Moon visits scene of deadly S Korea fire as anger mounts

SouthKorean President Moon Jae-in comforted mourners in the small sceniccity of Jecheon yesterday amid growing public anger at how fire rippedthrough an eight-storey building, killing at least 29 people, most ofthem taking a sauna. All but one of the victims had been identifiedby yesterday morning, including 20 women who were overcome by toxicfumes in the second-floor sauna, Jecheon fire chief Lee Sang-min said.“Our crew on the scene said the lockers inside the facility wereinstalled like a labyrinth and it’s a glass building with few windows,which apparently made way for the smoke from the first floor to quicklyfill up the second floor,” Lee told reporters.Anger mounted atreports of shoddy building construction, broken doors and other problemsthat may have contributed to the deaths.One man shouted atofficials visiting survivors in hospital, complaining that firefightersfailed to break through to the trapped women in time.Media reportedthat a glass door leading to the sauna had not been working properly formore than a month, and that emergency stairs were often used forstorage.“Nothing has changed even after the Sewol tragedy,”parliament member Ahn Cheol-soo said, referring to the 2014 ferrysinking that killed more than 300 people, mostly South Koreanschoolchildren. “I just cannot understand why the same type of accidentshappen over and over again,” he said, according to the Yonhap newsagency.Jecheon’s mayor told reporters the city was considering amass funeral and planned to cover most of the costs. Investigators werestill trying to find out the cause of the conflagration, but werefocusing on a first-floor parking lot, Lee said. “There were cars parkedon the first floor, and as they were burning, a large amount of toxicgases were released.”  Tragic stories began to emerge as victimswere identified. One man told Yonhap that he lost his mother, wife, anddaughter. Another said he received a phone call from his trapped wife asshe coughed in the gathering smoke, but was later unable to reach heragain.  Heavy smoke charred glass facade of the building asfirefighters struggled to extinguish the blaze, climbing up and down aladder in a desperate search for survivors.  Organisers called off a legof the 2018 Pyeongchang Winter Games torch relay in Jecheon on whatshould have been a day of celebration ahead of the games.  “Wethought that having a torch relay at a place where so many people diedin a fire accident is just not right, and therefore cancelled today’sevent in Jecheon,” Ryu Hoyon, the torch relay manager for thePyeongchang organising committee, told Reuters. “We are planning toadjust further schedules with those who want to continue the relay.”  Jecheon is southeast of the capital Seoul and is popular with visitors to its mountains and lakes.