From Jecheon to Seoul, and back in front of the office screen
Two days at the “2nd Disaster Damage Fact-Finding and Administrative Relief Specialist Training Course”: a firsthand account ① Day one
Before I begin
I opened an administrative agent office and mostly handle immigration matters, but the word “disaster” had always sat at the back of my mind. Every summer brings news of torrential rain without fail, and Jecheon, set among mountains and rivers, can be no exception. Once a major disaster has passed, the first wall that affected residents run into is unfamiliar reporting procedures and paperwork. Thinking that filling that gap might be work for an administrative agent, in mid-September I sent in an application form and résumé for the Korea Association of Administrative Agents’ “2nd Disaster Damage Fact-Finding and Administrative Relief Specialist Training Course.”
The course ran for two days. The first day was in-person training in the Association’s classroom in Seoul; the second was online training over Zoom, followed by an assessment exam. Here I go back through the course materials and write up the six lectures I heard over those two days.
This post covers the three lectures of the first day; the second day continues in the day-two post.
Day one, Tuesday, September 29 — from Jecheon to Seoul
To make the 10 a.m. lecture I had to set out early in the morning. I took an express bus from Jecheon to Seoul, then changed to the subway and headed for the Association’s classroom. It meant spending no small amount of time on the road, but a subject as heavy as disaster was one I wanted to hear in person in a classroom, not through a screen. The lectures ran from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
Session 1 · The big picture of disaster management and where the administrative agent stands
The first lecture began by setting up the framework of disaster and safety management. Disaster management consists of four stages — prevention, preparedness, response and recovery (Article 3, subparagraph 3 of the Framework Act on the Management of Disasters and Safety, the “Disaster and Safety Act” below) — and the national crisis alert rises in the order Attention, Caution, Alert, Serious. The disaster text alerts we receive on our mobile phones are likewise divided into extreme emergency alerts, emergency alerts and safety guidance messages, and it struck me afresh that you cannot even opt out of extreme emergency alerts such as air-raid warnings.
The slide my eyes stayed on longest was a “dashboard” that mapped the seven kinds of work in Article 2, paragraph 1 of the Certified Administrative Agents Act onto disaster practice. Drafting damage reports (preparing documents); putting together statements of how the damage occurred and lists of damaged items (documents certifying facts); translating documents for foreign victims (translation); submitting documents to local governments and community service centers (submission on the person’s behalf); permits and approvals for recovery work and applications for relief payments (acting as agent for applications); guidance on who is eligible for support, the deadlines and the procedures (administrative counseling); and, finally, fact-finding investigations limited to affairs entrusted under statutes. As someone who does immigration work, I was especially glad to see the box marked “translating documents for foreign victims.” Jecheon, too, has no small number of foreign workers and marriage migrants. When a disaster strikes, there may be neighbors who cannot even file a report because of the language barrier.
The instructor drew the administrative agent’s position as a bridge between victims and administrative agencies. Between victims, who in the confusion do not know the procedures and whose evidence is scattered, and local governments, which are in charge of the official investigation and the recovery plan, the administrative agent helps prepare and submit damage reports, applications and supporting materials. One line on the slide seemed to sum up the whole course.
“An administrative agent is not an official investigator, but a helper who sees that the facts are reflected.”
The case of a restaurant flooded by torrential rain also stays with me. The building owner reported only the “damage to the building,” and the tenant did not know how to report the damage to business equipment such as refrigerators and to stock. The administrative agent uses the lease agreement to separate ownership of the building from ownership of the furnishings and equipment, checks before-and-after photos against purchase receipts, and prepares the list of damaged items and the statement of how the damage occurred, helping all the way through to submission to the local government and guidance on policy funds for small business owners. But the instructor drew a line in red letters. Loss adjustment, which fixes the amount of the damage, is absolutely prohibited. That part made clear how far an administrative agent may go and where to stop.
Session 2 · After a disaster strikes, how do the authorities act?
The second lecture followed, step by step, what the central government and local governments actually do when a social disaster occurs. Disaster manuals have a three-tier structure: standard manual (division of roles) → working manual (procedures for each agency) → action manual (actions in the field). The instructor stressed that the system itself is in place, but whether it works in a real disaster depends on how the manuals link up with one another and on the improvements made after inspections.
In the part on support for the public, the (Central Joint) Disaster Victim Support Center caught my eye. It is set up when a large-scale disaster occurs, to give integrated support to victims and their families in one place, and it handles guidance on, receipt of and processing of relief and various kinds of support, requests for cooperation from related agencies, and on-site checks to prevent secondary harm. For the recovery stage, the lecture covered the special disaster area system. First introduced after the collapse of the Sampoong Department Store in 1995, it now rests on Article 60 of the Disaster and Safety Act; once an area is declared, a considerable share (for example, 70%) of the cost of dealing with the damage, such as relief money and living expenses, is subsidized from the national treasury. If no declaration is made, support is provided at the local government level, and if there is a party who caused the disaster, the local government exercises its right of recourse against that party.
Once we had also gone over the damage report form for social disasters and the flow of deliberation by the local countermeasures headquarters, which office a victim has to go to and what has to be submitted there came together like a single map.
Session 3 · Gathering facts in the field, and how to treat people
The last lecture of the first day was the most practical. It began with the legal basis for an administrative agent’s fact-finding investigations. Article 2, paragraph 1, subparagraph 7 of the Certified Administrative Agents Act lists “investigating and confirming facts in affairs entrusted under statutes” as part of the agent’s work, and Article 2 of the Enforcement Decree lists the work of putting the results in writing and submitting them to the person who entrusted the task. Add to this subparagraph 2, “preparing documents certifying facts,” and you have the basis on which an administrative agent can set out what was investigated in a “certificate of fact confirmation.” We also looked at the damage reporting and investigation procedures in Article 58 of the Disaster and Safety Act and the support for special disaster areas in Articles 60 and 61.
The fact-finding with GIS (geographic information systems) that came next was a world that was new to me. You download digital map layers such as buildings, roads, rivers and embankments from the National Land Information Platform, and compare before and after the disaster using imagery from Korea’s land observation satellite. Also introduced were overlay analysis, which lays the damaged area over the land-use and building-register layers; buffer analysis, which marks out the range of impact by distance from the center point of the disaster; a way of drawing the flood line with drone mapping; and a technique for picking out areas burned in a wildfire with near-infrared imagery. Yet the starting point was modest. It begins with checking, on maps of the same scale, whether the lot numbers of the victim’s building and land match the disaster area.
I also noted down the list of things to bring to a field investigation just as it was given.
- Smartphone (location app, voice recording, photos and video), laptop and writing tools
- Clothing suited to the site, such as rubber boots, gloves, a head covering and a mask; a checklist of damage details; a GIS map
- Take photos panorama-style so that they overlap, and always record in photos and video any site the victim has already restored on their own. Also record nearby residents’ statements about the damage.
What stayed with me most was the interviewing technique that takes the trauma of displaced residents into account. If you ask for numbers and lists from the outset, the victim’s memory closes up instead. So rather than “What furniture did you have in the house?”, you ask, “Could you slowly think back to what you saw first when you opened the door and walked into the main bedroom on an ordinary day?” “Funnel questioning,” which starts with broad questions, narrows the focus and confirms at the end; showing a floor plan or a picture checklist and letting the person point with their hand; an attitude that does not make them feel they are being interrogated. Even away from a disaster site, it was something to turn over in my mind for everyday consultations, where I meet clients who do not know where to turn.
The supporting materials were summed up as: GIS information maps; the disaster damage checklist; certificates of registered matters, building registers and land registers; photos and video of the site and the damaged items; statements from witnesses and neighbors; assessments of the damage by loss adjusters and others; and other materials proving causation.
The lecture closed with professional ethics. Demanding excessive fees, taking a contingency fee on the promise of “getting you a large relief payment,” and bringing in cases through brokers are prohibited. In a national disaster, public-interest work such as free consultations and help with preparing documents for vulnerable groups is called for. I also learned for the first time that if you take part in an investigation under an official entrustment from the central government or a local government, you are deemed a public official, under Article 78-2 of the Disaster and Safety Act, for the purposes of the offenses of divulging secrets and bribery. The three ethical dilemmas that arise — between a client’s secrets and the public interest, between the client’s interests and an objective investigation, and between the limits of one’s duties and the urgent relief needed right in front of you — have no easy answers, and so kept me thinking all the longer.
After the lectures ended at 6 p.m., I made my way back to Jecheon, again changing between subway and express bus. The scenery outside the window on the way home looked a little different. I found myself picturing who would have to go where, and with which documents in hand, if that river overflowed or that slope gave way.
The second day’s online training and assessment exam, and the thoughts I was left with at the end of the two days, are in the day-two post.