I was in a crush once. Glastonbury, at an intersection, not a stage. Much smaller than this and nothing like as bad. Scary though, quickly. I and some others stood up on bins (trash cans) to coordinate, and managed to diffuse the crush. The thing that amazed me was how fast the crowd changed. Some were in panic, for good reason with the crush. Just a few meters back and folk were just pushing to get through with no idea what was happening in front of them. I know I’m preaching to the wrong crowd, but WATCH and LISTEN and look out for one another. When something bad happens in a big crowd, somebody will notice and try to do something about it.
What a horrible, stupid way to go. My heart goes out to the families, friends and other attendees. How sad.
A study based on video from the Hajj disaster in Mina/Makkah reveals some morbidly fascinating physics behind crowd-panic:
They reveal two subsequent, sudden transitions from laminar to stop-and-go and ``turbulent’’ flows, which question many previous simulation models. While the transition from laminar to stop-and-go flows supports a recent model of bottleneck flows [D. Helbing et al., Phys. Rev. Lett. 97, 168001 (2006)], the subsequent transition to turbulent flow is not yet well understood. It is responsible for sudden eruptions of pressure release comparable to earthquakes,
I’ve seen annotated videos based on this study. Fascinating and scary stuff.
Similar experience here. I made the mistake of going to J&R Cameras near city hall in Manhattan just as a ticker tape parade for the Rangers was going on. I emerged from the subway right into the crowd but thought I could make my way through it. A few minutes later I felt the oxygen being squeezed out of my body by the crowd. Terrifying.
I gave up, worked my way orthogonally from my original route and out of the crowd toward the Brooklyn Bridge. Once I got out there was no way I was going back so I crossed the bridge on foot, caught the train on the other side and went back home. I promised myself never to put myself in that situation again.
There’s multiple examples where reacting that way triggered a riot.
There has been a weird ass burst of cases like this. Either people just poking others with needles. Typically in the butt. Or even more disturbing sneaking up and injecting semen into others. Again, typically about the butt.
It seems to be some sort if maniac fetish. I’d heard of a couple of instances of that in the past. But seldom with needles.
There’s been a half dozen or more cases reported since the pandemic started. So there’s maybe a copycat/follow on thing happening because of the coverage.
The other end of it is this has been a long standing urban myth. Particularly around the early HIV epidemic. But also with claims that people run around forcibly injecting CHILDREN and WOMEN with DRUGS to get them addicted.
So I wouldn’t put to much stock in it till there’s confirmation. The (seemingly) actual cases that have cropped up recently are more stalked and snuck up on a jogger, than ran around sticking people at random.
Once in a big city square in China. I forget the event (might have been a gathering to watch a telecast of China in the World Cup in 2002?). A crowd of thousands was moving across the square and there was a low fence bisecting the square that the crowd couldn’t see, so the crowd just keep pushing toward the fence and the people by the fence couldn’t get over it fast enough to get out of the way. Fortunately a friend and I were significantly taller than the average person in the crowd and were able to see an escape route and push the rest of our friends that way. I don’t think anybody ended up getting hurt but it could easily have turned into a disaster if just a few people had panicked.
A second time was in Times Square in NYC. The NFL had set up a bunch of booths (like a cross between a big trade show and a carnival) in the square to promote the 2014 Super Bowl and the paths around that stuff were in some places ridiculously narrow. My son and I were just trying to walk through and got caught in a bottleneck where only one or two people at a time could squeeze through, and there were hundreds trying to get through in both directions. Again I don’t think anyone got hurt, and this one didn’t even involve a big crowd—it was only slightly more than a typical pedestrian flow in Times Square. But those situations really are terrifying.
I’ve also been to a lot of music festivals but never felt in danger in those. Then again my music festival tastes run more toward chill hippie music and less the kind of shows that have mosh pits. I can’t imagine a show with a mosh-prone crowd that doesn’t have big buffer areas to make sure people can get out safely.
Yeah, I didn’t get it why the one ‘security’ person was tripping the people running, shoving others every once in a while. What was all that about? Seems to me that they’s lawsuits waiting in the wings.
Funny, too, how them cowboy cops on the hosses couldn’t do a damn thing. Is this what it will look like when the masses with pitchforks come after the bankers and other 0.01 percenters?
I suspect that Mr. Scott will be deemphasizing whatever song it was that had the “ain’t not mosh pit if no injuries” lyric going forward. That one definitely worked better in Fortnite.
I think the memory of that must’ve been fresh in '87. A friend went to see U2 then (Joshua Tree tour). When you got close enough to the front of the stage, your paths forward were tunnels leading under the stage and back out on the main floor, further back.
I remember waking up the morning after 9 kids died at the Pearl Jam gig in Roskilde 2000 - grey sky and izy drizzle, my friend, Stina, crying endlessly, she’d been a guard the nite before seeing them die right in front of her unable to do anything… Eddie Wedder and the band…. crying …. begging the crowd to pull back but too late….
I thought we all learned a lesson back then and standard security upped, well-well….
I would be unbelievably suspicious of that. Almost every time a case like this comes up it proves to not be supported by the physical evidence later, but the fear in the public remains. The main claim of this right now is a guard for whom a claim they were attacked and rendered unconscious would be exculpatory and neatly aligns with popular police lies about narcotics. The idea of trying to successfully administer an IV drug in such a situation by surprise should strike everyone as wildly unlikely.
Would it have to be intravenous, though? I’m not up on my injectionable drugs, so have no idea.
Either way, your points about public fear and officials lying to escape culpability are spot on.
If it is being fixed by naloxone, it would probably have to be an opiate. There really aren’t any opiates that fit the description, sudden effect, administered in passing, with an intramuscular injection. On the other hand panic attacks can cause someone to lose consciousness and naloxone administration can be unpleasant enough to wake them up.
Charitably they were just trying to slow people down (for… some reason) and were incredibly inept and half-hearted about it. But really, it seems like they were pissed and feeling powerless and just wanted to hurt people a bit and assert their power. (I feel like security jobs sometimes end up attracting people for some of the same reasons people become cops.)
As a species, I do not think we qualify any longer as sane or survival oriented from an evolutionary standpoint.
Huge masses of people at sporting events, music events and religious events have always been insanely dangerous if spooked or even if they just get wind of something that attracts significant numbers, others will crowd in until it becomes a chain reaction.
Ugh. These facts make the coverage that much more annoying. I was listening to the radio at lunch and reporters repeated the claim about the guard, but hadn’t consulted any medical professionals who could speak to whether or not the “random injections” story was even a feasible cause of the guard’s collapse.
The security guard grabbing/tripping people was part of an earlier incident, in which the crowd waiting to pass the main security check-in on the way in began pushing through the VIP gates. The guard was trying to keep people from entering. (And doing a really bad, really hazardous job of it.)
And the horse guards were, eventually, fairly effective. Some of the longer crowd videos show them managing to round up and eventually eject most of the gate-crashers, but the most popular viral videos end before then.
