Hajj Stampede:Why Crowds Run

[summer]

www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2015/09/hajj-stampede-crowd-disasters/407542/




On Thursday, more than 700 people were killed in a stampede outside the holy city of Mecca. The disaster took place during the annual Hajj pilgrimage, which draws about 2 million Muslims to Saudi Arabia each year.

Although this was the deadliest Hajj episode in a quarter-century, it is a story that is sadly familiar. In Mina, where Thursday’s disaster took place, stampedes killed more than 360 people in 2006 and 244 in 2004. In the worst Hajj stampede, 1,426 pilgrims were crushed in a pedestrian tunnel leading to Mecca in 1990.


Worldwide, human stampedes are so common—and so confounding—that they’ve inspired their own body of academic research within the larger field of study on crowd behavior. According to one2010 study led by Edbert Hsu of the Johns Hopkins School of Medicine, 215 human stampedes took place worldwide between 1980 and 2007, leading to more than 7,000 deaths and 14,000 injuries. Stampedes have been evaluated as a public health issue, and as a sociological phenomenon. Others have asked whether the right algorithm could help identify dangerous crowd surges before they turn deadly.

Large religious gatherings are a particular stampede danger in the developing world. A 2013 paper out of India, for example, found that 79 percent of stampedes in that country have taken place at religious events, as opposed to political or entertainment-related events. In 2014, 178 people were killed in various Indian stampedes, and the country’s annual total death toll from stampedes has topped 300 four times in the past decade. According to Hsu’s research, the deadliest stampedes are concentrated in Southeast Asia and in Africa, and at religious events. But they can and do occur anywhere, as evidenced by the notorious New York stampede at a 2008 Wal-Mart Black Friday sale, which killed a store employee. With a growing global population concentrated in crowded cities, Hsu and his team found in 2010 that stampede incidents were on the rise.

Stampedes are captivating in part because, though somewhat common, they are also unpredictable. Here’s how John Seabrook described them in a harrowing 2011 articlein The New Yorker:

The transition from fraternal smooshing to suffocating pressure—a “crowd crush”—often occurs almost imperceptibly; one doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late to escape. Something interrupts the flow of pedestrians—a blocked exit, say, while an escalator continues to feed people into a closed-off space. ... At a certain point, you feel pressure on all sides of your body, and realize that you can’t raise your arms. You are pulled off your feet, and welded into a block of people. The crowd force squeezes the air out of your lungs, and you struggle to take another breath.

For remote observers, the terror of the phenomenon is compounded by the fact that it’s so hard to know whom to blame. In Saudi Arabia, the country’s health minister chalked up the latest incident to a failure to follow instructions, and the head of the Central Hajj Committee blamed “some pilgrims from African nationalities.” But others pointed to the Saudi government’s failure to manage the event. (It doesn’t help the Saudis’ claims of competence that a crane collapse at Mecca’s Grand Mosquekilled 109 people just a few weeks ago.)

Crowds often take the blame for what are actually failures of planning and logistics.

The current discussion echoes what Seabrook concluded: Crowds often take the blame for what are actually failures of planning and logistics. Press accounts, he found, often characterize stampedes as “panics,” with a frenzied mob surging forward with no regard to whom they trample. But one recent analysis of crowd disasters, which focused on 2010 stampede that killed 21 people at the Love Parade music festival in Germany, found that the disaster had more to do with physics than psychology: “Video recordings show that people stumbled and piled up due to a ‘domino effect’, resulting from a phenomenon called ‘crowd turbulence’ or ‘crowd quake.’ This was the consequence of amplifying feedback and cascading effects, which are typical for systemic instabilities.”

Blocked exits, overcrowded spaces, and insufficient security and emergency services all exacerbate the dangers. Event organizers, managers, governments, promoters, designers, and other entities defend themselves vigorously in the aftermath of these disasters. But the crowd, so brutally cooperative in one moment, rarely speaks in such unison afterward. With no one to defend it, the crowd can be personified as violent or dumb.

And although it’s easy to assume that stampedes are caused by panicked crowds running away from something in fear, Seabrook found that, in general, that’s only true in fires. In most stampedes, the crowd is churning toward something. In the United States and Europe, stampedes are rarer than they are in the developing world, and they don’t tend to happen on religious occasions. Americans and Europeans stampede for other causes: Black Friday sales, rock concerts, and sporting events. No one person decides to stampede. But if there’s a connection between what attracts a crowd and what a society holds dear, then stampedes are a deadly illustration of those values.

[YeahSure]

Interesting article! Thanks for posting.

[savan]

I watched an interesting documentary on Netflix about the Hillsborough disaster that occurred at an English soccer game. The documentary spends a lot of time on the investigation and subsequent cover up of the cause of the stampede. I believe one of the major causes was someone opening an extra gate that increased the flood of people into a closed area. There was no panic, just not enough for room for all the people and no exit for those at the front. It caused almost 100 deaths. I'm slightly claustrophobic so the idea of getting caught up in a stampede is horrifying.

[WanderingWinoZ]

we were at my siblings college football game a few weekends ago & they let the freshman rush the field before the game & there were several thousand kids running full speed across the field to get hte best position to greet the them & them a 2nd time to get into the stands. It seemed SOOOO dangerous to me! We saw a small group of kids fall down & the ensuing madness to try to stop the crowd & get them back on their feet. I can't believe the school lets something like that go on with the liability issues...

[ttt]

Well, this justifies my deep desire to avoid crowds.

[nursecramer]

I found the last 3 sentences of the article to be very contradictory to the rest of the piece. The rest of the piece was about how they are dependent on features of the location, not the whims of the crowd, and then he throws in a line about values? Give me a break. It seems more indicative of the purposes of those venues. In America, there aren't very many holy sites, certainly not that generate pilgrimages on a large scale, so religious venues tend to serve far fewer people-- hundreds at a time, not thousands like sports venues. Regardless of the type of venue, it's purpose, or the values and motives of the crowd attending, stampeding almost always comes down to failures of a venue to handle the capacity of a crowd.

[thebulldog]

Sept 26, 2015 23:48:28 GMT -5 savan said:

I watched an interesting documentary on Netflix about the Hillsborough disaster that occurred at an English soccer game. The documentary spends a lot of time on the investigation and subsequent cover up of the cause of the stampede. I believe one of the major causes was someone opening an extra gate that increased the flood of people into a closed area. There was no panic, just not enough for room for all the people and no exit for those at the front. It caused almost 100 deaths. I'm slightly claustrophobic so the idea of getting caught up in a stampede is horrifying.

Dh and I watched this too (it was an ESPN 30 for 30 doc i think). It was such a horrible story with images of people being pressed up against the fence to death. One woman was somehow let through an opening but the rest of her friends as the game died.


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[erbear]

The description of what happens made my heart flutter. Crowds terrify me

[MixedBerryJam]

Crowds in general cause me huge anxiety. I was listening to an NPR story and they explained that to escape a stampede you want to travel across it. That wouldn't work at all with the picture in that article. OMG. My heart is racing just thinking about this. How terrifying a stampede must be.

[AAM2012]

Very interesting. Thanks for sharing.

[patbutcher]

Sept 27, 2015 13:00:42 GMT -5 thebulldog said:

Sept 26, 2015 23:48:28 GMT -5 savan said:

I watched an interesting documentary on Netflix about the Hillsborough disaster that occurred at an English soccer game. The documentary spends a lot of time on the investigation and subsequent cover up of the cause of the stampede. I believe one of the major causes was someone opening an extra gate that increased the flood of people into a closed area. There was no panic, just not enough for room for all the people and no exit for those at the front. It caused almost 100 deaths. I'm slightly claustrophobic so the idea of getting caught up in a stampede is horrifying.

Dh and I watched this too (it was an ESPN 30 for 30 doc i think). It was such a horrible story with images of people being pressed up against the fence to death. One woman was somehow let through an opening but the rest of her friends as the game died.


Sent from my SM-G900P using proboards

I remember so clearly when Hillsborough happened and I was only 9. I think people tried to scale the fence and the police were hitting them back too? The whole thing is horrifying.