Tag: subway

Considering some of the drunken and mentally unstable incidents I have seen happen on the Seoul subways this is a job I have a lot of respect for the people working it:

Wearing stab-proof vests over their uniform shirt, they patrol underground during duty hours. Their mission is to help secure safety of people and keep peace.

Policemen? No, they are Subway Guards helping prevent crimes and incidents and establish order at more than 300 subway stations in Seoul.  (……)

Although guards do not have the power to arrest, unlike police officers, most of them are well-trained professionals, each mastering several martial arts.

“I majored in security science. I am a third-degree black belt in Taekwondo and fourth in Hapkido. Many guards here have similar backgrounds,” Han Ji-yong, Lee’s partner, said.

The number of guards for Seoul Metro has increased from 40 in 2011 to 133 this year. According to Seoul Metro’s data, the guards were involved in 53,448 cases of violations in 2015, up 20 percent from three years earlier. The daytime shift workers take on the job from early morning — 7 a.m. to 4 p.m. — and from then come nighttime shifters to work until the last train arrives at 1 a.m. Ten guards work each shift per line.

The work becomes tough when they have to face violent drunken passengers. “They are usually typical patriarchal men in their 50s and 60s,” Lee said.   [Korea Herald]

You can read more at the link.

A family member of a victim of the Daegu subway fire in 2003 weeps at a memorial held on Feb. 18, 2016. A man with a history of mental illness set a subway car on fire in the morning of Feb. 18, 2003. The blaze quickly spread to a train on the opposite track, killing 192 people and injuring 148 others. (Yonhap)

Commuter who walked past actress at Waterloo station cleared of 'bizarre' sex assault claim https://t.co/AOr8nRVv8Y

— The Telegraph (@Telegraph) February 7, 2016

It makes you wonder if the additional safety risk caused by the platform screen doors is worth the suicide prevention rationale for installing them in the first place?:

An elderly woman died Wednesday after her purse was caught between a subway train and a platform screen door at Seoul Station, and she was dragged until she fell onto the tracks.

According to police, the woman, surnamed Seol, 81, got stuck while exiting the train at 9:04 a.m. She was pulled for about seven meters between the glass and the train and before falling on the tracks.

Witnesses said the accident happened because her purse was caught in the closing subway doors and she tried to pull it out.

The subway doors and the platform screen doors closed at the same time and the woman was caught between them, but the train departed without the engine driver noticing this.

“When the rescue team arrived, she was already dead with a serious head injury,” a police officer said. [Korea Times]

You can read more at the link.

Ultimately the authorities were able to catch the crazy man threatening passengers with a knife, but I am not sure what authorities in Seoul can do to prevent crazy people from doing crazy things:

Authorities on Tuesday apprehended a middle-aged man who was alleged to have brandished a 10-inch knife and threatened passengers onboard a subway train in Seoul during morning rush hour.

The suspect, determined later to be a 51-year-old homeless man, was caught more than an hour after the episode, in which he brandished a knife onboard a train on subway line No. 1 around 8:20 a.m., before exiting at Jonggak Station.

No injuries were reported, though the incident highlighted a barrage of loopholes present in subway security systems in the capital, with a population density almost twice that of New York City and where more than 7 million people on average use the trains daily.

Last year, police recorded 3,040 crimes at local subway stations, up 58 percent from the 1,922 cases in 2013.

The most apparent oversight, however, is the lack of security resources and personnel.  [Joong Ang Ilbo]

You can read more at the link.

Passengers sit with their feet aligned with heart-shaped stickers on the floor of a subway car on Seoul’s Line No. 3 on Dec. 24, 2015. Seoul Metro, the operator of the subway system, has introduced the stickers in a bid to rid its passengers of the habit of spreading or crossing their legs beyond the confines of their hips and taking up too much space. (Yonhap)

The subway doors were once considered a good idea to reduce the deaths of people falling in front of oncoming trains, but now have become a safety liability after a subway workers was killed by the doors last month:

The Seoul Metropolitan Government plans to replace platform doors at subways with retractable doors.

The city government said Monday that it will replace doors at three subway stations by the end of the year.

The doors have been criticized for making evacuations during emergencies difficult as some are installed between billboards that cannot be moved.

All platform doors at stations on Line 9 can be opened, but 25 percent of the doors on Lines 1 through 8 are stationary.

Seoul plans to replace all platform doors down the road, but is in consultations with the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport about receiving government grants as the replacement is expected to cost over 50 billion won.  [KBS World Radio]

Anyone traveling to and from Incheon on the Line 1 subway may have noticed that it was closed.  The line was closed due to this crane collapse captured in the video below:

Health officials spray disinfectant solution in a bus in Seoul’s Seongdong Ward on June 15, 2015, as a precaution against the spread of Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS). South Korea reported one more death from MERS on the day, along with five new cases that brought the total number of people diagnosed with the disease here to 150. The latest fatality raised the number of MERS-related deaths in South Korea to 16. (Yonhap)

A train with the word “BLiND” graffitied on it at a subway station in the southeastern city of Daegu is shown in this photo provided on May 26, 2015, by the Daegu Suseong Police. The police said that the graffiti, which was discovered on May 10, was the work of two male foreigners who broke into the train station through an external vent. (Yonhap)