Fire breaks out in Seoul’s last-remaining shanty town

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A fire on Friday in one of Seoul’s last-remaining shanty towns burned makeshift houses and forced dozens of residents to flee, but no casualties were immediately reported.

Much of the fire was under control about 6 1/2 hours after the blaze broke out in Guryong village in southern Seoul, fire officials said.

Local fire officer Jeong Gwang-hun told a televised briefing that rescuers were searching each house in the burned area to look for possible victims.

More than 1,200 personnel including firefighters and police officers were deployed to the scene, he said, adding the cause of the fire was under investigation.

The hillside village has occasionally had fires over the years, a vulnerability that observers say is linked to its tightly packed homes built with materials that easily burn.

The village is located near some of Seoul’s most expensive neighborhoods, with towering high-rise apartments and lavish shopping districts, and has long been a symbol of South Korea’s stark income inequalities.

The village was formed in the 1980s as a settlement for people who were evicted from their original neighborhoods under massive house clearings and redevelopment projects.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the city were removed from their homes in slums and low-income settlements during those years, a process then military-backed leaders saw as crucial in beautifying the city for foreign visitors ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.