A 19-year-old woman has described the terrifying experience of being trapped in a crush of people at Falls Festival, Lorne, in the crowd stampede that injured more than 60 people, 19 of them seriously.
Ruby Campbell, pictured above, was exiting the crowded Grand Theatre stage at the end of DMA’s set when the crush began, and found herself trapped under a pile of people and fighting to breathe.
She told Fairfax that she was attempting to leave when:
“… two people tripped in front of me, I didn’t want to stand on them, but the crowd was pushing, so I just fell. We were just like dominoes, people fell and fell.”
Campbell described hearing the screams of people around her as they shouted “I am dying, I am dying”, and said that she attempted to escape the crush but could not.
“By this stage, I was just clawing at anyone and anything to get out, but it was getting heavier and heavier. I remember thinking ‘stay calm and breathe normally’ and … then I heard a snap underneath me. I was on top of a person and their bone snapped. There were 10 people on top of me …I felt the air get squished out of me. I just sort of accepted it. I just wanted it to be over. You’d almost die than have to go through that.”
Campbell escaped with bruises but no broken bones, as did her friend Sophie Baldock, who said of the experience:
“The DMA’s set had just ended and so everyone was just going back down the hill. Ruby was in front of me and she went down and I was trying to pull her up and then I fell down as well. We were on the ground and there was this flooding of people piling on top. We were stuck under there for at least five minutes. I couldn’t even see the sky, just covered in people.”
Baldock, also 19, described the experience of being trapped in the crush:
“Someone wet their pants because they were so scared and I was covered in someone else’s blood and urine. The girl next to me, she was screaming that she just wanted to live, I was trying to hold her hand and she went limp. I saw them trying to resuscitate her later as she was unconscious. I couldn’t breathe, I was hyperventilating, it felt like drowning. I thought I was going to die.”
Both Campbell and Baldock were critical of Falls Fest organisers, saying that the tent was already “compact and squishy”, with little space to move, and that they did not receive any assistance from staff.
Baldock told Fairfax that she was rescued by other patrons, and did not see any security or medical staff in the area, and that organisers did not appear to be around to help or guide.
She continued:
“We went for about a kilometre to the medical tent and they gave us two bandaids and said there was nothing else they could do. And there were 50 people in that tent, all covered in blood and there [were] not enough staff there to help everyone.”
19-year-old Olivia Jones, who was also trapped in the crush, told ABC News:
“I was under there for about three minutes just gasping for air and I eventually passed out and was dragged out and slapped in the face a few times to be woken up. There was a girl next to me who was just lying on the ground screaming for help with her hand out and she just went white in the face and she had her arm up asking for help and her arm just dropped to the ground and she just stared at me straight in the eyes. I thought she was dead. She was just unconscious, lying there.”
Falls Festival organisers say that they are “modifying stage exit points” at the Lorne site and removing part of the tent in question for the remainder of this year’s event.
