Corruption, greed and 빨리빨리
Discovery Channel just aired a programme on the Sampoong Dept Store disaster. I hope it serves as a reminder to what taking shortcuts leads to… It’s been 11 years now, which is about twice as long as the building “defeated the odds” as they said in the show. That’s right. The building didn’t even last six years.
But then again, I never liked that pink colour they painted the exterior walls with…
April 28th, 2006 at 6:35 pm
What gets me about the Sampoong disaster is that people in the building could see something was wrong. I also saw the Discovery Channel docu about it, and you’ll have noticed there was a point where one of the beams started pushing through the floor in the kitchen in of one of the top-floor restaurants. You’d think that at least the guys in the kitchen would have run for their lives, and they had plenty of time for that, but they didn’t. An hour or so before the big collapse people heard parts of the bldg rumbling and towards the end it was shaking so much classes in the kitchenware section started clanging, but people just went about their business.
Corruption, greed, and even ppalli ppalli happen everwhere, but the only time I think Korea may in some ways still be a Third World bit of a mess is when people ignore the most obvious of signs and when people who are concerned about safety get treated as a little crazy. For example, anyone who saw the beam coming through the floor or heard the sounds didn’t do anything because s/he didn’t want to be the only one to even just quietly get up and leave. Come to think of it, maybe a few people did just that and live today (and deserve to). But clearly no one yelled at people to run for their lives.
Bldgs collapse even in places like Germany, and as everyone knows no one is as uptight about such things as they are. But in most countries we’d like to call seonjin’guk, someone would’ve said something at Sampoong.