Hello and welcome to the witness history podcast from the BBC World Service, with me Ben

Henderson.

It's June 1995 and we're in Seoul, the capital of South Korea.

Sun Min Lee, who's 18 years old, is working her final shift at a glitzy shopping mall

called the Sampong department store.

She's daydreaming, looking forward to going off to college that summer.

And suddenly, hundreds of people are believed to have been killed or injured when a department

store collapsed in South Korea, according to some reports there was an explosion before

the collapse.

I can't remember how long I was there.

Some falling debris had cut a deep gash in my head, so I was covered in blood.

When I eventually escaped from the building, there were buses outside taking injured people

to hospitals.

I got on one of them.

I look at the passengers who was packed with people with serious injuries, who was like

a scene from a zombie movie.

It may have seemed like the Sampong department store collapsed, came out of nowhere, but

it wasn't an isolated incident.

There's been a series of man-made disasters in South Korea in recent months.

In April, more than a hundred people were killed by a gas explosion at a subway construction

site in a southern city.

Just October, the central section of a major river bridge in Seoul collapsed during the

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