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Bowdoin College student, from Orono, survives South Korea stampede

Emma Fortier was among more than 100,000 people who gathered Saturday night to celebrate Halloween in downtown Seoul.

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PORTLAND, Maine — A young Maine woman is safe in South Korea after the Halloween celebration she attended Saturday night in downtown Seoul turned into a deadly "surge" that killed at least 154.

Emma Fortier, a graduate of Orono High School and a junior at Bowdoin College in Brunswick, is studying this semester at Yonsei University in Seoul, the Bangor Daily News reported.

Fortier is the daughter of Bangor Daily News Opinion Editor Susan Young. The BDN reported that Fortier texted her family shortly after the event that she and a friend were in the Itaewon district when the crowd of more than 100,000 people surged:

“Itaewon is pretty much all one street, and it was just dangerously packed [and] you couldn’t move at all. We were just pushed along with the crowd and crammed against everyone and people kept tripping in the crowd.”

Credit: AP

Ambulances and rescue workers arrive at the street near the scene of a crowd surge in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Oct. 30, 2022. Witnesses say the nightmarish scene intensified as people performed CPR on the dying and carried limp bodies to ambulances, while dance music pulsed from garish clubs lit in bright neon. Others tried desperately to pull out those who were trapped underneath the crush of people, but failed because too many in the crowd had fallen on top of them. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

People fell on each other and were trapped as long as 40 minutes. Emergency workers were so overwhelmed by the number of people lying motionless on the ground that they asked pedestrians to help them with CPR, the Associated Press reported.

“If you fell you would just get trampled because no one can stop,” Fortier said in her text. “I climbed up a side wall and jumped down the side of a giant structure behind a building.”

Credit: AP

South Korean police officers walk the scene where scores of people died and were injured in Seoul, South Korea, Sunday, Oct. 30, 2022. Witnesses say the nightmarish scene intensified as people performed CPR on the dying and carried limp bodies to ambulances, while dance music pulsed from garish clubs lit in bright neon. Others tried desperately to pull out those who were trapped underneath the crush of people, but failed because too many in the crowd had fallen on top of them. (AP Photo/Lee Jin-man)

At least 154 people were killed, including at least two Americans. Nearly 150 were injured, including 33 in serious conditions.

Officials said only 137 police officers were assigned to patrol the crowd on Saturday night, versus nearly 7,000 assigned to monitor protests in another part of Seoul the same night.