Fire breaks out in one of Seoul’s last-remaining shanty towns

SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — A fire on Friday in one of Seoul’s last-remaining shanty towns burned makeshift houses and forced about 260 residents to flee, but no casualties were reported.

The fire was completely contained more than eight hours after it broke out in Guryong village in southern Seoul, the National Fire Agency said in a statement.

The agency said that 258 residents were evacuated to safe places and that there were no causalities.

The fire agency said it will launch forensic and other examinations to find what caused the blaze and to determine the extent of damage to property. Agency officials said they couldn’t immediately confirm how many houses were burned or damaged.

Local fire officer Jeong Gwang-hun told a televised briefing earlier Friday that more than 1,200 personnel, including firefighters and police officers, were deployed to the scene.

The hillside village has occasionally had fires over the years, a vulnerability that observers say is linked to its tightly packed homes built with materials that easily burn.

The village is located near some of Seoul’s most expensive neighborhoods, with towering high-rise apartments and lavish shopping districts, and has long been a symbol of South Korea’s stark income inequalities.

The village was formed in the 1980s as a settlement for people who were evicted from their original neighborhoods under massive house clearings and redevelopment projects.

Hundreds of thousands of people in the city were removed from their homes in slums and low-income settlements during those years, a process that the military-backed leaders of the time saw as crucial to beautifying the city for foreign visitors ahead of the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games.