Diksha Sundriyal
The seventh and eighth episodes of Netflix’s ‘The Echoes of Survivors: Inside Korea’s Tragedies’ focus on the tragedy of the Sampoong Department Store disaster. The building collapsed on June 29, 1995, due to major structural failures, claiming the lives of 502 people and injuring 937. The Netflix docuseries presents the accounts of the people who worked on the rescue, including volunteers, as well as the people who later investigated the matter to figure out how an entire building could fall like a deck of cards. The episodes reveal the scale of the tragedy by the devastation it caused, but in the midst of this hopeless situation, there were also survivors who came out of it alive, against all odds.
The Survivors Were Rescued Over the Span of About Three Weeks
When the Sampoong Department Store building collapsed, about 1500 people were trapped inside it, but there were only a handful of people who made it out alive. Reportedly, a group of 24 people was rescued two days after the collapse. They had been in the basement room, changing clothes after their shift ended. When the building fell, the basement remained fairly intact, which allowed for their survival. A couple more people were pulled out of the wreckage in the coming days. 21-year-old Choi Myung-suk had been trapped for about eleven days in the concrete rubble in sheer darkness, without any food. The only water he got was what dripped down from the rubble he was buried under. Initially, he used a lighter to see where he was trapped, but when it became clear that there was no way out, he decided not to waste the oxygen and did not use the lighter again.
As the days passed, he focused on the possibility of getting out and thought about all the things he would do once he was rescued. By the last day, his mind had gone blank, but then, he heard sounds above him, and soon, he was out of the rubble and saved. He was found to be severely dehydrated and had lost eleven pounds. His rescue gave more hope to the rescuers as well, who had started to believe that they wouldn’t find another survivor. But soon, they found Yoo Ji-hwan. She was 19 when she started working as a store clerk in the Sampoong Department Store, and was buried under the rubble for 12 days in a 4 1/2 feet long and 19 inches wide space. She was sustained by rainwater, and when she was rescued, she was found to be relatively well, albeit dehydrated and sustaining some minor injuries on her leg.
Another 19-year-old store clerk was Park Seung-hyun, who was the last of the survivors to be pulled out, 17 days after the building collapsed. She, too, was miraculously minorly injured. She was shocked to discover that she had been under the wreckage for more than two weeks. In her mind, it had only been five days. It was believed that the darkness around her might have influenced her perception of time and might also have been one of the things that helped her stay alive. She and her father considered her incredibly lucky, especially as she revealed that she didn’t remember drinking any water during those 17 days. The doctors believed that either she consumed rainwater, like the other survivors, while she was semiconscious, or that her body adapted itself to slow down its functions to assure her survival.
The Survivors Built a Hopeful Future for Themselves
Before he was trapped under the wreckage of the Sampoong Department Store, Choi Myeong-seok had been contemplating a future in architectural engineering. He eventually got a degree in architecture and structural engineering and worked for GS Engineering and Construction for several years. His job focused on ensuring that the buildings were structurally safe and followed all the codes and guidelines to prevent disasters like the one he had been through himself. While he went on to have a fulfilling life, the road to recovery wasn’t so easy. He came out of the collapse relatively unscathed (except for the blurred night vision that persisted for a while), but the experience did take a toll on his mental health. Following the rescue, he experienced difficulty in adjusting back to his life before the disaster. He even volunteered to join the Marines. At the same time, he also knew that he had to live his life more fully, and that’s what he focused on.
In the same vein, the other survivors as well suffered from the effects of the trauma and worked through it to find the normalcy again that allowed them to return to their lives with the same vigour they had before the disaster. Yoo Ji-hwan revealed that, for a while, she had receded into herself and did not feel lucky to be alive. She and a couple of other survivors were also invited to several news channels and TV shows for interviews. However, talking about their experiences over and over again started to take its toll on them. Eventually, Yoo found her way back to her old cheerful self again. At one point, she’d joked that she wanted to date the person who pulled her out of the rubble. She did eventually get married, though not to the rescue worker, and has been living a happy and fulfilling life since. The other survivors have also focused on making the best of their lives, but they have also preferred to enjoy their privacy since then.
The survivors, as well as the families of the deceased, received compensation from the Sampoong group for their culpability in the matter. Initially, the compensation of about $361,000 each was sought, but with 3,293 cases against the group, the settlement reportedly amounted to approximately $300 million, with the payouts being finalised by 2003, and, reportedly, leading to the shutdown of the Sampoong Group. The money helped the survivors to start a new chapter in their lives. Meanwhile, the families of the victims used that money to start a scholarship fund, with Daesang group (which bought the site of the collapsed building) providing an additional $590,000, to support the education of the children who had lost their parents and guardians in the tragedy. Around 150 children benefited from the fund that, reportedly, provided the sum of around 1.4 million won annually to help the children pursue their education from middle school to university.
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