The stampede meant people had space to escape, but that was not the case in Itaewon, he said. The more people there are in the crowd, the greater the crowd’s crushing power.
“The whole crowd goes down as one. When you’re in an enclosed space, people can’t get up again,” Still says.
One person said in a Twitter thread on Saturday that he was in the crowd. explained People are “falling down like dominoes and screaming.”
“I felt like I was really crushed.” Tweet“And I breathed through the hole and cried and thought I was going to die.” Someone nearby picked me up.
During a surge, the pressure from above and below people in a crowd makes breathing difficult as your lungs need space to expand. It takes about six minutes to cause compressive or restrictive asphyxiation, the presumed cause of death in crowd crash deaths, Still said.
Others may injure a limb and lose consciousness while struggling to breathe to escape a crowd. It takes about 30 seconds of compression to restrict blood flow to the brain and make people in a crowd feel lightheaded.
Crowd surges can be caused by many tight situations, such as when people push others or when someone trips. It is not caused by people who want to. These reactions usually occur after the crowd begins to disintegrate, says Still.
“People don’t die because they panic,” he said. “They panic because they’re dying, so when their bodies fall or people bump into each other, they struggle to get up and their arms and legs get twisted.”
130 people died at a soccer stadium in Indonesia this month, and 10 died at the Astroworld Festival in Texas last year.
At Astroworld, most of the fans who died were close to each other in the south quadrant of the venue. There were metal barriers around the venue that squeezed people in as the crowds swarmed closer and there was no way to regulate the flow of people.
The crash in Itaewon happened on the street, but the crowd was so dense that movement was very restricted and there was no way for people to get out vertically.
Over the past year, crowds have gathered more frequently since pandemic restrictions were eased significantly. This is another factor in the recent crowd surge. The long restrictions have probably led to more people attending events such as the Halloween celebrations in Itaewon, Still said.
He added that the increase in large gatherings now allowed underscores the need for crowd management training, which declined when the pandemic hit because large events were rare.
Professor Martin Amos, who studies crowds at the University of Northumbria in the UK, says such large-scale events require proper planning and people trained to manage crowds.
In a statement to The Washington Post, Amos said, “The general point is that these incidents will continue to occur unless we put in place adequate crowd control processes to anticipate, detect and prevent dangerously high crowd densities. .
