Representative of battery factory involved in Hwaseong fire accident in South Korea arrested

According to news on August 29, 2024, as reported by Yonhap News Agency, due to the fire at the ARICELL battery factory in Hwaseong, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, which caused 23 deaths, the representative of the battery factory, Park Soon Gwan and others were arrested on August 28 local time.

At around 10:30 a.m. on June 24 this year, a battery caught fire in this lithium battery manufacturing plant in Hwaseong City, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea, which then triggered a serious fire. Surveillance video at the scene of the incident showed that when the battery products smoked and caught fire, although the on-site employees tried to extinguish the fire with fire extinguishers, the explosive battery combustion caused thick smoke to billow inside the factory building, and the fire spread rapidly and got out of control. The employees lost the best opportunity to escape. In the end, more than 35,000 lithium batteries piled up in the factory building were completely burned down. After the fire lasted for more than five hours, the main fire was extinguished. After firefighters entered the scene, they found more than 20 charred bodies. This accident led to the tragic deaths of 23 people, including 17 Chinese laborers, and another 8 people were injured.

On August 23, the accident investigation team of the “Hwaseong battery factory fire” composed of the South Korean police and labor departments released the investigation results. The investigation shows that as early as 2021, when the company involved began to provide relevant battery products to the South Korean military, it had always passed safety inspections by means of deception such as switching inspection products. The production process was shoddy and neglected in management. Eventually, the defective battery products caught fire and caused a tragedy. The South Korean police investigation found that since 2021, when the enterprise provided relevant products to the South Korean military, it artificially manipulated inspection data by separately manufacturing a batch of batteries and switching inspection products to pass the military safety inspection. In April this year, during the procurement batch inspection by the South Korean military, problems such as forgery of product descriptions by the enterprise were found, and the relevant batch of products was judged not to meet national defense standards. After that, during the rush work process of the enterprise, the defect rate of products increased significantly, eventually leading to the accident.

The Suwon District Court of South Korea said that Park Soon Gwan is suspected of seriously violating laws such as the "Act on the Punishment of Serious Disasters." Therefore, an arrest warrant was issued for him. This is the first time since the implementation of this law in 2022 that a business representative has been arrested. The court also issued an arrest warrant for Park Jong Eon (son of Park Soon Gwan), the chief director of the factory, on charges of violating the "Industrial Safety Act" and the "Dispatch Act" and causing death due to negligence in business. However, for Jeong, the operator of Han Shin DIA, a human resources supply enterprise, and Park, the safety management team leader of ARICELL, the court did not issue an arrest warrant on the grounds of insufficient risk of destroying evidence and escaping.

This accident has attracted widespread attention and also sounded a safety alarm for related industries. The South Korean government said it will further strengthen supervision over enterprise work safety to avoid similar tragedies from happening again.