The Itaewon crowd crush
A Halloween crowd in a Seoul alleyway kills 159 people with no fire, no attack and no collapse.
- When
- Known to
- ± 12 hours
- Era
- Contemporary, Holocene
- Where
- Seoul, South Korea · 37.5345° N, 126.9946° E
On the evening of 29 October 2022 a narrow sloping alley in the Itaewon district filled beyond capacity and the crowd compressed until people could not breathe. Most of the 159 dead were in their twenties. Repeated emergency calls warning of the density went unheeded for hours, and the disaster became a case study in crowd-flow failure and in the absence of any responsible authority for public space.