Let’s say you’re at Groovin. You approach the Moolin Rouge tent bang on 11am, prepped to secure a delicious patch of real estate right up the front for Client Liaison‘s 5:35pm set.
As the day filters on, you slowly slither your way through the crowd towards the front. By 4:47pm, you’re three bodies from the railing, and to get there, you managed to piss off only three flower-crowned punters. Nice one.
It’s getting close to the set time, and more and more folk are cramming into the tent. Rubber necking, you see the crowd has swelled enormously (and is absolutely heaving, mind you) and you’re stuck in this spot, balls to balls, like a sticky sardine.
If you’re not a claustrophobe, you may well like this scenario. But it can be more dangerous than you imagine.
The YouTubers at HowStuffWorks have released a new vid that explains the phenomenon of the ‘Crowd Crush‘ – something tragic that can occur in densely crowded spaces:
Basically, this phenom can occur when there’s more than six people per square metre in a crowd. Once you get more than six bodies in this limited space, individuals begin to lose their ability to move freely. The crowd then acts like jelly – moving as one. It limits your arms moving from your sides, and eventually inhibits your lungs from inflating and deflating – leading to suffocation.
Further to that, if one person falls over in this configuration, they can create a hole leading to ‘Progressive Crowd Collapse‘ – the people who were formerly leaning on this fallen person fall too, creating a domino effect where the people unfortunate enough to be at the bottom can be crushed.
We’ve seen this happen time and time again – like the Hillsborough stadium disaster of 1989 in Sheffield, England which claimed 96 lives and and more recently, the Love Parade festival of 2010 in Germany that claimed 21 lives.
The above vid explains that there’s a misconception about how people die in crowds – it’s not because of mass panic or stampedes. “If you have enough room to run over your fellow humans to get from point A to point B, there’s probably enough room for those fellow humans to get out the way,” explains the vid. “In fact, you can suffocate in a crowd crush from a very calm crowd that’s just entered a bottle neck in a narrow corridor trying to get out of an exit. People just quietly die pinned up against other people.”
Thankfully, this certainly did not happen at Groovin this year. Adequate crowd control measures and specially designed venues limit the possibility of this kind of tragedy happening.
But lets say you did find yourself in this sitch. What can you do?
“Crowd researchers suggest that when you’re entering a crowd, try to keep quiet so you can listen ahead to any people who may be calling for help, or saying move back,” HowStuffWorks explains.
It mightn’t be the most prime of spots, but staking your ground near left or right-hand side railing is safer than being in the middle of the fray. Moving parallel to the stage, instead of pushing back, is the safest way to go if you get the inkling things are getting out of hand. If you fall down, don’t scream – instead, protect ya neck, head and vitals by crawling into the foetal possie till it’s clear to stand up again.
and once you do stand up, you can go back to doing what you do best
Source: HowStuffWorks.
Photo: The Simpsons.
