Andong:Walking with a cane, 84-year-old apple farmer Kim Mi-ja surveys the wreckage of her village, which was reduced to rubble and covered in ash by South Korea’s worst wildfires.Kim built her house in Chumok-ri village herself when she first moved there from the city but, like most houses in the area, it was totally destroyed by the blazes that killed 28 people.My heart feels like it’s going to burst even now speaking about it,” she told AFP.Wildfires tore through much of the southeast over the past week, destroying an ancient temple and priceless national treasures, threatening UNESCO-listed villages and burning numerous small villages to the ground.The inferno has also laid bare South Korea’s demographic crisis and regional disparities: it is a super-aged society with the world’s lowest birth rate, and rural areas are both underpopulated and disproportionately elderly. Just over half of South Korea’s entire population lives in the greater Seoul area and the countryside has been hollowed out, with families moving to cities for better jobs and education opportunities.Most of the victims of the fire, which hit deeply rural Andong and Uiseong hardest, were “in their 60s and 70s”, an official from the Korea Forest Service told AFP.
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