Experts say they see common factors in tragedies similar to the crowd surge at a Houston music festival that left eight people dead and scores injured.
Tragedies like the one Friday night at the Astroland Music Festival have been happening for a long time. In 1979, 11 people died in a scramble to enter a Cincinnati, Ohio, concert by The Who. At the Hillsborough soccer stadium in England, a human crush in 1989 led to nearly 100 deaths. In 2015, a collision of two crowds at the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia caused more than 2,400 deaths, based on an Associated Press count of media reports and officials’ comments.
When a crowd surges, the force can be strong enough to bend steel. It can also hit people from two directions: one from the rear of the crowd pushing forward and another from the front of the crowd trying to escape. If some people have fallen, causing a pileup, pressure can even come from above. Caught in the middle are people’s lungs.A U.K. inquiry into the Hillsborough tragedy found that a form of asphyxiation was listed as an underlying cause in the vast majority of the deaths.
“Survivors described being gradually compressed, unable to move, their heads ‘locked between arms and shoulders ... faces gasping in panic,’” the report said. “They were aware that people were dying and they were helpless to save themselves.”“My research covers over 100 years of disasters, and invariably they all come down to very similar characteristics,” said G.
A sudden downpour of rain or hail could send everyone running for cover, as was the case when 93 soccer fans in Nepal were killed while surging toward locked stadium exits in 1988. Or, in an example that Still said is much more common in the United States than other countries, someone yells, “He has a gun!”
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