A fire had started on the 8th floor of the academy, this photo taken by a friend with his phone. Just visible on the left hand side of the building is the fire escape, only installed in July last year and running no further than the 5th floor.
I'm also tempted to take some of the blame. That morning my schedule had been changed, leaving me without a free period and nullifying my traditional easing into the week. Usually I like to start Monday slowly and then grind to a complete halt by Tuesday, making the observation during a break that "I'd kill for a spare". As things turned out, I did get the afternoon off but luckily no one was seriously injured.
What scares and angers me the most was how easily the lack of safety measures in the building and organisational planning could have resulted in someone (probably a child) dying. Fire drills I've been part of in school and work environments were always either a pleasant break from routine or pain in the keister, dependant on the weather and what I was doing at the time. I'll definitely be taking them more seriously in the future.
My class and I had it pretty easy. I was teaching on the 9th floor when I smelt smoke. Looking out the window I saw smoke coming up from below but confusingly there was a very faint sound of an alarm which sounded far away, like it was coming from the next building. I asked the children to pack-up, the lack of any kind of alarm or announcement, making me a little uncertain about how far to act. When I opened the classroom door the corridor outside was already filling with smoke, the nearby stairwell was completely filled. It was amazing how quick it had happened.
Now telling the children to leave their belongings, we left the classroom where a man in the corridor motioned for us to go down the stairwell. Sucking in lung fulls of smoke going down the stairs was an educational reminder of how badly human physiology and carbon monoxide mix. Leading the children, I could see very little for the first couple of floors, I had to trust that none of my students had gone back for a bag, phone or nap time. It was a huge relief on the ground to see them all there, upset but okay.
The disorganisation and luck continued outside. Children were left standing in the road when cars were coming through. Most disturbingly people were milling around close to the building as windows above began to blow-out from the heat and be broken by those still on the 8th floor. Fortunately due to problems with heating(!), most of the classes from the 8th floor had been relocated up to the 9th, however there were still two classes and some teachers on the 8th when the fire began.
The fire started on the other side of the floor from where those guys were, making them probably the last to be aware of it. Frighteningly for them, when they gathered in the teacher's office and tried the fire escape door they found building management, in their dispirit wisdom, had bolted it shut. It took them a lot of effort with a coat stand to break the double glazed glass, then passing the students out over the broken glass to move down the fire escape. Of course they could only go as far as the 5th floor where they had to go into the building again to get out.
Had the fire escape not been put in, a mere 6 months before, things would have been very hairy for these guys. They would have needed to get past the fire damaged monitors on the left in the picture below to get down the stairwell behind them.
On the ground there were no records bought down of who was in the building when the fire broke out. Two classes were unaccounted for. I was dreading the thought that people had been caught inside, hoping that the firemen wouldn't come down with bodies. Eventually word begun circulating that the two missing classes had come down, but still no-one could find them for the next 90 minutes.
Telling Lindsay's mother that her daughter had come down safely wasn't very reassuring for her when no one knew where she was. The teacher of that class had evacuated to another branch of the school a couple of streets over but for whatever moronic reason, did not check back for almost two hours. For some unfathomable reason the teacher had an oddly smug look when she finally paraded back with her students, seemingly oblivious to the distress that had been inflicted on those worried about them.
Even when parents had begun arriving to pick-up their children, there was never any roll of names taken or checked against any sort of attendance list. When the fire had started there was no announcement of a fire, no fire sprinklers, no fire wardens, no effective audible bell inside the building - but most importantly, no causalities. Of the 8th floor, every room apart from 3 were destroyed. So now, after impressively minor disruptions, we've temporarily relocated (to a building with fire alarms, two stair wells and a sprinkler system) while they repair the other building.
Apparently (effective communication with employees by Korean employers is about as common as le unicorn) the fire started due to someone leaving a small space heater unattended in a room, with the books and other paper materials found in a school taking care of the rest. On the bright side this has at least laid to rest early theories, formulated over a couple of cold brews, that the cause was a build up of flatulence and an errant spark of wit.
