Tag: safety

It will be interesting to see how this safety law is enforced because you can have good safety practices and sometime things just happen:

An employee makes dough at a bakery in Seoul on Friday, one day before expanded implementation of the Serious Accidents Punishment Act, a workplace safety law aimed at penalizing employers for serious industrial accidents, takes effect as scheduled. (Yonhap)

Expanded application of the workplace safety law is expected to have a substantial impact on the South Korean business community, as it holds employers with more than five workers legally responsible for deadly accidents. Concerns are growing as this change, which officially took effect Saturday, will cover 837,000 workplaces, including small neighborhood restaurants, bakeries, pubs, cafes and mom-and-pop stores.

Regardless of the size of the businesses and their financial capabilities, under the law, employers of small and large companies face the same criminal charges if a deadly accident happens during their operations.

“I am paying more attention to safety as the workplace safety law is expanded. But I am very concerned that if an accident occurs, the business will be forced to close,” said a business owner surnamed Kim, who has been running a timber company in North Chungcheong Province for 30 years. His company has 20 employees.

The food service industry argues that safety support should be provided before punishment is pursued.

“Many restaurant business owners are anxious because they think guidelines on the scope of responsibility are unclear. They are also worried since even with good safety training, accidents can always occur due to employee negligence. Some business owners are expected to reduce the number of employees they have hired for a long time to avoid the application of the law,” an official from the Korea Food Service Industry Association said.

Korea Herald

You can read more at the link.

This is a horrible tragedy over in Gwangju:

A building collapsed during demolition in the southwestern city of Gwangju on Wednesday, leaving at least nine people dead and eight others seriously injured, fire officials said.

They received a report at 4:22 p.m. that the 5-story building had collapsed and fell onto a bus that was stopped at a station near the construction site. 

As of 8:40 p.m., nine people were confirmed dead and eight others were seriously injured and taken to nearby hospitals. All of them are bus passengers.

Yonhap

You can read more at the link.

Anyone surprised that these workers were killed because they did not have proper safety equipment?:

Three migrant workers were found dead, and another one is in a coma, following an accident inside an underground tank at a fishery products processing factory in the eastern county of Yeongdeok on Tuesday, local fire authorities said. 

The four — three Thais and one Vietnamese — were found at the bottom of the tank at 2:30 p.m., according to the North Gyeongsang Province Fire Service Headquarters.

The workers, whose names have yet to be made public, are believed to have suffocated while doing maintenance work inside the tank at the factory in Chuksan Port in Yeongdeok, some 250 kilometers southeast of Seoul.

The 42-year-old and 28-year-old Thai workers and the 53-year-old Vietnamese person died in the accident, and the other victim, a 34-year-old Thai, is currently in a coma, the fire headquarters said. 

The tank stores byproducts from the processing of fish and shellfish, it added.

The rescue authorities said the workers appeared to have entered the tank without safety equipments even though there was a high risk of inhaling toxic gas from decomposed fishery products.

Yonhap

Even if this is the cause of the fire, I have to wonder what the safety measures are around these fuel tanks if a “sky lantern” can blow one of these oil tanks up:

The police have arrested a Sri Lankan national in its probe of a recent explosion at a local oil storage facility, police officials said Monday.

The arrest came one day after an explosion at the oil storage facility in Goyang, just north of Seoul, consumed a large storage tank with 2.66 million liters of gasoline, enough to fill 250 tank trucks.

The police said the 27-year-old Sri Lankan is believed to have accidentally caused the fire by releasing a sky lantern in the vicinity of the oil storage facility.

The police believe the sky lantern may have started the fire when it fell on the lawn of the oil storage facility, causing flames that later spread into the ventilation system of the oil tank, causing the explosion.

The 27-year-old is said to be a construction worker currently working at a site near the facility.  [Korea Times]

It will be interesting to get feedback in a few months if the weekend safety brief has actually been ended:

Don’t shoot anyone on post, don’t sleep with your squad mate’s spouse, don’t snort unknown substances and don’t live in your car while collecting rent money from the Army.

The warnings given to soldiers at weekend and holiday safety briefings in recent decades are the stuff of Army lore. As those mandatory briefings become optional or end entirely – the Army has eliminated several administrative requirements recently in a streamlining measure – a few soldiers shared their memories of unusual briefings with Stars and Stripes.

Situational briefings remain at a commander’s discretion and soldiers said they can be useful when there’s a critical issue at hand or when a topic is discussed with depth and insight.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link.

https://twitter.com/SouthKoreaDaily/status/588418510964953088

How do you forget to do something as basic as hooking up a harness to somebody going on a zip line?  This is like telling someone to jump out of a plane without giving them a parachute:

A 12-year-old boy died in a 24-meter (78-foot) fall from the starting point of a zip line, an adventure sport in which people slide down a cable using a pulley, in Boeun County, North Chungcheong, on Saturday, raising concerns about Korea’s lack of safety standards for leisure activities.

The police think a worker at the zip line didn’t properly attach the victim’s harness to the pulley. The worker was a 23-year-old university student on a leave of absence. The boy, who lived in Cheongju, an adjacent city, was on a group outing.

“We believe the employee did not do his job, which is to attach the pulley to the rider’s harness before the jump,” said a police officer. “The employee stated in the investigation that he thought he connected the wire to the boy before he departed.”

The operator of the park immediately suspended operations and took the boy to a nearby hospital, but the victim died of excessive bleeding later that day. The police are planning to charge the employee for involuntary manslaughter due to professional negligence, while they investigate other kinds of negligence in the operation and maintenance of the park.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link, but condolences to the family of the boy.

Who creates a building to barbeque in with a straw roof, one exit, and no fire extinguisher?  Well a guy in Damyang did with deadly results:

Four university students were killed and six others sustained injuries in a fire at a guest house in Damyang, South Jeolla Province, Saturday.

The fire erupted in a hut in the guest house compound, where some guests were having a barbeque.

A survivor said the fire began after one of the guests attempted to extinguish a charcoal fire by pouring water onto it, which caused sparks to reach the flammable ceiling.

Police said the hut was built with flammable materials ― dried grass for the roof, a wooden floor and plastic walls.

Twenty-six guests were inside the hut grilling meat at the time of the incident. All were students from Dongshin University in Naju, South Jeolla Province.

Another survivor said there wasn’t a fire extinguisher in the hut, which is used by guests for barbeques.

“I had to bring one from elsewhere, but even that stopped working after 30 seconds,” he was quoted as saying by a police officer.

Police suspect poor safety inspections are to blame for the fire which started at 9:45 p.m. and lasted 50 minutes.  [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link, but this is just another example of poor safety awareness in Korea. Hopefully the increased media attention on this subject in Korea will improve safety awareness to reduce incidents like this from happening.

Apparently a number of on-post housing for US servicemembers in Korea are not up to standard:

An Inspector General’s report has cited hundreds of potentially dangerous housing code violations, ranging from missing sprinkler systems to exposed copper wiring, in U.S. military housing in South Korea, although only 11 were considered serious.

Most of the violations were related to inadequate upkeep of housing facilities, according to the Oct. 28 report, which found that “housing visits and inspections were not being conducted in accordance with established instructions and procedures.”

Twelve percent of the occupied buildings at 13 U.S. Forces Korea military installations — ranging from family housing to barracks and dormitories for unaccompanied servicemembers — were reviewed during the IG’s March 10 to April 24 inspections. The checks found 646 deficiencies in 277 units, mechanical rooms and common areas.

The 11 “critical” deficiencies included an out-of-service fire alarm system at U.S. Army Garrison Yongsan, which left the occupants of one building with no means of fire detection. Furnaces in two other buildings at the Seoul base were leaking heating oil onto an electric blower motor, posing a fire hazard.  [Stars & Stripes]

You can read more at the link, but I have lived in quonset huts and crackhouses in Korea before so what servicemembers have to day is much better than just a decade ago.  With that said the real concern I have is how come the fire departments are not doing regular inspections of these facilities to ensure they are safe?  If they are then why did they not catch these issues beforehand?  Why did it take an IG inspection to find these deficiencies?

Koreans are trying to come to terms with the latest public safety disaster:

“Are we living in the Republic of Disasters?

This Internet post captures the fear, anger and frustration felt by a nation that was shocked by a fatal accident during an outdoor concert, when it is still recuperating from the Sewol tragedy.

A ventilation grating collapsed and 27 people standing on it fell 20 meters into an underground parking lot in the middle of a pop concert in Pangyo, south of Seoul, Friday evening.

Sixteen people were killed and 11 others were seriously injured.

“All we have heard since the Sewol ferry sinking is about how to improve safety,” said Lee, a 27-year-old man, who refused to reveal his full name.

“Every time, it’s same. The same headlines, the same government reaction and what not. The newspapers blame lax safety measures as the cause of yet another disaster and the saddest of all is that it all could have been prevented,” Lee said.

“What’s next?” Lee asked himself, and answered: “Some high-ranking government official bows in front of the cameras. Someone resigns, and it seems to quiet down. And another accident happens. It’s so cyclical that mentioning the problem seems boring.”

A 30-year-old office worker who identified herself as Kim suggested that a few security guards on site could have prevented the accident.

“The victims were trying to get a better view of the performers on stage. And I guess those people probably didn’t think too much about whether the grate was strong enough to support them or not. They were just being enthusiastic concert-goers, right?” she said.

“Maybe if someone had warned them, they wouldn’t have risked their lives,” she said. (Korea Times)

You can read more at the link, but like one netizen said in the article would the crowd have listened if there was security there?