Chapter 35. Apartment Collapse (3)
“Hello.”
Harok approached the father and son with a friendly greeting.
“Who are you?”
“I’m Baek Harok from Daehan Daily.”
Harok pulled a business card from his back pocket and handed it over.
He still hadn’t received new cards for the Culture Department, so all he had were his old Social Affairs cards.
“A reporter? What does a reporter want with me?”
“I wasn’t deliberately eavesdropping, but I overheard what you said earlier and wanted to ask you a few things.”
The man in his sixties looked at Harok warily.
“What did I say?”
“You said you knew a major accident was going to happen. Why did you think that?”
The man hesitated slightly.
“I also heard that you worked on construction sites for more than thirty years. I’d like to hear your opinion as an expert.”
The word expert clearly pleased him.
“Ahem. Well, if that’s what you want...”
“Dad, stop wasting your time on pointless things and go home to sleep.”
His son tried to stop him.
“What are you talking about? This reporter is asking for my professional opinion.”
The man seemed to enjoy explaining things he knew.
For a reporter, that was preferable to dealing with a source who refused to speak.
Of course, talkative sources also had a habit of exaggerating, so everything still needed to be filtered carefully.
“Look over there.”
The man picked up a metal rod from the ground.
“This is a fixing rod used at construction sites. Things like these and plywood sheets used to fall all the time. The ground sank badly too.”
Harok noticed metal rods, plywood, and other construction materials scattered around the area.
He had assumed they had fallen during the collapse.
But according to the man, material had already been falling around the site long before the accident.
“We residents kept filing complaints about these problems from the very beginning of construction.”
“What did the district office say?”
“They said there was nothing wrong. And even if there was, they claimed there was nothing they could legally do about it.”
“They even told us this was one of the best-managed construction sites in Seoul.”
The son joined in.
“Exactly. I warned them that if things continued like this, it would definitely collapse.”
“Really?”
“Of course. But the district office ignored me like I was some dog barking on the street. I told them clearly that I’d spent half my life on construction sites.”
So poor oversight by the district office might also have contributed to the accident.
“May I ask your name?”
“What do you need my name for?”
“When we write an article, we need to know who the source is.”
“I don’t really want my name appearing in the paper.”
“If you don’t want it published, we won’t use it. But I still need your real name for internal reporting.”
“Jeong Jinsam.”
Harok quickly wrote the name in his notebook.
“Oh, and this is another reason I thought there would be an accident.”
Jeong Jinsam picked up a piece of rebar that had been exposed during the collapse.
“Here. Take a look.”
Harok knew nothing about construction materials.
Still, he accepted it and pretended to inspect it carefully.
“Doesn’t the rebar look too clean?”
Now that he mentioned it, Harok noticed something odd.
Concrete had been poured around it, yet there was almost no concrete stuck to the surface.
“It does.”
“This is evidence of shoddy construction. If the concrete had been poured properly, it would bond tightly with the rebar. Even after a collapse, you’d expect chunks of concrete to remain attached here and there.”
Even Harok, who knew almost nothing about construction, could understand that explanation easily.
“Look at this. The rebar slipped out of the concrete as if the two were oil and water.”
“Why would that happen?”
“They didn’t let the concrete cure properly. What else could it be? They were raising one floor every four days. There’s no way it had enough time to harden.”
Apparently, the claim that he had spent thirty years on construction sites wasn’t exaggerated at all.
Even to Harok, the explanation made sense.
“May I ask where you used to work?”
“Well, it’s been quite a while since I retired...”
“He retired from DK Construction.”
The son answered for him.
DK Construction was one of the country’s major builders, comparable to Handong Construction.
“Did you work in construction?”
“I mostly did supervision.”
Bingo.
A retired professional who had spent more than thirty years doing construction supervision at DK Construction.
That was a credible background.
Jeong Jinsam bent down and picked up a chunk of concrete from the ground.
“Look at this. This is concrete, but it crumbles like tofu.”
He squeezed it in his hand.
The concrete broke apart helplessly.
After getting Jeong Jinsam’s phone number, Harok thanked him and left.
Harok waited until the briefing ended before meeting Yubin again.
“Senior, you’re still here?”
“You’re writing a breaking story now, right?”
“Yes.”
“Anything useful from the briefing?”
“They found two of the buried workers dead. The search is continuing for the last one. That’s about it.”
Harok led Yubin somewhere quieter.
“You found something?”
“...This is what I heard. I think all of it needs to be verified.”
“If he spent that long working as a construction supervisor, he sounds fairly credible.”
“Still, we can’t write it based only on his word. What matters is whether his claims match the facts.”
It was a problem reporters encountered all the time.
A surprising number of people spoke very convincingly while making themselves sound far more impressive than they really were.
Sources often exaggerated their own status.
A reporter had to know how to filter what they heard.
“The site manager is at the police station, right?”
“Yes. He’s being questioned.”
Harok frowned and thought.
“Shouldn’t we ask Handong Group?”
“We need to approach them with undeniable evidence. Otherwise they won’t give us a proper answer.”
Yubin nodded in agreement.
“Do you have the construction union chairman’s number?”
“Yes.”
“Ask them first. They should know about things like improper concrete pouring.”
“Okay.”
Harok checked the time.
It was almost midnight.
If they could finish the article now, it might still make the final edition.
“Write quickly. Start reporting.”
“Won’t it be too late if I report first and then write?”
There was no choice.
He would have to leave the reporting to Yubin and write the article himself.
Harok could probably report faster, but he officially belonged to the Culture Department now.
If he started conducting Social Affairs reporting himself, it could create problems later.
“Give me your laptop.”
“You’re going to write it for me?”
“We don’t have a choice.”
“Hehe. Thank you.”
“You call the construction union and the subcontractor employee you mentioned earlier.”
“Yes, sir.”
Harok took Yubin’s laptop and immediately started writing.
“Oh, Senior.”
“What?”
“I heard something from the police. They think the tower crane may have swayed in a sudden gust and struck the building’s outer wall.”
That was possible.
But at this stage, it sounded more like police speculation than anything official.
At most, it deserved a line in the article.
“Okay. I’ll include that. You make the calls.”
For a disaster this large, a major paper would normally send three or four reporters.
Daehan Daily had sent only two.
Broadcast networks had five or six reporters scattered around the site.
While Harok wrote, Yubin passed him the information she gathered.
By then, it was almost one in the morning.
“I’ll finish in about ten minutes. Close your eyes for a bit.”
To survive a stakeout, you needed to become good at taking short naps.
There was never time to lie down comfortably and sleep for hours.
Yubin had been awake since pitching stories at dawn and hadn’t slept at all.
Stakeouts were Harok’s specialty.
He knew better than anyone how exhausted she must be.
“But you’re writing my article while I... Yaaawn.”
Despite her determination, Yubin opened her mouth wide in a huge yawn.
“Ah, sorry.”
“A yawn is like a sneeze. What are you supposed to do? You look exhausted, so get some sleep.”
“But... you must be tired too.”
“I can spend all day sleeping at the sauna tomorrow.”
Yubin was going to be stuck here for a while.
By morning, an investigation headquarters would be established and the full investigation would begin.
Then articles would start pouring out.
Even if they added one or two more satsumari reporters, they would still be desperately short-handed.
“Then I’ll sleep for a little while.”
“Go ahead.”
Harok finished writing at 1:20 a.m.
“Ughhh.”
He stretched once, then read through the article one last time.
Let’s see.
No obvious typos.
The subjects and predicates matched properly.
After finishing the final check, he clicked transmit.
Yubin must have been completely exhausted.
She had fallen asleep curled up tightly, still clutching her phone.
They were inside a temporary press room that Handong Construction had set up near the site.
The reporters who had spent an exhausting day covering the disaster were scattered around, sleeping or resting.
A few were somehow still playing computer games.
Harok draped his jacket over Yubin and stepped outside for a cigarette.
Phewww.
He took a long drag and exhaled toward the cool night sky.
If he counted from his previous life, it had been exactly ten years since Harok last reported from a site like this.
Maybe because it had been so long, reporting felt fun.
Korean journalists tended to age out of field reporting far too quickly.
Harok himself had become vice-chief after only six years, which had already pulled him slightly away from the field.
He had returned to active reporting after transferring to Culture, but still.
By around fifteen years in, it became awkward for a reporter to keep showing up at scenes.
Younger reporters from rival outlets would start wondering why someone that senior was still there.
By twenty years, reporters disappeared from the field almost entirely.
They were expected to work inside as desks.
Ironically, Korean reporters often left the field just when their reporting instincts and writing skills were reaching their peak.
Media companies recognized the problem and tried creating positions such as specialist reporter or senior reporter so experienced journalists could remain active.
But peel back one layer, and those positions were often just makeshift solutions to promotion bottlenecks.
Reporters who failed to become department heads, or who stepped down from management positions, often became senior reporters because there was nowhere else for them to go.
Then the industry complained endlessly that Korean reporters lacked expertise and couldn’t write.
Thinking about that, Harok lit another cigarette.
Then—
“Senior.”
Harok turned.
It was Baek Jaejin from Juo Daily.
Because they shared the same surname, the two had once even compared their family clan generation names and had become fairly close.
“Oh, Jaejin. You got called out here too?”
“Senior, I heard you transferred to Culture. Did they temporarily assign you here because of the accident?”
When a major disaster occurred, newspapers often pulled ace reporters from other departments and sent them to the site.
Apparently Jaejin assumed that was what happened to Harok.
“Something like that.”
“You’ve got it rough.”
“You find anything interesting?”
At major disaster scenes, reporters competed fiercely for exclusives.
But they also exchanged information.
As Harok asked, he first shared some of what he had learned.
Information was something you traded.
Jaejin naturally shared his own findings in return.
“I spoke to a subcontractor worker earlier and heard something unbelievable.”
“What?”
“They were supposed to install load-bearing walls between apartment units. But they used partition walls instead.”
Harok didn’t know enough about construction to fully understand, but it clearly sounded serious.
“Partition walls are normally used inside a single unit to divide one room from another. They basically can’t support structural loads.”
“They installed those between units? If they can’t support weight, then what was holding everything up?”
“That’s probably why it collapsed.”
Harok was speechless.
If the building had actually been completed and people had moved in, wouldn’t something like this potentially have killed hundreds?
“The worker I interviewed has been to a lot of construction sites too, and he said he’d never seen partition walls installed between separate apartment units.”
“They skipped the load-bearing walls, and they didn’t even cure the concrete properly...”
“It’s a mess.”
“Isn’t this basically murder through willful negligence?”
Harok was genuinely furious.
“Well, the company will probably bow its head, apologize, and promise it’ll never happen again.”
“And people will keep dying.”
“That’s why people are talking about introducing a Serious Accidents Punishment Act.”
At this point, Korea still had no Serious Accidents Punishment Act.
Even when a major industrial disaster occurred, there was little legal basis to punish the CEO of the company responsible.
Still, Kwon Jaegwan.
I’m going to make sure you get punished.
