authority, but rapidly spread up the 24-storey tower, which had new cladding on the outside.

In the wake of the disaster, hundreds of similar buildings across Britain were subjected to safety checks, and some residents were evacuated as a precaution.

The painstaking process to identify all the remains took months and anger is still simmering among the survivors, with most awaiting permanent housing and voicing scepticism about an