A series of fatal accidents has occurred at
the construction site of a power plant in North Korea’s Baekam County, Yangkang Province due to overly aggressive construction plans and violations of
safety rules, Daily NK has learned.
“As the construction progresses, there has
been a continual number of fatalities caused by falling rocks or explosion work
that has gone wrong,” a source in Yangkang Province told Daily NK on Monday. “Despite
the deaths that have occurred each year, the construction managers have
repeatedly just said the project needs to be completed soon and have not taken
any countermeasures, so the number of accidents has not dropped.”
He added, “Even this winter, some of the workers had to
work in the water despite the frigid temperatures; their frostbite was so bad
it almost inhibited them from working, but they pressed on and things moved
forward on site with no signs of improving.” This has done nothing, he went on, to curtail emphasis by the state on “speed” over all else– regardless of the potentially deleterious effects.
The power plant, dubbed the “Mt. Baekdu Songun Youth Power Plant,” first broke ground in January 2002, and it was initially set to be completed over the stretch of 10 years in time for founder Kim Il Sung’s 100th birthday. After the project got underway in the Cheonsu area of Baekam County, Yangkang Province, the soil around the area was found to contain too much sand, and the construction site was relocated to a swathe of land between Cheonsu and Hwangto, requiring workers to operate at much faster speeds to compensate for lost time.
Moreover, during Kim Jong Eun’s onsite visit to the plant’s construction site, he decreed that the project be completed by the 70th anniversary of the Workers’ Party, observed on October 10th; this mandate, coupled with efforts to regain lost ground, resulted in an immediate upsurge in the pace and intensity of the project.
A North Korean defector who previously took
part in a state construction project while still in the country testified, “If
the state works in line with the battle for speed required by Kim Jong Eun, it
will mean construction will move forward even if only the surface of the cement
has solidified. This kind of faulty work will increase the risk of accidents.”
He added that the current construction boom taking place in the North—encompassing
a host of projects—will make things even harder to manage and come with greater
peril for the workers mobilized to contribute to them.
Meanwhile, Party cadres have come under
fire for cremating bodies of the victims without consulting bereaved family
members, the source reported.
“Some families have received the remains of
their family members three months after the accident, further fueling anger
among people,” he said. “One family from Hwanghae Province came all the
way to the construction site to protest what had happened after their
family member was killed by a falling rock.”
He explained that the absence of trains and scarcity of trucks in the areas around most of these construction sites means that most people who perish there are cremated prior to being returned to their respective villages. “Last winter, a worker with a battalion
in Jakang Province was killed in another construction accident and his family refused to
leave the construction site, condemning the fact they they weren’t even informed of the death but simply told to come and collect the remains,” he said, citing another example.
Fatal accidents and the subsequent suffering of the families of the departed show little hope of changing in the foreseeable future, according to the source, who explained that “most workers mobilized from all across the country for construction work have little to no agency, meaning that the management officials on site don’t really give these things a second thought.”
*The content of this article was broadcast to the North Korean people via Unification Media Group.
