Later Wednesday, Seoul City Mayor Oh Se-hoon apologized for causing confusion for many residents. She thought things were going to fall from the sky,“ said the resident, who asked to be identified only by her family name, Byeon, citing privacy concerns. “She kept crying as we turned on the TV news to see what was going on. When they receive evacuation alerts next time, their thinking would be, ‘It’s going to be fine, let’s wait a little,’’’ said Betty Lee, an English teacher in Seoul.Īnother Seoul resident said she struggled to calm her crying 10-year-old daughter who begged her not to go to work after the early morning alert. “People received a flurry of texts today, but nothing really happened. Others complained that the alert didn’t provide any useful details, such as why they needed to go to safer places and where to go. “Is it OK for us to receive an alert at 6:41 a.m.? If a real missile was launched, it could have landed in Seoul earlier than the alert message,” one Twitter user said. Social media in South Korea were abuzz with criticism of the alert message. Most North Korean launches have ended with weapons falling harmlessly in the ocean, except in a few cases when missiles were sent over Japan. South Korea’s military said it asks the safety ministry to send such phone alerts only when North Korean rockets fly in the direction of South Korean territory or falling debris is expected. Wednesday’s text messages were only the third of their kind since 2016. It would only take a few minutes for forward-deployed North Korean missiles to reach Seoul.īut it’s extremely rare for South Korea to issue such missile alerts, even though North Korea has conducted more than 100 missile tests in the past 17 months. Seoul, a city of 10 million people, is only an hour’s drive from the heavily fortified border with rival North Korea.
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