Interior ministry expands nationwide disaster drill to 236 agencies

The interior ministry said Monday that 236 central government, local government and public organizations will take part in South Korea's fall disaster-response exercise from Oct. 19 to 30, 39 more than the 197 that joined last year's drill.

The 12-day exercise, the 2026 fall edition of the Safety Korea training program, focuses on social disasters: 58 organizations will run wildfire scenarios, 20 venue disasters, 13 crowd crushes, 11 road disasters and eight rail disasters.

Organizers have also shifted the scenarios themselves. Since the start of this year, agencies have been asked to plan for large-scale, simultaneous and regionally spreading incidents rather than situations in which command and control functions normally, and repeating the same disaster type within three years draws a penalty in the assessment. Each participating organization set its scenario around a high-risk disaster identified from its local conditions and past incidents, and will check whether its crisis-management manual works in practice.

Fifty-two cities, counties and districts, including Sancheong County in South Gyeongsang Province, which was declared a special disaster zone after major wildfires in March last year, will concentrate on stopping a fire's spread in its early stages and evacuating residents quickly.

Korea Oil Pipeline will stage a combined wildfire, fuel-tank fire and fuel-leak scenario at its Pangyo depot on Oct. 27, testing how fast it can restore energy supply while working with local governments to protect residents. The culture ministry and Seoul's Seocho District will jointly drill on Oct. 22 for a fire and building collapse at the Seoul Arts Center, and Daejeon's Yuseong District will run a crowd-crush exercise at World Cup Stadium Station on Oct. 29.

The ministry said a central evaluation team of private-sector experts helped agencies identify hazards and refine scenarios, and that results will feed back into revisions of crisis-management manuals.

"The Safety Korea disaster-response drill is an important process of checking, before a disaster occurs, whether the response system works properly and of making up for what is lacking," said Kim Kwang-yong, head of the ministry's disaster and safety management headquarters. "The government will raise on-site operability through realistic drills and build a dense disaster-safety management system that lets the public feel at ease against increasingly complex disasters."