Here am I. Send me!: A Fire in the Subway

After work on Tuesday and Thursday, I walk about 10 minutes to a McDonald's to eat dinner before my Korean class. I have about an hour and a half from work until my class starts, so I get dinner and study. One day in July, I was preparing to leave McDonald's and noticed many people standing at the window looking outside. Obviously something was happening because it was uncharacteristic behavior. So I went to check it out. What I saw was a LOT of fire trucks and ambulances right outside the City Hall subway station. A Korean gentleman came up and told me that two trains had crashed into each other. Well I took some pictures and ventured towards my Korean class but obviously could not cross under the road through the station but instead had to walk down to the crosswalk. But it gave me a good view.

There were so many fire trucks and ambulances. At least 10 fire trucks I think and around 15-20 ambulances. I saw firefighters at the entrances and watched as the police arrived and began blocking the entrances to the subways so that people would not go down. Thankfully what I didn't see was a lot of injured people being taken off by ambulance.

I smelled some smoke but smelled even more when I walked through the station just over 2 hours later when my Korean class finished. I found out later it wasn't a crash. The air conditioner on one of the trains had caught fire and had fallen into one of the train cars. No one was seriously injured and it was all taken care of before I finished my Korean class a few hours later. That day I was thankful I was't trying to travel by subway during that time. Not many people made it to class because of it and some people it took them over 30 minutes to travel just a few stops that usually takes less than 10.

If you look carefully here, you can see the firefighters at one of the entrances to the station. The person is the bright yellow rain jacket was a police officer directing traffic.

A slightly better view of the firefighters with lots of people coming up out of the subway.

And with the subway temporary closed this is what the bus stop looked like. Typically there is 5-8 people waiting here. At that point int time probably at least 50 people were standing waiting on buses that were also delayed because of the traffic jams caused by the emergency vehicles.