Crammed into narrow alleys lined with bars and clubs, thousands of people flocked to Itaewon, a neighborhood in Seoul, for the city’s first Halloween festival since the COVID-19 pandemic.
But as crowds grew throughout the night to unmanageable levels, the celebration turned disastrous as a crush in an alleyway left at least 154 people dead.
Sky News has analyzed social media videos to show it took just 30 minutes for the situation to spiral out of control.
They also confirm an apparent lack of police or security presence in the build-up to the crash.
Halloween celebrations
The revelers who showed up for the celebrations were mostly young, with many traveling to the area via Itaewon Station.
Some videos broadcast live from their evening on Facebook. The screenshot below, taken from one of those live streams, shows crowds starting to form on the main road near the station at 8:10 p.m.
The main road is very busy, but cars can still move freely and there is still space between people.
Over the hours that followed, the crowd grew. They rush down a series of small side streets behind the main road around the Hamilton Hotel, highlighted in yellow on the map below. These streets are small and those that run north to south are steep.
The alleys, highlighted in yellow, are where the crowds began to build
At 10:06 p.m., people can be seen in the main driveway running east to west, still moving freely but slowly. Some people stand to avoid being separated by the crowd as they pass an Irish bar in the background.
Later, 150 meters east of where the above footage was taken, a denser crowd developed in one of the steep and narrow side lanes. People were so close together that the slightest movement reverberated through the crowd.
In the footage below, pop music is heard blasting amid cries of anguish as the packed crowd senses danger.
The people of this street narrowly avoided disaster. It would be another steep lane on the other side of the Hamilton Hotel where the fatal crash, highlighted in dark yellow below, would take place.
The alley west of the Hamilton Hotel, highlighted here, was where the crash happened
This short video shows this alley west of the hotel earlier in the evening. The crowd is spread wall to wall through the narrow passage – which is on a 20% slope – with no escape route.
Around the corner, Janelle Story, an eyewitness who spoke to Sky News, filmed her sight as the crowds surged. This video was taken at 10:34 p.m.
The story told Sky News: “Very suddenly this wave of people rushed towards us with incredible force and urgency, and at that point I stopped filming because it became really serious and scary.”
She was 40 yards from the west lane near the Hamilton Hotel where a crush was happening. Matching the exterior of the building with existing Google Streetview imagery, Sky News confirmed the footage was taken outside the Irish bar seen in the earlier video at 10:06 p.m.
Within half an hour, a bustling but fluid crowd had become dangerous.
The eyewitness video (right) can be located by matching the front of the bar with existing images from Google Maps (left)
At 10:45 p.m. it became clear that something was very wrong. Live feeds from the main road show ambulances and emergency personnel heading towards the Hamilton Hotel.
In the surrounding crowd, he also began to realize that a serious incident had occurred. A young man had live-streamed the party in the street with his friends enjoying themselves. As they made their way to the Hamilton Hotel, the mood changed.
At 11:15 p.m., he filmed the crowd parting as paramedics moved with patients on stretchers.
A stretcher-bearer carries a casualty through the crowd in the main east-west walkway
The video below shows the scene from where emergency services were heading. A wave had forced the crowd down, probably made worse by the steepness of the alley.
Rescuers can be seen trying to free those caught in the crush. People are trying to scale the walls in an attempt to escape, while those on a small staircase leading to a side door of the hotel are trying to get people to safety.
Reports suggest that some people were trapped for over an hour. Other videos posted online show paramedics and members of the public attempting CPR in the moments after the outbreak. These videos are too painful to share.
In the immediate build-up to the crash, few police or security personnel can be seen in the busy lanes on live feeds analyzed by Sky News. Questions are now being asked about the management of the situation by the authorities.
Graphics: Arianne Cantwell
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