Apparently a stampede of some kind happened when police tried to shut off access to the festivaal grounds through a long tunnel.
I can think of very little more terrifying than thousands of stampeding German technopop fans.
Is it wrong that I captioned this in my head as “Love Parade - Ur doing it wrong”?
German media now has the death toll at 19, 300+ injured.
The entire city of Duisburg is pop. 500,000. There were 1.3 million people at this event, going in through one entrance, which happened to be a fairly narrow tunnel. This was a disaster waiting to happen.
I’ve been in a few of these situations myself*, thankfully without incident. But with a lot of fear. Vast crowds really give me the willies.
Some of the survivors are saying they were stuck inside the tunnel for up to two hours before the disaster unfolded. Then the cops sealed off the tunnel. Pics - warning, quite disturbing.
Looking at past stampede disasters, it’s almost like they made sure to include every single ingredient required: confinement, exclusivity of egress, conflicting instructions from authorities, but worse, expecting a crowd to behave as a rational individual. They don’t; they’re a different beast entirely and the majority of people involved in them have no control over what they’re doing.
*1. I got stuck, jammed in a vast crowd of people on a bridge between two fields at Glastonbury Festival for an entire hour, unable to move and hardly able to breathe. 2. Leaving a one-day festival at Slane Castle in Ireland, I ended up with my feet not even touching the ground and swept along by the crowd right into the middle of several garbage fires. 3. Worst of all, I missed the Lan Kwai Fong New Year’s Eve disaster by two minutes. The Halloween prior to the disaster, I was in Lan Kwai Fong and said to my girlfriend, as I pulled her into a bar to wait for as long as it took until the crowds dispersed, “this is another Hillsborough waiting to happen”. I was right. 
Some other points from today’s news reports
- the venue had a permit for 250k people; the management expected 1.4 million.
- an alternative safety/crowd control plan by police and fire department had been turned down by the city as requiring too much manpower i.e. cost to the event that the city did not want the promoter to cancel for cost reasons.
- video monitoring of the tunnel had been proposed but considered too costly
- the immediate cause of the panic seems to have been that people tried to bypass the entrance to the venue, temporarily closed for overcrowding, by climbing up, then fell down from as high as 9 m. That panicked the people they fell down on. Apparently such an event was not anticipated - people at a rave were expected to behave soberly and responsibly :smack:
Now there are 21 fatalities - one woman died on Monday and another last night. 13 women and 8 men; autopsies say they all died of crushed chests.
Reports on deliberations in the city administration seem to show that Duisburg’s mayor and the head of the city’s public order department overruled strong objections by the city’s building department, police and fire brigade. The final permit was only issued on Saturday morning, when hundreds of thousands of people were already on their way to Duisburg. Last year the city of Bochum had cancelled the planned Love Parade there due to safety concerns.
Looks to me like there will be a high profile criminal trial of the heads of the city administration and possibly of the event’s organizer some time next year, or possibly the year after next. It’s going to take some time - for the Bad Reichenhall ice rink collapse of 2 January 2006 the trial was in 2008 and there is still an appeal unresolved against one engineer’s conviction.
jjimm, regarding #2, I’ve been there, done that on several occasions coming out of the Stretford End and heading over the railway bridge, back in the 70’s. Scary and exhilarating when you reach the other side; an absolute nightmare if you don’t.
I wonder if we’ll ever determine what started the panic?
Impatient bastards, I expect. If the people at the back are pushing the people in front of them, and they try to make room by pushing the people in front of them, eventually you’ll get to the stage where people realise that they’re going to die if the people behind them keep shoving. And then they panic.
“Impatient bastards” seems a bit harsh. How impatient is it to expect to be let into a public event in an orderly and safe fashion?
The use of judgemental terms like “impatient” is counter to my “expecting a crowd to behave as a rational individual” theory. A crowd of people has no brain. It’s more like an amoeba than a collection of individuals, since once in the crowd, most crowd members have absolutely no control over where they’re going.
The big problem appearantly was that people coming from all over the city had to go through this bottleneck of a tunnel and at the same time people from the other side were trying to leave the festival ground through this same tunnel. You read that right, this mega event had exactly 1 entrance/exit.
Yes, there was a bunch of mistakes made deliberatly: the former head of police was against this, so the mayor called him a kill-joy in thwarting this big chance for the city of Duisburg to get famous (well, now they are infamous), and sent him to Siberia (figuratvly, not literally; he has retired now), so the new chief of police went along
- the requirements for exit ways to be a minimum width was relaxed by the city for the organizer
- the organiser wanted to steer a crowd partly intoxicated, bent on having fun, with loudspeakers in the tunnel, instead of using helpers!
- apparently, at the end of the tunnel, where the ramp lead to the festival area itself, helpers were needed to quickly distribute the masses spilling out from the tunnel, but none were there.
- the police union (very critical) has stated that the organizer used their own, poorly trained “helpers” instead of police trained in crowd control. Also, that police in every major event try to disperse the crowds to prevent mass panic (if that is the cause) and stampedes, while the organizer did his best to herd the people in - the whole festival place was surrounded by non-exit things. (sounds to me looking at the diagrams, that they wanted to make sure that the city of Duisburg itself and its decent citizens wouldn’t be bothered by drunk, loud techno fans, let alone one window smashed, so everything had to be herded together and contained).
- The Deutsche Bahn was very worried in advance that excited fans would not be willing to listen and cross the tracks from the festival area (an old freight station) to the special trains at Duisburg main station. This thankfully didn’t happen but shows additional problems in the security layout.
- Otherwise mandatory plans for the fire brigade and police in case of problems were not handed over by the organiser.
I really, really hope they punish the people responsible for putting finances ahead of people’s live. This is unexcusable because everybody with half a brain knows that the love parade has over 1 mio. people every time (between 1.2 and 1.4 mio), so limiting it to 200 000 is beyond dumb; we have rules and tons of information on events like these, exit ways, crowd behaviour etc., from past (good and bad) mass events. We can and could have handled this better.
Sadly, all that is happening now is blame-shifting. The first thing the mayor said on the evening of the catastrophe was “Nothing was done wrong”, and everybody only points fingers and stonewalls.
I’ve seen several near misses at various events in Washington DC over the years. Just last Sunday, Celtling and I were at the swimming pool with a friend and her daughter. A bad thunder storm came up very suddenly; I looked up at the sky and saw what looked like a huge dark gray wave rolling up on a beach. I pointed and said “tsunami!” and just about everybody saw it at the same moment.
We got out of the pool and started gathering our things. When we were ready to go I put my arm out to stop them - the stampede was just about to go by, and there was no way we could carry all the stuff and keep the girls safe with only four arms between us.
So we stood in the rain and watched with fear and awe the danger of a human mob. This was only about 150 people, and it was astounding. No one was hurt, thank goodness.
And although I would have thought anybody was crazy to stay in the water, there was nothing yet but clouds and rain, there was no sign yet of lightning or even thunder. People just panicked, and all rushed for the two small doors into the clubhouse at the same moment.
**Edited to remove hijack
Crowds are very scary. I was at the fateful Who concert in 1979 in Cincinnati and was at the back of the crowd and didn’t get in the crush. I was really hesitant to even go to the concert as our tickets were for the unassigned seats, all my previous concert experiences were assigned seating at the various venues. I have never liked big crowds and was basically talked into going with my brother, my BF and my brothers fiance.
To this day, I will hang back and let the trampling herd go on its way before I bother trying to go … to the extent of being made very uncomfortable at getting priority on and off airplanes because of needing assistance- previously I always waited to be last on and last off to avoid being pressured by others.
Not sure if it qualifies as a phobia about crowds or not though. I just don’t like being pushed around to the extent of not going into a concert or whatever just to avoid crowds, and I do my christmas shopping either online or during the early part of the year just to avoid the damned crowds.