This is a scene that has become painfully familiar.

Last month, on the afternoon of the 26th, a bridge deck collapsed at the demolition site of the Seosomun Overpass in Seodaemun-gu, Seoul, killing three workers and seriously injuring three others. Twelve years have passed since the Sewol Ferry Disaster, and four years since the Itaewon Crowd Crush, yet Korean society once again finds itself standing in the exact same place.

The cries of grieving families, politicians arriving en masse to offer condolences, investigative agencies conducting raids and seizures, and media coverage that will inevitably fade within days — it is a scene so familiar that it has become even more devastating.

But can this tragedy truly be viewed as nothing more than an industrial accident?

The Seosomun Overpass had been sending repeated warning signals for years. Since concrete fragments fell onto the road in 2019, additional structural problems followed: slab detachment in 2021, concrete deterioration and steel cable damage in 2024, and a long history of safety concerns spanning seven years. A detailed safety inspection had already assigned the structure a Grade D safety rating, and the Seoul Metropolitan Government had begun demolition work in August of last year.

On the day of the accident, construction had reportedly been halted early in the morning after workers discovered a 2.9-centimeter structural displacement during slab cutting work. Yet while safety inspections were being conducted afterward, the bridge deck collapsed. Approximately twelve hours passed between the discovery of warning signs and the actual collapse.

For this reason, the tragedy cannot simply be reduced to the negligence of a single subcontracted worker.

Nor is criminal punishment alone the answer.

This disaster reflects multiple layers of systemic failure: long-term infrastructure maintenance failures, inadequate review of demolition methods, the safety management responsibilities of the Seoul city government as project owner, insufficient risk assessment by contractors and supervisors, and the question of whether workers were genuinely empowered to stop operations once danger signs emerged.

Finding the truth means carefully dismantling and examining every one of those failures.

Throughout my work with the Special Investigation Commission on the Sewol Ferry Disaster, the Social Disasters Special Investigation Commission, and the Korean Bar Association’s Itaewon Disaster Special Committee, I have repeatedly encountered the same principle.

There are unchanging rules when uncovering the truth behind major public safety disasters.

First, criminal punishment alone can never reveal the full picture of a disaster.

Second, truth-finding investigations must maintain political neutrality, free from partisan interests.

Third, the focus should not be on deciding who to punish, but on identifying what must change to prevent future tragedies.

Even before the truth is uncovered, some people will step forward to assign blame, while others will rush to avoid responsibility.

We already know how that story ends.

Once elections pass, the cameras disappear, while the broken safety management systems that actually require reform remain untouched, quietly waiting for the next tragedy.

Ten years after the Sewol disaster, we have heard no meaningful reports that illegal overloading, improper cargo securing, or passenger overcapacity have fundamentally improved. After the Itaewon tragedy, public discussion briefly focused on standing passengers on express buses before quickly disappearing.

The people who truly need to answer are not the high-ranking officials standing before television cameras.

They are the individuals hidden somewhere along the approval lines buried on the final pages of internal reports.

Who made repair or demolition decisions after the Grade D safety rating?

Was project schedule pressure prioritized over safety and cost concerns?

After structural displacement was discovered that morning, was the authority to stop work genuinely exercised?

How did the approval process for risk assessment reports unfold internally?

These questions cannot be answered through political slogans.

As history repeatedly shows, the louder the political chaos becomes, the easier it is for bureaucratic institutions sitting closest to responsibility to quietly reorganize documents and redraw lines of accountability while escaping public scrutiny.

Seongsu Bridge in 1994.
Sampoong Department Store in 1995.
Sea-Land Fire in 1999.
Sewol Ferry in 2014.
Itaewon in 2022.
Jeju Air in 2024.
And now Seosomun.

The list of national tragedies continues to grow longer, yet the lessons we have learned remain painfully short.

When children, workers simply doing their jobs, and ordinary citizens walking down the street continue losing their lives in preventable man-made disasters rather than natural disasters, public trust in both government and society begins to collapse, and the very foundation of community itself begins to erode.

What grieving families and the public seek is not yet another massive political conflict.

They want answers grounded in facts and evidence.

Who did what?

Who failed to do what they were responsible for?

And what changes must be made to prevent the next tragedy?

Truth-finding is not politics.

It is the most persistent form of administration.

It is the most honest form of accountability.

And above all, it is the minimum debt that those who survived owe to those who did not.

A society that refuses to learn from experience will fail again.

This time, we must finally stop and confront that reality.

— Kim Min-hoo
Partner Attorney, Suhn Law Group
Former Participating Attorney, Sewol Ferry Investigation Commission & Social Disaster Special Investigation Commission