hankyoreh

Family members mourn in front of a makeshift altar set up for the victims of a fire that broke out in a distribution center that was under construction in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, on Apr. 30. (Yonhap News)

Twenty-nine memorial tablets were placed on the forlorn altar. Among the images in the funeral portraits were a middle-aged man, his dark face seemingly seared by a lifetime spent on construction sites, and a baby-faced young buck who looked as though he was barely 20 years old.

These were the faces of the identified victims among the 38 workers killed at a construction site where a distribution center was being built in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province. Most of those who lost their lives had been employees of small-scale electrical, painting, facility, and waterproofing subcontractors, as well as day laborers and migrant workers who represented marginalized presences even within those worksites. Nine of the workers killed have yet to even be identified.

According to accounts from the National Fire Agency and police on Apr. 30, the 29 victims who had been identified as of 4 pm that day represented a wide range of age groups from those in their 20s to those in their 60s. Eight workers were in their 40s, 50s, or 60s -- indicating that most of the workers were household heads responsible for their family’s livelihood. Three of the workers were in their 20s, having only just begun their professional life; two of them were in their 30s, the prime of their working life. According to the family members and colleagues of the victims who were gathered around the joint memorial at the indoor gymnasium of the Seohee Youth Culture Center in Icheon’s Changjeon neighborhood that day, an especially large number of victims were day laborers who had lost positions in fixed employment.

“The factory my brother worked at closed down in February after two people were diagnosed with the coronavirus,” the brother of a 49-year-old victim surnamed Kim explained to the Hankyoreh that day. “He needed a job, and he ended up doing day labor.”

Kim was a head of household with three children, the youngest of whom had just started university. It was all the more painful that he had suffered his fate at a job he had hurried to find to provide for his family. Remembering him as “a tremendously diligent person who always shared everything with others,” his grief-stricken brother added, “The people who died here were all people without money.”

Firefighters, police, and investigators from the National Forensic Service at the site of a fire that broke out at a construction site in Icheon, Gyeonggi Province, on Apr. 30. (Yonhap News)

In some of the cases, family members lost their lives together -- a situation believed to be the result of relatives following each other into positions as more and more people have lost their already unstable employment due to the virus. A 44-year-old surnamed Gang, who was among the victims’ family members gathered at Moga Indoor Gymnasium, lost both a younger brother and a brother-in-law. The oldest of three siblings, Gang had received word that his younger sister’s husband, 35, had lost his life; his brother, the youngest of the three at 31, has yet to be identified. The younger brother had gone to the worksite to join the brother-in-law, who had long been involved in urethane application work. Choking back tears, Gang recalled, “My brother had been working there for less than two weeks after working at an electronics store in Busan before.

“I interacted with my two siblings a lot. We were very close.”

In another case, a 61-year-old father and his 34-year-old son were both victimized in the tragedy. The son was hospitalized with severe injuries after jumping to the ground from the second floor, where he had been doing equipment work; the father’s remains have yet to be identified. The family member of another victim there said, “I lost two members of the family in this accident, including a cousin.”

Three of the victims were migrant workers, two from Kazakhstan and one from China. The family members of the Chinese victims explained that a few siblings had come to South Korea together from Qingdao to work.

“We lost the youngest of the five siblings in this accident. He’d been planning to get married this May, but it ended up being put off because of the coronavirus,” one of them tearfully explained.

By Chai Yoon-tae and Jeon Gwang-joon, staff reporters

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