About the only significant bit of information I can find in English comes "Emergency Management in Korea: Just Started, but Rapidly Evolving," [.doc] a chapter in the Comparative Emergency Management Book Project available online from the United States Federal Emergency Management Agency [FEMA] website.
A blast occurred in a train with 40-ton explosives at Iri Station at 9:15 pm on November 11, 1977. As a result, 59 people were killed, 185 people were seriously injured, and 1,158 people were slightly injured. The Iri station explosion was a man-made disaster, considering the mistake of one drunken guard who was careless with the dynamite on the train. When he attempted to ignite the candle, he mistakenly set the fire to dynamite. The total number of emergency responders reacting to the explosion and help recover from this disaster was 107,787. In particular, military personnel, including not only the current soldiers but also the national guards, played many important roles in response and recovery. Through this disaster experience, cooperation with military force was deeply emphasized.
Here are a couple pictures of the scene:
You can probably view some other pictures via a Google Image search, though there's not much out there. Another picture I tried to retrieve was on an Empas blog that caused Internet Explorer to crash and caused me to lose over an hour's worth of work on this post, so I'd advise against it. There's really not much available in English, and in fact the only other substantial write-up I've found was on GordSellar.com in 2008; an excerpt:
Actually, Iksan is a great microcosm of development in Korea. Downtown (not pictured above) was all new and modern, with big multi-lane roads, a shopping district laid out relatively logically (that is, on a grid) and it was easy to navigate, get around in, and so on. The reason for this, however, was awful: one night in November 11th, 1977 — when the town (or at least the train station) was still normally called by its old name, “Iri” — there was an accident at the train station. The way I heard it, someone was moving crates in a military shipment — unmarked, of course, for security reasons, right? — and he discovered what was in the crates when his cigarette lit them, and the crates exploded.
I don’t know whether that’s true, of course — how would anyone know that it was this or that guy, whether he was smoking or just, you know, dropped a crate? And would the ask of a cigarette actually set off dynamite? Isn’t it just as likely that a box got dropped and blew up? I don’t know, but this is exactly the kind of tangled urban legend that grows up around these kinds of events. But the effect is incontestable. The account on Wikipedia (in Korean only) suggests, if I’m getting it right, that someone lit a candle or lantern while moving the crates at night, which contained about forty tons of high explosives. They weren’t supposed to have been there, but they were.
In any case, an older gentleman I knew in Iksan told me he was drinking soju with his buddies in Jeonju when it happened, and they heard the sound of the blast. From a distance of about 20 kilometers away, they heard the sound so clearly that it overpowered all the conversation in the establishment where they were drinking, as well as the TV. Boom. They didn’t know it then, but downtown Iksan had just been smashed apart, or, at least, the area immediately in front of the train station had been destroyed.
I first got on this trail ages ago when I noticed a picture in the Gwangju bus terminal of a bus going to Iri.
It caught my attention both because I had never heard of it and because, coincidentally, there's a lake and a town Erie in Pennsylvania. Korea's Iri city (이리시) doesn't exist anymore, because it and Iksan county were merged into Iksan city, Jeollabuk-do, in 1995. As far as I can tell, from this Naver encyclopedia page, a new station opened in Iri in 1978, and it, too, changed its name in 1995.
5 comments:
One of my first thoughts was that someone was drunk. Turns out I was right.
This Is Me Posting, it reminded me of the careless smoker who set off the Taegu subway explosion.
Thanks for the information. It was only last week that I first learned of this disaster. I found reference to it in a book by Simon Winchester called Korea: A Walk Through the Land of Miracles. Interesting book but a bit dated.
I was about 11 years old at the time of the explosion, which blew out a couple of our windows. The story back then was that the security officer watching the waggon made a fire because of the cold. He then fell asleep and woke up to find the waggon burning. Knowing what was inside made him run away and save his life to be later excecuted.
Post a Comment