Man, news sure does travel fast. Jon and I woke up at 6am this morning to get ready for our daily 7am classes, sat down to a breakfast of cereal, some PB&J and a biiig coffee each. Less than two minutes into breakfast, I got a text from a former student of mine and a current student of Jon's:
"Arla,U&Jon are alright? i just heard there was fire in PANGDA(7th floor)."
I replied that we were fine, hadn't even been to the school yet, and thanked Jinny (from her Korean name, Jin Hee) for her concern.
A few minutes later, Jon got a call from our most competent manager, Soo, who informed us that classes were cancelled today and might be cancelled tomorrow. She would call later if tomorrow's classes would, in fact, be in session.
So we went to the gym and then arranged to meet a friend of ours, Rob, for a hike. Walking to the subway station on our way to the mountain, we approached The School - and smelled it before we saw it. With smell of burning rubber as faint as that smell can be in our noses, we turned the corner and saw this:
It appears as though at least 20 windows were broken: at left, seven at the north side on the seventh floor, at least one window on each floor of the stairwell at the right of the building, and a few scattered windows on upper floors. On the sixth floor, we noticed that lights were on in each room, and it seemed that there was little to no damage below the seventh floor.
A few teachers arrived at the school at 6am, only to find debris below the broken windows and smoke-stained concrete frames. This was cleaned up by noon, when we passed by the building.
The east side of The School showed worse damage than the north side. Although notices at the front of the building claimed it would reopen in four to five days, our managers insist that weekend classes will continue.
A big surprise. Later in the afternoon, senior teachers told us the cause of the fire: a photocopier on the seventh floor, the transformer/converter of which had overheated and caught fire. Combine heat with a lot of nearby paper and you have yourself a growing fire.
Although nobody from The School was in the building, other students have told us that there were some injuries in the health clinic on the upper floors (also known as a plastic surgery clinic). I have yet to find an English-language article on the fire/blast that could give me more reliable details, but will post any that I find.
Until the building reopens or we get news from our managers, many teachers are concerned about their income and their schedule. Enrollment has dropped off significantly now that students are in university during the daytime, and teachers have about seven hours of class on average, instead of the opportunity to take on more classes to make more money. Weekend classes have been jeopardized, since they had already been condensed into three four-hour sessions instead of four three-hour sessions. And current students will likely want to make up their classes at another time. Although this would not normally be an issue, many teachers think we'll be asked to hold makeup classes at the beginning of October - which had previously been a holiday. Teachers have invited family to come for this 5-day weekend, have booked plane tickets to various paradises in SE Asia and have made more local plans within Korea.
In sum, everybody loses. Students have classes carried into October, teachers have the inconvenience of a broken-up holiday and the rest of The School's staff have to deal with administrative chaos and cleanup of this kind of delay. Not to mention the injuries of the plasticized above us.
The upside? We might get new photocopiers.
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