korean people's army
FILE PHOTO: The North Korean military conducting a winter river-crossing drill in January 2018. (Daily Nk)

Sixteen North Korean soldiers recently lost consciousness due to gas asphyxiation at a barracks of a military unit under the Korean People’s Army Air and Anti-Air Force command, Daily NK has learned.

“The command headquarters, army infirmary and hospital received emergency summons,” a source in the North Korean military said on Monday, adding that the incident occurred at 2 AM on Nov. 30. 

According to the source, on the day of the incident, a soldier in the company entered the troop quarters to wake the personnel who were next on duty, but he noticed a thick fog, and the troops did not wake up no matter how much he shook them.

He immediately used a landline to report the situation to the field officer of the day. The field officer then issued an emergency, ordering that the unconscious soldiers be dragged out of the troop quarters and laid on their stomachs on the dirt yard in front of the building until ambulances and transport vehicles arrived.

The source said metal heaters to burn briquettes or coal mixed with water were placed in each of the company’s troop quarters from Oct. 20.

In this case, carbon dioxide produced by the burning coal leaked through a crack in the stovepipe, suffocating the sleeping soldiers.

The source said about 25 soldiers were sleeping in the platoon quarters where the accident occurred, and that the 16 soldiers sleeping in the lower beds of the two-story bunk beds lost consciousness.

After the accident, the operations department of the headquarters of the Korean People’s Army Air and Anti-Air Force immediately issued a notification to all subordinate units calling on them to “thoroughly inspect their ability to respond to gas asphyxiation incidents at barracks during the winter training period, and to step up gas patrols.”

The order called on soldiers to be on alert against gas asphyxiation incidents, a frequent occurrence in winter.

Moreover, the operations department reportedly ordered units to use the opportunity to thoroughly inspect their ability to deal with barracks fires, too, with duty officers patrolling every night to check whether troop quarters are supplied with enough sandbags, buckets and basins.

As an initial measure to prevent fires at smoking areas outside the barracks, it ordered soldiers to stack enough sandbags outside those areas. 

The barracks of the headquarters of the Korean People’s Army Air and Anti-Air Force has no fire hydrants, so soldiers respond to fires by nailing sandbags to inside walls or stacking them outside, the source said. 

The headquarters’ political department taught troops that since the portraits of Kim Il Sung and Kim Jong Il that hang in each troop quarters and the armories are the most important, they must be “protected no matter what” in any accident.

The source said this sparked criticism from soldiers, who asked whether “portraits or weapons were more important than people’s lives.”

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