Cheonan E Land Logistics Center Fire Fully Extinguished
- Seoyeon Kim
- Nov 19
- 3 min read
Nov 19, 2025
Seoyeon Kim
On the morning of 15 November 2025, a major fire broke out at the E-Land Fashion Logistics Center in Cheonan, South Chungcheong Province. The fire started at about 6:08 a.m. on the fourth floor of the building in Pungse Industrial Complex, after smoke was detected and the fire alarm sounded. A staff member quickly called emergency services, and within minutes the local fire authorities declared a Level 1 response, later raising it to Level 2 as the situation grew more serious.
This logistics center was one of the largest fashion warehouses in Asia. It had one basement level and four floors above ground, with a total floor area of about 193,000 square meters, which is roughly the size of 27 football fields. Inside, the company stored more than 11 million items, including clothing and shoes for well known brands such as New Balance and other E-Land labels. Because these goods were mostly textiles and cardboard boxes, they acted like fuel and allowed the flames to spread very quickly through the building.
Firefighters faced a very difficult task. At the peak of the response, around 150 fire trucks and 430 firefighters were mobilized to the scene. They managed to bring the main flames under control by about 3:30 p.m. on the first day, around nine and a half hours after the fire started. However, they could not declare the fire fully extinguished at that time because large parts of the structure were still burning deep inside. Moreover, the steel frame and floors had been exposed to high heat for many hours, so there was a serious risk that the building could collapse at any moment. For safety reasons, firefighters often had to stay outside the building, using heavy equipment to open up parts of the structure while spraying huge amounts of water from the outside. After working continuously for three days, the authorities finally declared the fire completely extinguished at 6:11 p.m. on 17 November, about 60 hours after it first began. By that time, the warehouse was almost entirely destroyed, with only a blackened skeleton of the building remaining. It is believed that nearly all of the more than 11 million stored items were burned, so the economic damage is expected to be very large. Fortunately, there were no deaths or injuries, because only a few workers were in the building at the time, and they were able to escape safely soon after calling 119.
The fire has also caused major disruption to E-Land’s business operations. With the main fashion logistics hub destroyed, the company has announced that some deliveries will be delayed and some orders may even have to be canceled. To reduce the impact on customers, E-Land is allowing people to cancel affected orders without any fee, while trying to move operations to other warehouses and speed up production at factories.
For now, investigators are waiting for the site to be fully stabilized before entering the ruins to look for the exact cause of the fire. The police and the National Forensic Service are expected to carry out a joint on-site investigation once it is safe to go inside. This case shows how vulnerable large logistics centers that store huge amounts of flammable goods can be, and it raises important questions about fire safety systems, building design, and emergency response in modern supply chains.
