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Thirty-five people were injured in a stampede Sunday morning at Lotte World in Seoul, when 120,000 gathered at the amusement park. It was the first day of an intended six days of free admissions, meant as a gesture of apology for a March 6 accident in which a man was killed falling off the rollercoaster at the park. People are said to have massed around Jamsil Subway Station near the amusement park since dawn. The day¡¯s quota of 35,000 visitors was filled only 40 minutes after the gates opened at 9 a.m. The situation was so precarious that it is a wonder nothing more serious happened.
The idea of granting free admission to all comers in the wake of a safety accident is beyond comprehension. Once an accident like that has happened, the first thing to do is study how to prevent another, including a check of whether there were any flaws in the facilities and whether staff were given proper safety training. Instead, Lotte World threw open the gates, presumably in a bid to attract publicity after a decline in business.
If it had to let people in for free, it should have chosen a safer method, for instance giving away advance tickets by way of an online draw or some other means. Only 35,000 of the 120,000 people who wanted to get into the amusement park could be admitted. The remaining 85,000 presumably suffered the frustration of long queues and went home angry. Inside Lotte World, there are 37 rides and other facilities, meaning each would have drawn a queue of at nearly 1,000 people on average. A lot of them reportedly had to halt operations several times because of overheating. How amusing.
That the park should have failed to estimate how many people would be drawn to the free rides is absurd. It was the second day of a two-day weekend because most schools took Saturday off. The police had written to the amusement park calling for particular care to prevent accidents. But even assuming that the park thought it must attract the maximum possible number and completely forgot to think about the risks, what followed was worse. ¡°The accident happened because visitors failed to properly follow the guidelines of our safety workers,¡± a senior staffer said afterwards. It beggars belief.
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