Seoul mayor says sorry, but not sorry for alert message

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon holds a press conference at the Seoul City Hall on Wednesday to explain the city government's decision to issue an evacuation alert to residents earlier in the morning. [YONHAP]

Seoul Mayor Oh Se-hoon on Wednesday apologized for "causing confusion" with an early morning evacuation warning sent to residents by the city government in response to a North Korean projectile launch but said the alert was not a mistake.

“The alert was issued after it was judged that immediate action was required in a situation such as this one, where North Korea fired [a projectile] southwards,” Oh said in a press briefing.

Although the North launched over 90 missiles last year, the majority of them were fired into the Yellow Sea or the East Sea.

The projectile fired by the North on Wednesday, which Pyongyang claimed was a space launch vehicle, followed a southwestern trajectory from its launch site in Tongchang-ri, North Pyongan Province, and eventually fell into the Yellow Sea.

“The emergency message may have been an overreaction by working-level officials, but my judgment is that it was not issued erroneously,” the mayor said. “We cannot make compromises regarding safety, and our principle is to respond in a manner that can be seen as excessive.”

The city first received information from the Interior Ministry about the North Korean projectile launch at 6:32 a.m.

The initial evacuation warning, sent out as a “Presidential Alert” in Seoul at 6:41 a.m., triggered alarms on mobile phones across the capital, where air raid sirens blared.

In the alert, the city government said, “A warning has been issued for Seoul. People are advised to prepare for evacuation and to give priority to children, the weak and the elderly,” but did not provide a reason for urging people to take shelter.

The alert triggered a flurry of panicked phone calls on emergency hotlines and search requests on the South Korean search engine Naver, whose mobile page suffered a brief service disruption from 6:43 a.m. to 6:48 a.m. as it was deluged with people looking online for updates.

The warning was rescinded in another public alert at 7:03 a.m. that simply said the earlier warning was “sent in error.”

The Interior Ministry finally explained in a public message sent at 7:25 a.m. that the first emergency alert had been issued due to a North Korean missile launch and clarified that the warning had been lifted.

The ministry sent a separate emergency alert to residents of Baengnyeong Island and Daecheong Island, two South Korean islands near the Northern Limit Line that demarcates the inter-Korean border in the Yellow Sea.

Sirens sounded for over 20 minutes in the outlying islands and an evacuation advisory was broadcast via the public announcement system across the region, residents said.

BY MICHAEL LEE [lee.junhyuk@joongang.co.kr]