A lethal fireplace at a South Korean lithium battery manufacturing facility in June broke out as the corporate raced to satisfy a deadline with out taking motion to handle indicators of harmful high quality failures, police mentioned.
Not less than 23 individuals have been killed on the Aricell lithium battery plant through the large blaze, in one of many nation’s worst industrial disasters in years.
Manufacture Aricell, which additionally produces batteries for South Korea’s navy, had failed a top quality inspection in April and subsequently elevated manufacturing to make up the backlog, police official Kim Jong-min mentioned on Friday.
It employed short-term and unskilled staff, contributing to a bounce in product defect charges, together with overheating of completed batteries, however didn’t take motion to comprise security dangers, Kim mentioned.
The corporate was making an attempt to supply 5,000 batteries a day and “began extreme manufacturing”, police added.
Additional investigations confirmed that Aricell had handed earlier high quality inspections by manipulating take a look at samples because it began supplying battery merchandise to the navy in 2021, South Korean information company Yonhap reported.
The Ministry of Employment and Labor and police requested for an arrest warrant for 3 officers of Aricell, together with CEO Park Quickly-kwan.
Gross deficiencies
“The accident occurred as the corporate pushed forward with out taking measures regardless of issues in varied steps within the manufacturing course of,” Kim added.
Police additional mentioned that the corporate didn’t adjust to manufacturing facility security legal guidelines, together with a scarcity of emergency exits and insufficient security training for workers who didn’t converse Korean.
Safety digital camera footage confirmed the hearth sparking from a stack of batteries and rapidly engulfing the manufacturing facility the place 35,000 lithium batteries have been saved.
The unfold of poisonous smoke in all probability rendered staff unconscious inside seconds, fireplace officers have mentioned.
Seventeen of those that died have been Chinese language, and one was Laotian. The remainder have been South Koreans.
“Due to gross deficiencies, nearly all of staff have been discovered on the opposite aspect of the emergency exit – although there have been 37 seconds wherein they might have evacuated after the preliminary explosion on June 24,” mentioned Kim.
South Korea has confronted quite a few lethal incidents in recent times, together with the Halloween stampede, which have been blamed on the failure to implement security guidelines.
On Thursday, a brief circuit or different electrical causes was believed to have sparked a hearth at a resort in Bucheon, west of the capital, Seoul, leaving seven lifeless and a dozen of others injured.