SEOUL, South Korea (AP) — Carrying huge backpacks and water bottles, tens of thousands of Scouts began arriving at university dormitories, government and corporate training centers, and hotels around Seoul and other inland cities on Tuesday afternoon as the South Korean government evacuated the World Scout Jamboree ahead of a tropical storm.
The South Korean government had scrambled to keep the 12-day gathering of Scouts going in the face of struggles with heat, hygiene and land use controversies, as thousands of British and American Scouts departed over the weekend.
It wasn’t until Monday afternoon that officials announced the decision to abandon the coastal campsite in the southwestern town of Buan, after forecasters raised alarms that Tropical Storm Khanun was heading toward the Korean Peninsula.
The 37,000 Scouts, who hailed from 156 countries and were mostly teenagers, folded up their tents before boarding over 1,000 vehicles for the evacuation. Officials say 656 vehicles had left the campsite as of 4 p.m.
Most of the Scouts will be accommodated in Seoul and the surrounding area, with others sent to other provinces in the country’s north and central regions.
South Korean officials say the Jamboree will continue in the form of cultural events and activities, including a K-Pop concert in Seoul Friday.
Scouts from Britain, who had transferred to hotels in Seoul over the weekend because of the extreme heat at the Jamboree site, visited a war memorial and the former presidential palace.
Hundreds of scouts from Norway had already left the site on Monday, citing concerns about the complications of moving together with tens of thousands of other Scouts. Geir Olav Kaase, leader of the Norwegian contingent, said the Scouts arrived at their hotels in Incheon by 9 p.m. Monday.
The provincial government had hoped the event would draw attention and investment to a controversial swath of reclaimed land.
Concerns had been raised beforehand about having such large numbers of young people in a vast, treeless area lacking protection from heat as South Korea grappled with one of its hottest summers in years. After the Jamboree began, hundreds of participants were treated for heat-related ailments.
The government insisted the event was safe enough to continue and channeled resources to keep the event going, adding medical staff, air-conditioned buses, military shade structures, and hundreds of workers to maintain bathrooms and showers, which some Scouts had complained were filthy or unkempt.
Saemangeum is the result of a 19-year project to build a 21-mile seawall, which South Korea describes as the world’s longest.
Since the wall was finished in 2010, the land the wall helped to reclaim from the sea remained largely barren. Once seen as a major development project for a region lacking an industrial base, it’s now increasingly viewed as an ecological blunder that wiped out coastal wetlands and hurt fisheries production.
Local government officials insist that the project remains key to the region’s economic future, despite its failure to deliver on early promises.
In a 2018 document describing its successful bid to host, the North Jeolla provincial government wrote that its main reason for hosting the event was to lure badly needed infrastructure investment to the area after initial plans didn’t progress as hoped.
