At around 6:05 pm on June 29, 1995, people who were strolling on the streets and relaxing for a week of work suddenly heard a loud noise. They looked up in the sound and were shocked.
only saw Sanfeng Department Store , located in the prime location of Seoke District, , Seoke District, , in full view of the public, all collapsed in just 20 seconds and became ruins.
Everyone was screaming, and the passers-by rushed to the edge of the ruins to save people, pulling out some people who had run out of the department store but were still pressed by the falling rubble.
A five-story shopping mall, a large shopping mall considered to be the most prosperous commercial center in South Korea at that time, was built and opened in just five years. Why did it collapse in an instant?
Some people speculated that it was a terrorist attack, and some people said that it was caused by a gas explosion. But as the investigation deepened, the final result made everyone angry.
To understand the truth of the incident, let us turn our time back to the late 1980s and early 1990s, when South Korea was in a period of rapid development, with various real estate projects and shopping malls emerging one after another. You see a piece of open space today, and it may become a building after a while.
1987, Sanfeng Group obtained an open land originally used as a landfill in Seocao District, Seoul. It plans to build a 4-story office building on this land, and the foundation has been laid.
However, the chairman (president) of Sanfeng Group Li Liu temporarily changed the plan and felt that the location here was very good and the benefits of building an office building could not be maximized. So I decided to convert it into a department store, and at the same time I asked to build a floor to create a large indoor ice rink, and change the four floors to five floors.
Because the foundation is planned according to the four-story building, if it is to be covered, the original structural plan of the floor must be changed, which obviously violates the relevant regulations and is too risky. The project leader informed Li Liu of the various harms of this change and refused to implement the change.
Li Li insisted on his own actions. After being rejected, he simply fired his previous project team and found a construction company that owns stake in to take on the subsequent projects.
At the same time, Li Yu changed his mind again and converted the 5th floor ice rink into a catering floor. After completion, 8 restaurants were settled in. The result of this change in
has resulted in the load-bearing columns that were previously planned to bear 4 floors, and now they need to bear the weight of 5 floors. The originally planned empty ice rink has also become an intensive restaurant, and the weight it carries is also increasing.
In order to facilitate more space inside the mall to install escalator , many load-bearing columns planned previously were cancelled, and the load-bearing columns were reduced from 80 cm thick to 60 cm thick, which greatly weakened the load-bearing capacity of the load-bearing columns.
After multiple changes, Sanfeng Department Store was completed in the second half of 1989 and officially opened on July 7, 1990.
Li Li is very optimistic about this project and has created a lot of momentum for the opening of Sanfeng Department Store, and has decorated it into an extremely luxurious .
The two sides of the department store are connected by huge chrome-inlaid glass, and the walls are decorated with Italian pink marble.
Many of the merchants that settled in the mall are luxury brands and top furniture merchants. The fifth-floor restaurant was also the most high-end and fashionable Korean restaurants at that time. The target group is aimed at the middle class and rich people with great consumption capacity.
In Korea at that time, such a shopping mall was unique. The grand opening ceremony and overwhelming publicity attracted the attention of countless people.
was extremely popular after opening. The daily traffic to the mall is endless, with an average daily customer reception of 40,000 customers and an average daily turnover of more than 500,000 US dollars. This was in 1990, and such turnover was already amazing.
Seeing such results, Li Li was naturally very happy and arranged for his son to become the head of Sanfeng Department Store, and his daughter-in-law also worked in one of the restaurants.
For a large shopping mall, the air conditioning system is naturally very important. Only a good temperature environment can make customers feel comfortable to visit. If they stay for a long enough time, the transaction volume will be higher. Sanfeng Department Store also attaches great importance to this.
On the roof of the fifth floor, there are three air-conditioning equipment that controls the entire shopping mall building. Each weighs 10 tons, totaling 30 tons. After the air conditioner is filled with water, the total weight is as high as 87 tons, which is 4 times the load-bearing design standard on the top floor.
At the beginning, the location of the shopping mall air conditioner, next to the residential building next to it, the noise generated by the operation of the air conditioner equipment caused dissatisfaction among nearby residents and complained to the relevant departments. After some coordination, the mall moved the air conditioner to the other side away from the residential building.
Under normal circumstances, this kind of movement should be to use a crane to adjust the air conditioner and then move it to a new position to reduce the pressure on the roof.
However, in order to save trouble, Sanfeng Department Store directly pushed the pulley of the air conditioner weighing 87 tons to a new position. This operation caused cracks to appear directly on the roof of the building that was originally overloaded and load-bearing.
But no one cares about these cracks, and it doesn't matter if the surface is cracked at all. The residential building is far away from the noise of air conditioning, and no one cares about this anymore.
The mall continues to operate in such a prosperous manner, with more and more fame and more people coming to the mall.
1995 On the evening of June 28, 2019, the night security guard began patrolling the mall as usual. When he arrived at the 5th floor, he heard a strange cracking sound, as if something was cracking.
After careful inspection, the security guard found that there was a crack on the roof of the 5th floor. Because it was too late, it was inconvenient to report to the leader immediately. The security guard wrote the situation on the note and left it on the facility manager's desk.
1995 On the morning of June 29, 2019, the facility manager saw a note on the desk as soon as he entered the office. He immediately went to the top floor to check and indeed saw a crack. However, he believed that this was a crack caused by mobile air conditioning before, and planned to ask someone to repair the crack later, and did not take it seriously.
0:00, the mall was officially open, it was Sunday, and a large number of customers flocked to the door as soon as the door opened.
There is a restaurant called "Chunyun Restaurant" on the 5th floor of the mall. The decoration of this restaurant is special.
Koreans have the habit of sitting on the ground and eating. In order to make customers feel warm when sitting down, a floor heating equipment is installed under the entire floor of this restaurant. Such decoration undoubtedly increases the burden on the load-bearing structure on the fourth to fifth floors.
And the crisis also started from this restaurant.
Not long after the mall opened that day, employees of Chunyun Restaurant found cracks above the load-bearing columns in the restaurant, and there were signs of continuous spread, so they hurriedly reported the matter to the facility manager.
The facility manager went to the scene and saw that the cracks were indeed obvious, so he hung up the decoration sign and asked the restaurant to suspend business. Let's talk about it after the repair.
On the weekend, the restaurant closed for one day and suffered a lot of losses. However, facing such a situation, the restaurant owner had to accept this reality and let the employees go home on holiday. He never expected that such a move would allow employees to escape.
At 12:00 noon, employees on the fourth floor began to report to the facility manager that cracks also appeared on the ceiling of their store. The facility manager realized that the crack on the fifth floor reached the fourth floor, and the situation was already very serious and did not dare to neglect the matter. He immediately reported the situation to the company's senior management. After the company's senior management meeting held a study, it was decided to close all shops on the fifth floor first, close the entire floor, and transfer the goods on the top floor and the heavy objects in the shops to the basement.
At this time, many people in Sanfeng Department Store felt a slight vibration, and even small pieces of ceramic tiles began to fall off in some places.
High-level manager felt that this might be a vibration caused by the air conditioner air conditioner cooling mechanism, so he sent someone to the top floor to turn off the air conditioner.
At the same time, the broadcast was broadcast in the mall that the air conditioner was broken and repaired was under emergency control. The mall would be stuffy for a short time. Please forgive the content.
html At the end of June, it was summer. The temperature in Seoul was not low. Once the air conditioner was turned off, some customers could not stand the stuffiness and left the mall, but there were still a large number of customers who chose to stay.
At this time, the ceilings on the 4th and 5th floors began to sink, the cracks became larger and larger, and some arrays were shaken and fell down.
. Faced with this situation, the senior executives immediately reported the matter to Chairman Li Liu. At 2 pm, Li Liu convened a meeting of all management teams to find solutions to the problem. Someone suggested that an expert from relevant parties come and take a test.
Around 3:30 pm, a civil engineering structure expert was invited to check the problem. After the expert arrived at the scene, he informed the board of directors after just a simple inspection that there were serious problems in the structure of Sanfeng Department Store and may even collapse. The details must be closed and further inspections must be conducted after the business is closed. It is recommended that Sanfeng Department Store close its business first and evacuate the crowd.
However, as the chairman, Li Liu saw that the shopping mall had a passenger flow that day. If the business was closed for one day, the mall would suffer huge economic losses and did not issue an order to close the department store and evacuate people. He thought that after the business ended on the day, he would then find relevant personnel to repair and reinforce the building.
So Li Liu made the decision to continue business. After the meeting, he and the company executives all quickly left the mall.
At 5:00 pm, the ceiling on the fourth floor had been severely sunken, and the facility manager immediately closed the 4th floor.
At around 6:03, a "crackling" breaking sound came from the upper floor, and the sound became louder and louder, and the building began to shake violently. Unclear customers and some shop staff thought that an earthquake had occurred.
The mall staff also found that something was wrong, so they immediately sounded the alarm and began to evacuate customers.
But it was too late to evacuate customers at this time, leaving only 2 minutes for people to escape.
:05: The entire building began to collapse from the fifth floor to the bottom. In just 20 seconds, this former landmark building in South Korea became a ruin, and even the four-story underground space was filled with the fallen floor.
At this time, there were still thousands of customers and shop and shopping mall staff in the building, and they were unable to escape and were all crushed under the ruins.
This scene shocked everyone.
Because it is located in a bustling area of the city, fire trucks, police cars, ambulances and other related rescue personnel and facilities arrived a few minutes later.
At this time, no one knew how many people were buried under this collapsed department store. Because they were worried that the use of heavy equipment would cause secondary damage to the lucky ones pressed down, everyone could only try their best to carefully turn on the steel bars, concrete, and wooden boards with bare hands to find the survivors.
Heavy rescue equipment can only slowly lift some large wreckage from the outer edge to facilitate further rescue.
After intense rescue, one night passed, and more than 200 lucky people were rescued one after another. At the same time, the data of the dead were also increasing. The families of the missing persons stayed by the building all night, hoping that their relatives would be rescued.
But at this time the government issued an order to stop rescue because the exterior walls on both sides of the building may collapse at any time to prevent harm to the rescue personnel entering it.
This decision by the government undoubtedly made the missing person lose hope of survival. The families of the missing persons could not accept it. They united to protest the decision.
Under pressure, the government finally mobilized large cranes to pull the two exterior walls with steel ropes to prevent collapse, so that the rescue work could continue.
Facts have proved that there is hope if you don’t give up.
On the 9th day after the building collapsed, 21-year-old college student Choi Mingxi was rescued. During these 9 days, he survived by eating cardboard and drinking rainwater dripping from the edge of rubble. Another shopping guide named Li was trapped with him. The elder sister was always encouraging him to live strongly. The two cheered each other up and waited for rescue.
But on the 8th day, this elder sister passed away because of injuries on her body and failed to survive until the moment she was rescued.
Next another bigger miracle happened.
At noon on the 17th day, a 19-year-old girl, Park Seung-hyun, was rescued. She is a shopping guide at a children's clothing store. When the building collapsed, she was knocked unconscious. When she woke up, she found herself trapped in a triangle space under the elevator lifting hole on the second floor underground.
She had not eaten anything during her trap, and survived by rain alone. This so-called rainwater is sprayed by firefighters using it to dissipate dust, which can be said to be a medical miracle.
The little girl lost her concept of time and thought that only four or five days had passed. It was this vague concept that made her always have the desire to survive, but her colleague who was trapped with her failed to last and died unfortunately while waiting for rescue.
Finally, after checking, a total of 502 people were killed in the accident, another 937 were injured, and property losses reached 270 billion won (about 216 million US dollars), making it the largest disaster in peacetime in South Korea's history. Such a major accident as
naturally has a cause.
When the truth was investigated, the Korean people were angry.
The final investigation confirmed that the most fundamental reason for this tragedy was the illegal reconstruction of Sanfeng Department Store. In addition to the original four-story foundation renovating the five-story building as mentioned earlier, unqualified cement was also used.
There should have been 16 steel bars in the load-bearing column, but they were secretly reduced to 8. The steel bars used to strengthen concrete floor slabs on the th floor were also installed in the wrong position. They should have been 5cm apart from the ground, but actual measurements found that they were as much as 10cm apart from the ground.
This is equivalent to thinning the thickness of the floor slab, resulting in a 20% reduction in the strength between the floor slab and the column. In addition, the operation of "slimming" the load-bearing column, all of this has laid hidden dangers for this collapse.
And at the time of the incident, the building had already had serious cracks in advance. Relevant experts also warned that there was enough time to close the mall and evacuate personnel. The mall also insisted on operating, which eventually caused such major casualties.
As a chairman, Li Yu should be aware of the violations he has committed, but why is he so bold and breaking the law?
This starts with his identity background. You must know that Li Yu's background is definitely not ordinary to build a shopping mall in a prime location like Seoul.
Lee Yoo worked for the CIA of South Korea in the 1960s. He is a capable leader of the former Prime Minister of South Korea and one of the "Three Golds" of South Korea ( Kim Yongsan , Kim Dae-jung , Kim Jong-bi ). It is precisely because of this background that Li Li has gained a lot of convenience in real estate development, so he has the ability to build a high-end commercial center like Sanfeng Department Store in the bustling area of Seoul Ruicao District.
is also why it gave Li Li a different "guy", openly cutting corners and illegally renovating buildings. During the whole process, many South Korean government officials colluded with Lee Hark, which eventually led to the tragedy.
There must be a cause and there will be a result, and no one can escape. After the investigation of the
incident was clear, on December 27, 1995, the Seoul (Seoul) District Court sentenced Lee Ho to 210 and a half years in prison for criminal negligence, and Lee Ho later changed his sentence to 7 years after appealing.
The CEO of Sanfeng Department Store, Li Liu's son was sentenced to seven years in prison for manslaughter and corruption.
In addition, 21 relevant personnel have been sentenced one after another, including 12 government officials. After
, Li Liu and his son sold all their assets to compensate all victims for about US$330 million, and an average of about US$220,000 in compensation for one victim.
At this point, the glorious Sanfeng Group disappeared from people's sight.
In 2003, Li Li was released from prison and died in October of the same year after he was released from prison.
, and Li Yu's son left South Korea after being released from prison and lived a secluded life.
In order to commemorate the victims of Sanfeng Department Store, Koreans have also built monuments to mourn these innocent victims.
After this incident, the South Korean government began to attach great importance to violations in the construction industry and conducted strict inspections. After inspection, it was found that only 2% of the buildings at that time had been fully qualified, and the rest had to be demolished and rebuilt or reinforced and repaired.
In this case, even if the Sanfeng Department Store incident did not occur, other buildings would collapse.
In the face of money, there are always people who will lose themselves because of interests and use their power and money to do whatever they want. However, this Sanfeng Department Store incident came at the cost of 502 lives, which is too heavy.
As Mark Twain said: "Fever desires can induce dangerous actions and do absurd things." In such a big incident, Li Liu and his son were sentenced to seven years in prison. Some people think that such a punishment is too light and does not match the crime they committed, but even if they are sentenced to death penalty, the lost lives will not come back.
I hope that such things will not happen again in the future, and have more respect for life and awe.
