Hospital fire kills 37 in rural South Korea
Disaster highlights challenge of fixing safety problems.
The fire that engulfed Sejong Hospital in the southern city of Miryang was the deadliest fire in South Korea in a decade.
SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA — When President Moon Jae-in took power in South Korea last May, he vowed to make his disaster-prone country a safer place to live. But public skepticism over his ability to deliver has deepened with a string of tragedies in recent weeks, including a hospital fire that killed dozens of people Friday.
The fire that engulfed Sejong Hospital in the southern city of Miryang was the deadliest fire in South Korea in a decade. It also came barely a month after another fire killed 29 people in December.
Both accidents revealed deep flaws in the country’s safety standards, like the lack of fire sprinklers in the hospital, problems that are likely to further erode public confidence in Moon’s ability to deliver his campaign promises just as the country prepares to host the Winter Olympics.
In Friday’s fire, the government even had trouble delivering an authoritative death toll, a common problem in South Korean disasters. The local police, fire department and health authorities announced 41 had died, but later revised that number to 37, saying some bodies were counted twice. But they said the death toll could rise again because more than 100 people had been injured, 10 seriously.
On Friday, officials were still investigating the cause of the fire, which they said started on the hospital’s first floor. Toxic smoke quickly spread through the rest of the hospital, which was filled with older patients, many of them unable to move on their own when the fire broke out, they said. Twenty-six of the 37 dead were in their 80s or 90s, including a 99-year-old woman. All of the fatalities apparently died of smoke inhalation, police Detective Kim Han-soo told reporters.
Like other rural towns in South Korea, Miryang has seen its population rapidly age in recent decades as its young have abandoned farming and migrated to cities.
The Miryang hospital lacked fire sprinklers, said Choi Man-woo, chief of the local fire department. The dead included a doctor and two nurses, Choi said.
With its death toll, the Miryang accident was the most deadly fire since an inferno engulfing a cold storage warehouse killed 40 people in 2008. In 2003, 192 people died in a subway arson.
South Koreans’ concern over safety standards has become a major political issue since an overloaded ferry capsized in 2014, killing 304 passengers.