At 9:15 p.m. on November 11, 1977, a freight train bound for Gwangju exploded while stopped at Iri Station (in what was then Iri City, now Iksan). The train, operated by Korea Explosives Co. (a forerunner of today's Hanwha), was carrying roughly 40 tons of high-powered explosives, including dynamite and electric detonators — and, remarkably, no properly designated person was overseeing the shipment while it sat waiting to depart. The blast killed 59 people and injured 1,343. Buildings within a 500-meter radius were flattened — 811 homes completely destroyed, 780 half-destroyed, and 6,042 partially damaged, thousands of dwellings in all — leaving about 7,900 people — 1,674 households — homeless.
Alongside the 1993 Gupo Station train derailment, this remains one of the deadliest disasters in Korean railway history. The following year, in 1978, the destroyed station was rebuilt about 100 meters south of its original site — the exact spot where Iksan Station stands today. That a city was leveled almost overnight, and then rebuilt a station right next to its own ruins, left its mark even on the city's name: when Iri City merged with Iksan County in 1995 to form the present-day city of Iksan, part of the motivation behind adopting the new name is said to have been a desire to move past the "Iri" name so closely associated with the disaster. Standing in front of Iksan Station today, it looks like an ordinary regional railway station — but buried underneath it is the memory of a night this city was flattened, and the story of how it got back up.