breaking news out of South Korea.

Officials now say

at least 59 people have been killed

and some 150 others

injured during a Halloween event.

In Seoul.

CNN's Will Ripley

is there now on the scene.

Well, what are you learning

Fred, arriving here.

We got this stunning news

from from the fire

officials who have been

responding out here.

About 900 or so police and firefighters

here on the scene.

And the news is just about as bad as

as we could have imagined.

I was walking past people

in Halloween costumes on the phone,

absolutely sobbing,

calling their family members

to let them know that they're okay.

You can see that

there are stretchers out here

waiting to see

if there are any more people

who need to be taken to the hospital.

But the videos that have been appearing

on social media, combined

with the emergency alerts,

we knew that something

something really awful had happened here.

This is to set the scene for you, Fred.

This is the Itaewon.

Is it possible to go through here, CNN,

just through here. Thank you.

This is the Itaewon

nightclub district in Seoul.

It is iconic for

among other major holidays, Halloween.

People fly in

from all over the region here in Asia

to come here

to celebrate Halloween in Itaewon.

Come over here, Charlie.

If we can just let's see.

I just want to take you down

this row of emergency vehicles here.

And you can see this line of stretchers.

So so all the hotels

in this area are sold out.

And it was actually at the Hamilton Hotel

which is right here to my right.

To my left. Excuse me.

There was a

Halloween party,

and apparently some sort of an incident

happened. People fell down.

It's been described in local media

as a stampede,

but people essentially were crushed.

They fell.

Let's get a closer here.

And people raced out into the street.

A lot of the streets

here are very, very densely packed.

There were

tens of thousands of people out here.

And the videos on social media showed

people in costume

lying on the ground, not moving

and suffered cardiac arrest.

We now know.

59 of those people at least

did not make it.

And so the videos that we that we saw

and we were afraid that people

might might actually be dead

on the street there.

It turns out they were

others were taken to area hospitals.

They've had to open up

extra hospital beds.

You have the president of South Korea.

He convened an emergency meeting of

of his of his disaster management team.

They have it

they have a disaster management

medical team on scene here now.

So this is a federal

this is a federal incident.

Undoubtedly got to be one of the worst

that they've seen here

in Seoul in quite some time,

although I don't have

historical statistics

to back that up yet.

But just

the looks on people's faces out here

looks of disbelief

at these scenes of of hundreds

and hundreds

of of emergency medical personnel

and earlier just rows of people's

bodies on the street.

So whether some sort of

media area here, Fred.

Yeah, go ahead. Yes.

So I'm wondering, John,

I just want to make sure I understand.

So you're saying

the party was taking place

inside the hotel.

Something happened

and then there was a stampede

and it was outside in

which people would just start collapsing

or were there people

who who

were physically in trouble

and had been taken out of the building?

And then you saw,

you know,

what appeared to be bodies

on the ground with sheets over

So that's a very good question.

One thing I'll point out to you

is that if you look at

if we can actually give you a wide look,

if you look at the sidewalks around

here, Charlie just said,

you know, it's not it's not a very, very

narrow area here.

And this is an area where earlier

there were videos of people on the ground

So while we're still trying

to piece together from authorities

exactly how this all went down,

what is clear

is that there were a lot of people

crowded into a particular area

and at least 81

people called

saying that they couldn't breathe.

They called emergency services

saying that they had trouble breathing.

You had cardiac arrest you know.

59 people dying.

Were people who fell?

Were they crushed

where most of the deaths

from cardiac arrest?

We're still waiting for the specifics.

Fred.

Clearly, there are a lot of questions

that still need to be answered here.

This is an investigation

that is just getting underway

and they have so much work to do.

Not to mention

notifying the families of those

are really going

to make it home for this Halloween party.

Oh, it's heartbreaking.

Will Ripley, thank you so much.

So, of course,

still trying to figure out what

what may have induced

cardiac arrest or suffocation,

what led to the deaths of now.

59 people there and

so many others injured.