Seoul: At least 146 killed in crowd crush during Halloween festivities
theguardian.com
theguardian.com
The crowds started getting thick as I started down the narrow Center-gai street heading toward the station. Maybe half the people were in costume, and I took pictures of some of the more amusing getups. The mood was cheerful and relaxed, and people were not noticeably drunk. The average age was probably around eighteen.
Before I realized it, the crowd became so tight that it was difficult to move. Our bodies were pressed against each other. People in Tokyo are used to such intense crowding on rush-hour trains, but this was the first time I had ever experienced it on an open street.
Fortunately everyone remained calm and I was able to gradually push my way to the station in about an hour--the walk would normally have taken only five minutes. But I was keenly aware that, through no fault of any individual, the crush could have easily turned into a nightmare.
My condolences to the people in Seoul.
In a false fire alarm you have the emergency services responding, possibly pulling them away from real emergencies, possibly fire suppression systems engaged adding property damage and cleanup, and everyone evacuating the premises wasting peoples time.
For a crowd-crush protocol I’m imagining something like this. If you see someone being crushed or fallen down and trampled you raise your hand. Possibly with some hand signal like a fist with an extended pinkie finger to disambiguate other reasons to raise a hand (like dancing at a concert for example). If you see someone giving the crowd-crush signal you also give the crowd-crush signal, this way it propagates throughout the crowd. In addition to giving the signal you will also stop moving and stand in place until the issue has resolved. At most a protocol like this would waste a few minutes of peoples time in a false positive.
(Also most people grossly underestimate this kind of danger - by the time someone in the center realizes they're in trouble, it would be too late.)
I doubt any animal of any species, if they were aware of their own kind being killed in large numbers nearby, would not shut up and pay close attention for the sake of their own safety if nothing else...
But perhaps I'm missing the point and this is the sub-thread for racist tropes/talking points. Why can't all minorities be more like Asians?
Bonus points when the perceived population homogeneity is used as a reason why universal healthcare works "over there" but couldn't possibly work here. It's ignorant and racist as soon as it's given even a cursory examination.
It's literally how our previous mayor went out, and he didn't even manslaughter 153 people.
> everyone turn around, people are being killed
I wonder if this would worsen the danger as people push to get away from the crush while others are still pushing from the back (as they haven't been made aware of the situation). But the fact that people are in the back pushing in the first place still sickens me.
I'm sure everyone in the crowd was aware that it was getting dangerous. And everyone just tried to get out and encountered other people facing the same issue, coming the other way.
The cause is lack of proper crowd management because if you view the cause as just "humans are fundamentally flawed", then you are basically just accepting the deaths because we're not going to fix humans...
In other words, just think it through? Nobody is endangering their own life to get closer to an amusement. Well, maybe in some other sense, like standing closer to a dangerous firework before it goes off or something. But not in the sense of being extremely uncomfortable and feeling rising panic, and then moving forward towards to get some more uncomfortable panic feeling because, welp, gotta get to the bar. Packed crowds are extremely distressing long before you get asphyxiated in them.
> In other words, just think it through? Nobody is endangering their own life to get closer to an amusement.
I didn't claim people were endangering their own lives to get closer to an amusement (although that's probably true as well in some sense), I claimed that they are disregarding others' safety, which is actually probably too weak a phrasing since it suggests passivity rather than the fact of the matter: people who push (even gently) to get closer to some stage/etc actively and lethally endanger others for the sole purpose of being closer to an amusement.
You are either ignorant, or victim blaming. Go read wikipedia about crowd collapse.
Completely false. The reason people don't die at a concert is because the organisers control the crowd density. The density is high, but not so high that death is all but inevitable (as was the density in Itaewon on saturday, which can be confirmed from photographic evidence of the scene).
They have crowd barriers and security staff and it's well lit, so they can see if anyone is struggling and help them over. Even if the crowd density is relatively safe, localised disturbance (eg. someone tripping over, losing a shoe) etc can cause a dangerous situation. So even when the density is at a level considered "risky but safe", you need vigilant security staff and a space to overflow people to (space created by crowd barriers.)
If the density is too high, or the measures to protect people are insufficient. It is the fault of the organisers, and that is manslaughter.
This is just called "risk management", you tolerate some level of risk, so that people can do the activities that they enjoy, while allowing them to have the reasonable expectation that they won't die.
The effect is made worse in 2 dimensions because of converging field lines having a force amplification effect.
1. passively propagate forward whatever force is being applied to them from behind
2. actively resist by applying some amount of counterforce (this doesn't mean the person in front of them experiences 0 force, but only that the force they experience is less)
3. actively add one's own force in addition to whatever force they are experiencing from behind
I'm positing that (3) is selfish even at low forces, even if you're near the back of the line, and your scenario of 1k people doing (3) with an individual contribution of 1lb of force describes 1k wrecklessly selfish people.
The moral I'm proposing--and it's a really fucking easy one--is don't fucking push people, even gently.
The drugs could be squarely ruled out even as the very first reports came out. Even in the most hedonistic parties, you couldn't get 50 people to take timed doses of the same substance and have them stay together in the very same location until poisoning set in for a group of people of vastly different body weights at the same time...
But if you're talking about a collective response, how about you know... regulating and managing large dangerous crowds like this (I was there last year and it was unsafe then, too...). Or regulating the nightclubs (which are all diabolical death traps, too).
They should be blocking off the entire itaewon-ro from noksapyeong to the hooker hill and keeping track of the people entering and leaving and have a protocol for getting first responders in. A nightclub fire would have been equally or even more deadly, the toll could have been in the high hundreds in that event..
You can't rely on spoken signals, mainly because of other noise and broken phone effect. Something like raising your hands and crossing them could work. People who are close to the crush will quickly agree and raise their hands, so it's unlikely that one troll could make a false alarm since you would need maybe ~30 or so people to get the signal started. This signal could propagate through a huge crowd in just a minute or two.
Initially I thought about drones with arrows and loudspeakers but it seems a bit too niche of a usecase to have a swarm of drones for. Also doesn't quite work in all conditions.
I had a lot of mini crush experiences in primary school. Students holding doors for fun and everyone trying to push through. People jumping on top of each other and making human piles. I think these are all good experiences to understand how crowds work, even at small scales. I think schools could teach this kind of protocol and practice it. It's also important that this doesn't cause a mass panic and a stampede so drills are necessary.
I’m much taller than most which helps with getting air but I was shocked to experience how hard it was to get out of the crowd, you essentially have to shove your way to the back. People will yell at you but you have to just think about yourself to get out of a surge.
Music festivals in Europe (at least 5 countries in familiar with) build barricades to prevent surges at festivals.
This shows there's a barricade part way back from the main stage at Roskilde Festival in Denmark:
https://www.etnow.com/news/2016/3/mojo-barriers-secures-thre...
I think I saw barricades like that at Coachella, definitely a good way to limit this.
Thankfully there were vigilant security guards to pull me to safety.
An hour later I read in chat that there was a stampede in Seoul at the Halloween gathering. Pape removed the recorded video and clips, but apparently the clips and vod are mirrored somewhere.
There a tragic thing happening, you're on a live streaming platform and no you can't show what happened because that would be a bannable offense, the world is fucked up.
But where do they fall amongst all other causes of mortality? Are they in the top 100 causes of death? Top 1000? Do the crowd crushes of street festivals make it an activity as risky as say mountain climbing per hour that you're taking part?
It's awful & absurd. But... crowd dynamics are hard, our impacts are extremely hard to judge, only tall people get any info, & i respect that, those absurd difficulties of knowing wtf is going on, even though the aftermath is so obviously horrific. Being sensitive & thoughtful is the best humanity, but it is hard.