Safety ignorance still prevails

Children wearing police uniforms hold a campaign to ensure traffic safety in cooperation with police in Daejeon, Friday. / Yonhap

By Yoon Sung-won, Park Jin-hai

More than five weeks have passed since the ill-fated ferry Sewol sank, leaving approximately 300 passengers dead or missing.

The more the investigation goes on, the more it reveals that the accident was caused more by human error. The crew and the shipping company were irresponsible, and the Coast Guard was incompetent and not ready to cope with such an emergency.

All those reasons made this incident a man-made disaster, due mainly to people's ignorance about safety.

In fact, this is not the first time that pervasive safety ignorance has been brought up in Korea.

Similar mistakes were made when the Seohae Ferry sank off the western coast in 1993, killing almost 300 passengers, when the Seongsu Bridge over the Han River collapsed in 1994 and when the Sampoong Department Store collapsed in 1995, and so on.

More recently, even when our society was still in grief over the Sewol disaster, two Seoul subway trains crashed due to a malfunction of a signal system.

And on Monday, six people were killed and 41 injured in a fire at a bus terminal in Goyang, Ilsan, northwest of Seoul.

Every time there has been a disaster, no matter how big or grave it has been, people and the media suggest the whole of society is not only ignorant of safety issues but indifferent to them.

Though it is important to thoroughly re-evaluate and revamp the nation's counter-emergency systems, many experts argue that people can prevent disasters or at least minimize their impact if people are aware of how to react in emergency situations.

Children demonstrate how to use fire extinguishers during a safety training session organized by a fire station in Guro, southwestern Seoul, Monday.
/ Yonhap

Broken safety education

After the Sewol disaster, the local news media reported that there have been drills at elementary, middle and high schools around the country to help teachers and students prepare for emergency situations, for example by learning how to use fire extinguishers.

In these drills, participants showed their enthusiasm to learn, as well as ignorance of the basics of how to react in emergencies, which they should have learned, the media reported.

In a high school which held a drill two weeks ago, only three out of over 900 students had the opportunity to test a fire extinguisher. Something similar happened with teachers as well. Among the more than 20 teachers who wanted to learn how to use them, only three had the chance _ all because the school did not set aside enough money to buy fire extinguishers for the drill.

Even worse is that the instructor was a social science teacher who does not have any professional knowledge about safety and emergency situations.

"Without an organized drill system, led by an instructor with professional knowledge, I don't believe this will be a realistic and effective one," a teacher at the school said.

According to data released on March 14 by the National Assembly and the Ministry of Education, only 36.4 percent of elementary, middle and high schools around the country provide safety education, fully abiding by the related laws and regulations.

"I believe the administration should build a systematic safety manual and hire more experts in various fields of safety, such as firefighting and transportation as well as water safety, to visit schools to provide training to improve efficiency," another teacher at an elementary school in Seoul said.

Insensitivity to children's safety

Chun Su-jin, a mother of a 4-year-old son in Incheon, west of Seoul, says that his childcare facility's level of sensitivity about safety is all too worrisome. "Once I saw the bus starting off for the next stop before my son got seated. And I found a whole lot of other safety related issues," she said.

The daycare center where her son previously attended had a construction site nearby and had dump-trucks either parked or running all the time.

"I witnessed a lot of times the bus driver park the vehicle in between mammoth dump trucks, and letting the kids pile out. I took the issue up with the head of the daycare center, but all I heard was that there was no other option since those trucks are on the road around the clock. So I quit sending my son there."

According to a 2012 study by the Korea Customer Agency, 77.1 percent of buses at 48 daycare centers were found running without the children wearing seat belts, while 17.6 percent were unregistered as school buses.

Jung Hee-seong, 36, a father of two preschoolers in Guro-gu, Seoul, says that all the roads in the vicinity of daycare centers should also be designated as school zones.

However, that is only mandatory for schools or daycare centers with more than 100 children, according to the current Road Traffic Act. Also, it is up to local authorities to set aside funds to build and manage school zones.

The National Police Agency's report says that among the 18,706 facilities that requested school zone designations, only 19 percent could not get that support in 2012.

Hwang Jun-seung, an official at the state-run traffic safety agency KoRoad, says that school zones are not a cure-all either. "In many cases, the traffic surveillance cameras mounted there have the same speed limit as other roads. Even after the area is designated as a school zone, in reality there is no proper enforcement or campaign," he said.

The Seoul city government revealed that there are more than 480 traffic offenses reported within school zones each day on average. Last year, there were 81 reported car accidents in school zones.

Safety at home

Then there are incidents like the one that happened recently to Kim Jung-ju, 36. Her 2-year-old son swallowed a piece of candy and was choking.

"I saw him having a difficulty breathing and I panicked. Then in no time, without knowing it, I was holding him upside down and hitting his back hard," she said.

Fortunately the hard candy clogging his throat came out and he started breathing again.

As in Kim's case, child safety accidents are increasing year by year they mostly happen at home.

According to data collected over the last three years by the Korean Customer Agency, 67,951, or 37.4 percent, of the 181,627 accident cases involved children under age 14. And, among them, 65.6 percent actually happened at home. By accident types, choking was first with 6,921 cases or 10.2 percent, followed by burns with 2,174.

Kim said that after the accident, she looked for first-aid information.

"I learned about the simple but life-saving Heimlich maneuver. Previously, I had heard about it, but I didn't know how to perform it properly. Now I know that although it is life-saving, it should not be applied to unconscious people or babies under 12 months of age," she said.

The Red Cross recommends a "five-and-five" approach, where the performer gives five back blows between their shoulder blades with the heal of hand and, if that doesn't work, it recommends performing Heimlich thrusts.

The Heimlich maneuver, named after an American thoracic surgeon, applies sudden pressure with an inward and upward thrust of the fist to the upper abdomen to force the obstruction from the windpipe.