cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17045970
From Wikipedia
Stampede events that involve humans are extremely rare and are unlikely to be fatal.[5] According to Keith Still, professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University, “If you look at the analysis, I’ve not seen any instances of the cause of mass fatalities being a stampede. People don’t die because they panic. They panic because they are dying”.[5]
Paul Torrens, a professor at the Center for Geospatial Information Science at the University of Maryland, remarks that “the idea of the hysterical mass is a myth”.[5] Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.[16][17] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.[18][19][20] […] [M]ost major crowd disasters can be prevented by simple crowd management strategies.[22] Crushes can be prevented by organization and traffic control, such as barriers. […] Such incidents are invariably the product of organisational failures.[4]
What’s the expectation here? That there should be orderly exits and moderation in people attempting to evacuate an area when they are dying? I’m not seeing how these 2 dots are connected.
Yes, available exits are key and people can panic when they can see they are trapped and suffocating.
When organizers of mass gatherings funnel people into areas without exits and people start getting crushed they panic because they are dying. This happens during protests when the police direct them into dead ends or cut off avenues of exit. Alao happens at sporting event with large crowds.
Basically, people are pretty good at dispersing under pressure when they have places to go.
Basically if you read the whole wikipedia article nearly all of these so called stampedes are actually crowd collapses where people are packed in too tightly and when a couple people lose their balance and fall it almost has a domino effect and people often die of injuries or asphyxiation. And panic doesn’t cause these, it’s having crowds at too high of a concentration.
At even higher concentrations, you have crowd crush, where people who are standing upright get so packed they are unable to breathe and are asphyxiated to death.
I was commenting more on the quote by the Professor where he says they are panicking because they are dying. To me that means there’s a scenario where a shooter has started killing people indiscriminately or something like that and people are panicking in an attempt to leave. It seems an odd quote/reference to use when documenting organizational failures.
People are panicking because they are dying of asyphyxiation.
But according to the wikipedia article the media tends to report on it as if the panic caused the deaths. When it’s the opposite.
From the wikipedia;
Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.[16][17] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.[18][19][20]
They’re dying from the heat and pressure of everyone around them, and from not being able to leave to cool down or get water or more space.
I guess it’s making a point of saying that if there’s an organised system in place, people will maintain their composure and leave without issue, even in an emergency.
It’s when there’s a lack of organisation and a bottleneck that means people start to get crushed, then all hell breaks loose when they truly panic.
Basically, the lack of organisation and a safe route out is what causes the panic where people stampede, not the emergency itself.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victoria_Hall_disaster
Doesn’t have to be an emergency. 183 children died rushing to get free toys.
Definition of poor organization resulting in death.
I can’t name the last time someone has died in a “stampede”. It’s probably all the egress and occupancy regulations we have to mitigate them.
Crowd crushes which are often wrongly called stampedes still happen, even if “first world” countries. A recentish US-based example would be Travis Scott’s Astroworld concert.
That fucker egged it on too. I can’t believe he didn’t face any real consequences for that.
No he didn’t. He literally pauses the show to see if everything’s ok. He’s an artist on stage with a million stage lights in his face and none of his crew or managers, or back stage people, or security, telling him that anything is happening.
Reddit just decided that it was the scary black rapper’s fault rather than LIVE NATION, the literal largest concert organizers in the world who were contractually and legally responsible for organizing the venue, security, crowd management, the emergency response plan, etc.
And guess what the court cases have shown? That Live Nation had exactly zero crowd management plan and didn’t stop the show when they should have.
You are literally just falling for the exact same pro business, blame someone other than the organizers, attitude that OP is posting about.
The last time in Germany, at least as I can remember, was the 2010 Loveparade disaster in Duisburg, that has happened due to enormous errors made by the organisers.
And the police.
Definitely.
This one in South Korea is pretty recent (October 2022).
Yes, those help the vast majority of the time, even during extremely dangerous situations like buildings being on fire.
There are still occasional incidents when organizers don’t plan for the crowds or when anti riot tactics are used to restrict the ability to disperse while using tear gas and other techniques that are designed to make people panic so they will disperse, intentionally causing a stampede.
Put another way, with proper crowd management people will not be dying in the first place and so there will be no trigger to start a panic.