Get all your news in one place.
100's of premium titles.
One app.
Start reading
The Guardian - US
The Guardian - US
Entertainment
David Smith in Washington

‘Almost impossible to think about’: the Seoul crowd disaster one year on

promo art for Crush
‘This wasn’t a concert or mosh pit or soccer game where barriers are erected for a day and maybe they’re in the wrong position’ … Crush. Photograph: Courtesy of Paramount+

No bomb went off. No bullets were fired. No building fell down, no car veered out of control and no plane fell out of the sky. Yet still 159 mostly young people perished that night, crushed to death by nothing more than their own volume and a banal failure of planning.

“This wasn’t a concert or mosh pit or soccer game where barriers are erected for a day and maybe they’re in the wrong position,” explains Stu Schreiberg, executive producer of Crush, a two-part documentary about a deadly crowd disaster in Seoul, South Korea, last year. “This is a public street with lots of history of traffic patterns and where the choke points are and so it is almost impossible to think about how 159 died.”

Sign up to read this article
Read news from 100's of titles, curated specifically for you.
Already a member? Sign in here
Related Stories
Top stories on inkl right now
One subscription that gives you access to news from hundreds of sites
Already a member? Sign in here
Our Picks
Fourteen days free
Download the app
One app. One membership.
100+ trusted global sources.