Crowd crushes or stampedes are entirely avoidable, predictable, and preventive. Here are some lessons from the October 29th crush disaster in Seoul.
On the evening of Saturday, October 29, up to 100,000 people, mostly in their teens and twenties, packed into Itaewon’s tiny, sloping alleys for one of the first significant celebrations, Halloween. Chaos broke out just after 10 p.m. on a tiny, steep small street near Itaewon station that leads to a plethora of pubs and clubs from the main road. People tripped and knocked others down, stacking one on top of the other and entrapping them. Others attempted to flee by scaling the sides of the buildings.
The October 29th crush disaster in Seoul., which killed 156 people, including 26 foreigners, has left many asking how safe crowds are in Korea. The globe is still grieving from the night’s terrible crowd crush in Seoul, which killed innocent young people out celebrating Halloween. Leaders from throughout the world have expressed their condolences.
Crowd management necessitates meticulous planning, risk assessment, and emergency protocols. However, there had been no risk assessment at all that night.
What causes crowd crushes?
A crowd is described as “a large number of persons who are in the same location at the same time and whose movements continue for an extended length of time.”
Crowd density is the number of people per square meter in a given crowd. It is an excellent predictor of the likelihood of crowd crush injuries or death in a given crowd.
At crowd densities of seven people per square meter or higher, the risk of crowd-related injuries or deaths is extremely high. A “surprising transition” occurs at this density: individuals’ ability to control their own movement is almost completely lost, and “shock waves” begin to ripple back and forth through the crowd. These waves are defined as “random displacements of crowd members in all possible directions up to twelve meters or more.”
People trapped in a crowd behave like liquids. No one can control his or her own motion or assist others nearby. At about 7 people per square meter, the crowd becomes almost a fluid mass. Shock waves can travel through the masses and lift people off their feet.
People may be lifted out of their shoes and have their clothes ripped off. Breathing becomes difficult due to intense crowd pressures exacerbated by anxiety. Some people become weakened and faint as a result of the heat and thermal insulation provided by their surroundings. It is impossible to get to those who have fallen.
Those in distress must be removed by lifting them up and passing them overhead to the crowd’s edge. As a result, the greatest risk to crowd members in these situations is a medical condition known as “compressive asphyxiation”: being suffocated to death while standing due to the forces exerted by the surrounding crowd.
Venues, spaces, and corridors that allow people to distribute themselves “uniformly over the domain” reduce the likelihood of crowds reaching a high-risk density and, as a result, the risk of injury. Spaces and architectural features that “rigidly confine people within an inadequate space” or force crowds to move through “bottlenecks” on the other hand greatly increase the likelihood that a crowd will reach a critical density and cause a crowd crush.
This continuous forward movement of the back portion of the crowd can put a dangerous amount of pressure on the portion of the crowd that is already tightly packed at the bottleneck.
When crowds reach high-risk densities, people at the back of the crowd may continue to move forward even if those in the front are in severe distress. Indeed, unless the venue has a method of both overseeing and addressing the entire crowd, people at the back of the crowd have virtually no way of knowing that a crisis is unfolding in front of them.
How can these disasters be avoided?
Crowd management necessitates meticulous planning, risk assessment, and emergency protocols. Crowd safety is not challenging. It all starts with preventing dangerous density from accumulating.
A simple management strategy can include knowing the crowd limit, the routes taken, the location itself, the flow of people inside it, and monitoring the crowd density at the moment.
As a result, critical areas with an urgent need for pedestrian traffic channelization can be identified quickly.
Crushes are fully “preventable and avoidable” when police personnel are deployed in advance to ensure the safe and orderly flow of people during an emergence.
Since these safety protocols and features are overlooked, many innocent young people lost their lives.
Why local officials and police did not employ crowd control measures or sufficient personnel?
Itaewon’s district authorities did not deploy any safety patrols, citing the Halloween event as a “phenomenon” rather than a “festival,” which would have necessitated an official crowd-control strategy. Seoul’s City Hall has a real-time monitoring system that analyzes mobile phone data to anticipate crowd size, but it was also not used that night.
The deployment of so few police officers demonstrated that officials were unprepared, despite knowing ahead of time that there would be a large crowd due to the recent relaxation of COVID-19 limitations.
In addition to allocating more personnel, police and authorities in the Yongsan district, which controls Itaewon, could have prohibited automobiles from some streets and taken other measures to alleviate crowding on narrow roads like the one where the deaths happened.
However, the 137 police deployed in Itaewon were assigned to monitor crime, with a particular emphasis on drug usage, which meant that no one was looking after pedestrian safety.
The government’s role in addressing mass crises through effective crisis communication
A robust safety culture will always serve a nation well, and if well founded, it should be resilient in the face of unanticipated disaster, but it cannot guarantee immunity to every setback.
Crowd disasters, like many other disasters, are mostly man-made and can be prevented with proper planning, management, awareness, compliance, training, and instruction. Avoiding mass crises and disasters should be a shared duty of all levels of government, corporations, and individuals.
Safety in public places is a constant worry that does not allow for complacency.
