The Sampoong Department Store Collapse: Largest Mall Disaster in History

in 1995 greed corruption negligence and ignorance led to the largest peacetime disaster in korea's history [Music] 10 floors of clothes and cosmetics in the mid-1980s seoul and other major metropolitan areas of korea experienced incredible economic growth especially in construction and retail the 1988 summer olympics that were to be held in seoul korea would add to this major boom for korea's economy much like you hear in other cities that host the olympics seoul was pushed into aggressive construction deadlines adding to this that they could not hire outside foreign firms to assist in construction and design local media alleged that the local and regional construction firms were quickly overwhelmed in such a daunting task following those booming economic years of the 1980s the 90s continued this trend of massive economic growth which was especially the case in downtown seoul korea's heart and capital six lane highways high-rise office blocks plush department stores high fashion restaurants billboards neon the bustling city center soul was starting to look like something out of a blade runner construction and retail firms benefiting from this massive economic boom began to expand unchecked struggling to keep up with this economic explosion upmarket stores to try and cater to the ever progressive tastes buildings growing larger and larger to accommodate all the people pushing this economic transformation the four-story below-ground five-story above-ground nine-story total sampoong mall was the epitome of this new high-fashion upmarket mall style department store the wusung company an outside construction firm had began work on the sampong mall building the foundation building the first four floors below ground however the wusung company for reasons we'll get into in a bit had backed out of construction after these were complete the executives for sam poon then decided to hand construction over to local firms firms that they had more control over sam poon's in-house construction firm so to speak finished the above ground four stories and added a fifth floor which ended up being a complete revision from the ground up literally these four floors and the fifth floor were not built according to the structure's original plans the fifth floor not even being included in the original plans was added as a late edition the sampong department store mall would open in july of 1990 too much fanfare tens of thousands of shoppers daily were hosted at the sampong mall and in today's money approximately 1 million dollars a day in retail revenue unique at the time in both external facade as well as interior amenities the sampong mall was extremely popular it was a central hub in this area of seoul those unique amenities inside more importantly being the central atrium and the escalators leading from top to bottom these incredibly popular indoor aesthetics were hiding a massive amount of corner cutting they were hiding structural weaknesses that normal day-to-day visitors would have no idea even existed inside the structure in 1995 cracks and leaks began to show in the fifth floor leading to inspections on several occasions however no major actions were taken instead the fifth floor would eventually become unused and merchandise would be shuffled down to lower floors and the sampong mall executives and managers would go about keeping the mall open regardless of these fifth floor inconveniences in june of 1995 these cracks and leaks became even worse to the point where the vibration of the air conditioners could be felt throughout the entire structure leading to even more inconvenience such as no climate control during the summer water coming in by the bucket load through these cracks which led to more government inspections however these inspections were passed once again on june 29th of 1995 proper structural engineers were brought in to have a closer look at just what the heck was going on with this building's internal structure so on that same day those structural engineers were needless to say alarmed and if you've gotten an idea by now of how the sampoon company operated when those engineers warned the sampoon executives the executives disagreed these structural engineers attempted to impress upon them that it was crucial they evacuate the building and begin a more thorough evaluation as to how these problems can be resolved sampoon executives disagreed with this and did not take any further action on that same day the 29th of june 1995 just prior to 6pm the sampong mullen department store collapsed the search and rescue efforts of this tragic and unimaginable disaster went on for days and then weeks the final survivor park seong hyun being pulled out after 17 days reports conflict at the exact number but at this point roughly 500 people had been found dead so you might be asking yourself how the hell could something like this happen well i'll preface it by saying on june 29th the day the execs were warned to evacuate the building they got out just fine before it collapsed remember those olympic games we brought up in the 1980s this created a culture of construction and retail corruption in order to keep up with this economic boom that ended up sweeping the nation it wasn't just seoul and their metropolitan area that were experiencing this unchecked growth it was the entire nation this sort of economic growth would normally be considered a good thing and it was in many ways except due to this growth regulations and building standards and engineering standards began to receive shortcuts in just about every way you could imagine in order to accommodate this growth this became systemic in korea's construction culture corruption handing it off to the who you knows to just get the job done as quickly as possible the sampong mall was only unique in scale in october of 94 a section of a bridge in seoul a major highway network bridge collapsed during morning rush hour 32 perished in april of 95 approximately 100 people perished during an explosion due to negligence at a subway construction site by the time the final survivor had been pulled from the rubble at the sampong department store collapse public outcry in korea had reached explosive levels and its citizens were not going to tolerate this out and out corruption and negligence any longer in this era of economic growth in korea sampoon was also the first to bring about a major investigation into an incident like this by the authorities the investigation would bring on board a major university in seoul korea and began straight away some of the investigations taking place even during the rescue efforts while the elevator shafts and other portions were still just barely standing taking photographs measurements installing sensors as quickly as possible some of the initial findings were that sampoon was constructed in what's called a flat slab type of framework where there are no steel crossbeams and the concrete itself bears the entire load of the structure one of the professors was quoted as saying the fitting of the floors and columns and all the concrete is absolutely crucial in the design and construction as they are the framework themselves it has to be erected exactly as designed it has to be perfect referring to the original plans without cross beams in a flat slab construction you cannot deviate from those original plans as those determine the load-bearing factors of the building and there are no other methods of load transmission on any of the floors to begin modifying these plans after you've started construction these initial findings explain why the building pancaked so hard when it collapsed like cards falling horizontally into a stack after this they found that substandard concrete had been used cold and pitted concrete was obvious to the trained eye however this was not the entire culprit as they were not able to determine how much of the substandard concrete had been used now that the building was nearly demolished they needed more hard evidence as to what the actual root causes were wusung had began construction of this foundation on a former landfill site this fell under much scrutiny due to it being on a landfill however just because something is built on a landfill does not mean that it's built in a substandard fashion they found that wusung had done their homework wusang had built a very solid foundation on bedrock and not simply loosely or cutting corners in order to build on this landfill site after this the investigators began digging into the original designs and plans of the building they were astounded to find that this building was originally planned to simply be an office complex this meant that it would not contain any central atrium cutouts it would not contain any escalator cutouts an office building of this design with flat slab construction would have no issues in load bearing sampoon wanted to deviate so much from these original plans that wusung grew uncomfortable with this and backed out entirely the center atrium cutouts the escalator cutouts removed a massive amount of load bearing the fifth floor addition was even more of an issue investigators found as it went from being a retail level to a restaurant level which meant even more load capacity was needed and at the time it was traditional for koreans to sit on the floor and dine which required heating beneath the floor an additional layer of concrete in order to make this heating possible the restaurant required freezers and coolers for the food and on and on the fifth floor was completely incompatible with what was already poor modifications to the original design adding to this even more windows were added along the walls of the structure reducing load capacity the building was in dire need of more support columns but in this flat slab construction they have to be in line with each other from the lower floors all the way to the top so that the load bearing takes place evenly when sampoong and their in-house construction firms decided to add more columns they did so without those columns being on top of the next column below this was an absolute cardinal sin of building construction as this transmitted the load between the columns directly to just the simple floor that each column was supporting this would cause load-bearing columns to punch through floors above and below ultimately causing the pancaking effect that investigators saw but the building stood for so many years in this state what was the straw that broke the camel's back the massive air-conditioning cooling blocks that were intended originally to be located on the ground the building plans the cooling blocks themselves all initially planned for these to be on the ground level and not supported by the structure when running these cooling blocks caused complaints from nearby neighbors sampoon then decided to mitigate these complaints by placing these cooling blocks on the roof of the structure a roof and structure that had already been pushed to its limit the position in which these cooling blocks were placed initially caused more complaints by the neighbors once turned on sampoong then decided to relocate these air conditioning cooling blocks again to a different spot on the roof and during this relocation decided against using a crane to lift them from one spot to the other and instead slid them on blocks transferring their weight all across the roof across these portions of the structure that had been strained so heavily already which is what began causing the cracking the leaking and the spider webs that people could see spanning the walls of the fifth floor the lead professor from the university performing these investigations stated this weakened the entirety of the roof and cracks were clearly visible afterward we concluded that a lot of this structural damage was caused when they moved the cooling blocks the investigators even found more secondary issues like additional cost cuttings in the support beams of lower floors the columns did not meet the width they were supposed to be at the concrete columns were supposed to have for example 16 iron bars and instead this was cut back to eight every subsequent floor above the loads were under calculated or completely miscalculated at this point in addition to structure being removed to punch holes for the atrium for the escalators sampoon was found to have removed columns that got in the way of more retail space this is why columns were placed sporadically and not maintained where they needed to be the entire structure was just waiting to come down all those years and the cooling blocks being placed on top and relocated was the straw that broke the camel's back and to top this hall off both structural engineers that performed that final inspection before the building collapsed has stated before they had warned the sampling executives that the building was at risk of collapse and to evacuate the structure however sampoong executives noted that days foot traffic and revenue was particularly high and they did not want to risk losing it and thus they only evacuated themselves all of these findings inflamed the outrage of citizens and families of people that had suffered from this loss this led to a nationwide revisit of how these high-rise structures were regulated an investigation soon after concluded that two percent of high-rise structures across korea met construction regulations and standards 84 were in need of repair work and 14 were at risk of complete failure and needed to be rebuilt public pressure from the families of victims lost to this tragedy of those outraged by this entire situation in korea finally led to charges being brought and a trial held for the sampong executives and those involved in december of 95. on the 27th of december the sampoong chairman june lee sentenced to 10 years of jail time for criminal negligence his son han sang lee sentenced to seven years for corruption and homicide due to negligence this case opened the door that was concealing even more corruption however 12 other local officials that had been taking bribes in order for these types of structures to quote unquote past inspections were also found guilty 330 million was awarded in total to the families of the victims of this disaster the lee family the execs of sampoon also liquidating their entire family's wealth in order to contribute to this payment to the families inadequate inspections false certifications corner cutting corruption culture led to the largest peacetime disaster in korean history the sampoon disaster site remained vacant until roughly the year 2000 families of victims pushed for a memorial to be built along the lines of a park or something memorializing the victims however this was turned down by the local governments and the site is now the home to acrovista apartment complexes a memorial sculpture can be found at yong-ye citizens forest in seoul [Music] hey thanks for watching everyone so i've decided to re-upload this uh that's why you might be saying this and wondering well didn't you already put this on your channel sam well yeah i did but i've had an overwhelming amount of responses telling me this is a good video but it needed to be shorter i needed to be more to the point so i've put this video up in response to those requests and uh i hope this really gets the message across for a pivotal point in korea's history thanks for watching hope to catch you in the next one take care you

Channel: Brick Immortar

Views: 1,796,093

Keywords: mall collapse, sampoong department store, korean mall, tragedy of the sampoong mall, acrovista, mall disaster, sampoong mall collapse, structural failure, building collapse, sampoong department store collapse, the sampoong collapse, korea building collapse, korea building disaster, structural collapse, why did the sampoong department store collapse, how did the sampoong collapse happen, heres why the sampoong department store collapsed, korea mall, korea mall collapse

Id: 259gYwTWUyU

Length: 14min 46sec (886 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 02 2021