The cause of the big disaster is often the neglect of small details. The tragedy we are about to mention once shocked the world. A prosperous department store turned into a ruin within 20 seconds. Nearly 11,500 people were buried under rubble, causing the passing of life and the separation of families. This is the biggest accident with the casualties in peacetime in South Korea - Sanfeng Department Store collapse incident .
Time goes back to 995 . As one of the four Asian dragons, South Korea has a prosperous economy, and it is not an exaggeration to say it is an Asian miracle. The capital Seoul , various commercial buildings rose from the ground. Sanfeng Department Store , built by South Korea's Sanfeng Group, is one of the best. It is located in prime location in , Seoul, . This luxurious shopping mall has five floors on the upper and fourth floors on the ground. It has more than 1,000 employees. The walls are covered with pink imported Italian marble. The shelves are displayed with high-end clothing, various furniture and luxury goods. There are many fashionable Korean restaurants on the fifth floor, which locks in urban office workers with amazing consumption capacity. Sanfeng Department Store has performed very well, with html's turnover of more than US$500,000 on the 1st day. The store celebration was soon for the 6th anniversary of its opening, but no one expected that a disaster would be approaching quietly.
At 8 am on June 29, Li Yongzhou, the manager in charge of shopping mall facilities, came to the office as usual. He noticed a note left by the night guard on the table, which mentioned the strange sound from the rooftop last night . Since Sanfeng Department Store has just passed regular safety inspections, Li Yongzhou did not pay special attention to this matter. Two hours later, Chunyuan Restaurant , located on the fifth floor of the mall, contacted Li Yongzhou. They found that there was a huge crack around a pillar in the restaurant, and the width could be stuffed into a fist.
Li Yongzhou decided to temporarily close the restaurant and instructed employees to keep silent to avoid panic. Li Yongzhou believed that this might be caused by the air conditioner , so at 12:30 noon, he closed the air conditioner in the building and conveyed the news of the air conditioner failure to customers and employees through the broadcast, and reported the situation to his superiors. At 2 pm, Li Li, chairman of Sanfeng Group, invited Li Hezhu, the structural engineer in charge of building the building, to check the cracks. Li Hezhu found that the crack had expanded to the roof of the entire building, and some areas also experienced small collapses. After evaluating the risks, Li Hezhu believed that the building should be closed for immediately and will be repaired urgently. But his proposal was soon rejected by because the mall had a very large passenger flow that day and the management was unwilling to lose this considerable profit, so they decided that would continue to operate .
Time is coming, and Sanfeng Department Store ushered in the business peak of the day, and the bustling customers are crowded with counters in the mall. At 5:40, the sound of rumbling came from the roof of the building. More than 1,500 customers in the mall have not realized that the building is on the verge of collapse. 7 minutes later, a loud shook the entire building. With the sound of breaking various pillars and building materials, the building began to shake violently. The staff immediately sounded all the alarms, and everyone screamed, rushing towards the exit. But everything happened too quickly, and the load-bearing columns that played a supporting role fell down one by one, and the floor slab collapsed layer by layer. In less than 20 seconds, the entire building was razed to the ground. The once prosperous landmark of Seoul turned into twisted steel bars and rubble. After the smoke and dust dissipated, the crowd on the street saw a scene that they would never forget in their lives. The huge building collapsed vertically from top to bottom, and filled the 4-story basement . There were constant wailing sounds at the scene, and it was terrible.
A few minutes later, rescuers arrived amid the howling of police sirens. Rescuers had to move the gravel with bare hands because they were worried that heavy bulldozing would hurt the buried person. The next morning, more than 200 survivors were rescued.What exactly caused such a serious collapse of Sanfeng Department Store, which has only been built for six years?
After eliminating the possibility of earthquakes, terrorist attacks, and foundation collapse, investigators turned their focus to floor itself . They tested the strength of the concrete samples in the ruins, and unexpectedly, the building's concrete strength also met the standard. The investigation was in a deadlock. Investigators can only sort out the information over and over again. When calculating the building's architectural drawings and carrying capacity, they finally found doubts. According to calculations, the building's load-bearing needs columns with a diameter of 80cm, plus 16 steel bars. But in fact, the diameter of the column has been reduced to 60cm, and there are only 8 steel bars. This caused the overall strength of the building to be reduced by nearly half. But that's not the only cause of the disaster. Because when designing a building, it has safety reserves, and the bearing capacity required by the design is actually much greater than the actual bearing capacity required. Even if the intensity does not meet the standards, the building can generally remain intact. This explains why the building has been safe and sound since its construction five years ago.
As the investigation deepened, the investigators also found that the steel bars in the concrete floor slab were placed in the wrong position , from 5cm away from the surface to 10cm away from the surface. The five centimeters change is quite a bit, which is equivalent to directly weakening the thickness of the floor slab. This error reduced the strength of the floor slabs by 20%. All signs indicate that the management of Sanfeng Group has a major mistake in , and they evacuated early in the disaster and all survived.
further investigation found that when the building was initially designed, the building had only four floors and was intended to be used as an office building. After the original contractor set the foundation, Sanfeng Group asked to change the office building to shopping mall , and add to cover an additional layer of . This change has resulted in the cancellation of many load-bearing columns to make room for escalator . The contractor disagreed with the modification, and President Li Li simply fired them and asked his own construction company to take over the construction.
Another culprit of the serious overload of the building is the air conditioning device on the roof. The total weight of three large water-cooled air conditioners is 29 tons, and it can reach 87 tons after filling with water, which is far beyond the design standards. After investigation, the most critical factor in the accident also came from these three air conditioners. Two years before the disaster, three air conditioners were moved to the location due to nearby residents complaining about the noise of the air conditioner. This large equipment should have been lifted to a new position with a crane, but Sanfeng Group was lazy to install the air conditioner on the wheels and dragged them directly on the roof. It turns out this is a very bad decision . The dozens of tons of air conditioners were dragged to the other side of the roof, causing irreversible damage to the building structure. There were cracks of varying degrees where the air conditioner passed, and the columns of Chunyuan Restaurant were particularly damaged. In the past two years, the vibration caused by turning on the air conditioner will cause the cracks to spread. When there were enough cracks around the pillars, the floor of Chunyuan Restaurant could no longer bear it. After the first floor slab fell, the collapse quickly spread to the entire floor. The upper floor slab fell to the lower floor and caused the lower floor to collapse, and Sanfeng Department Store was razed to the ground.
On the 17th day after the accident, heavy machinery is cleaning up the building wreckage. At this time, the focus of the excavation work has changed from rescuing survivors to searching for remains. At this moment, the on-site personnel discovered a 19-year-old salesperson Park Seung Hyun who was trapped behind a concrete slab. After being trapped in the dark for 377 hours, she miraculously survived and was not seriously injured except for severe dehydration.
This news spread throughout the country as soon as it was reported, but Park Seung-hyun was also the last person to be rescued from the ruins alive. 502 lives were taken away by this disaster. Subsequent investigations showed that several government officials were suspected of accepting bribes during the construction of Sanfeng Department Store, and there were also widespread corruption and fraud within Sanfeng Group. On December 27, 1995, Li Yu, chairman of Sanfeng Group, was sentenced to 210 years and 6 months in prison for negligent death, and his son Li Hanxiang was also sentenced to 7 years in prison for corruption and other crimes.A large number of stakeholders were prosecuted, and a total of 21 people were found guilty, of which 12 were government officials.
Accidents will indeed make people learn from their lessons, but the tragedy of greed will not go far. Blind pursuit of interests is the best breeding ground for disasters. The fig leaf of South Korea's rapid economic development was ruthlessly lifted. Within two years, the financial crisis that swept across Asia spread to South Korea. South Korea, which has been developing rapidly for more than 30 years, has a hidden relationship between the bubbles, illusions, greed and ugliness hidden behind it. In such a seemingly unrelated building collapse accident, there is a secret connection that makes people feel cold.
