“The wind was so strong that I couldn’t stand still,” Kwon So-han, a 79-year-old resident in Andong told AFP.
“The fire came from the mountain and fell on my house.
“Those who haven’t experienced it won’t know. I could only bring my body.”
Late on Tuesday, authorities in Andong issued an emergency alert to residents of the historic Hahoe Folk Village – a UNESCO-listed world heritage site popular with tourists – as the blaze drew closer.
“The Uiseong Angye wildfire is moving in the direction” of that area, the alert said. “Residents are requested to evacuate immediately.”
In Uiseong, the sky was full of smoke and haze, AFP reporters saw, with the Korea Forest Service saying that the containment rate for the fire in that area had decreased from 60 per cent to 55 per cent on Tuesday.
Early in the morning, workers at the Gounsa Temple, which was more than a thousand years old, were attempting to move valuable artefacts and cover up Buddhist statues to protect them from possible damage.
“We used fire retardant blankets,” Joo Jung-wan, a Gyeongbuk Seobu Cultural Heritage Care Center worker told AFP, saying that a giant gilded Buddha statue was too large to move so had been carefully covered.
Hours later, an official at the Korea Heritage Service told AFP that the temple had been burnt down.
“It is very heartbreaking and painful to see the precious temples that are over a thousand years old being lost,” monk Deung-woon told AFP.
Around 3,500 inmates from correctional facilities in the southeastern county of Cheongsong and Andong are being transferred to nearby prisons, Yonhap news agency reported, citing the justice ministry.
https://www.channelnewsasia.com/east-asia/south-korea-wildfires-uiseong-state-emergency-5022066
