I can't bring myself to watch the video footage, the news reports are bringing enough horrific memories back. Fans at a major event crushed to death;police/organisational incompetence in dealing with the expected crowd suspected; attempts to blame the fans for the disaster already well underway (it was the reports of 'well if they hadn't been trying to climb over the fence this never would have happened' that jolted me awake and got me out of bed and posting angry rants on the internet); reports of the police 'sitting on the bridge doing nothing' (from here. ) Isn't it sickening watching history repeating itself over and over again?
Stampede at Love Parade - 21 people reported killed (updated)
- Thread starter Orang Utan
- Start date
I can't bring myself to watch the video footage, the news reports are bringing enough horrific memories back. Fans at a major event crushed to death;police/organisational incompetence in dealing with the expected crowd suspected; attempts to blame the fans for the disaster already well underway (it was the reports of 'well if they hadn't been trying to climb over the fence this never would have happened' that jolted me awake and got me out of bed and posting angry rants on the internet); reports of the police 'sitting on the bridge doing nothing' (from here. ) Isn't it sickening watching history repeating itself over and over again?
Clint Iguana
not an undercover cop
19 now.
difficult to know what to say at this moment.
difficult to know what to say at this moment.
Louloubelle
Well-Known Member
Horrific.
I wonder if it is ever possible to totally prevent the possibility of something like this happening at huge events where there are massive numbers of people attending?
A few years back I was crushed against a wall under a bridge at Notting Hill carnival. It was terrifying and it went on for maybe 5 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. The worst thing was, just before it eased, I was so crushed that after breathing out I couldn't inhale. There were too many people pushing against me for me to expand my lungs and breathe. There was a woman with kids next to me and she was hysterically screaming and trying to push people away from her kids, some of them were getting pushed onto me.
I think that on that occasion the problem was 2 big crowds moving in opposite directions converging under a bridge and the people in the middle and at the edges, like me, were getting crushed. Nothing as terrible as yesterdays event, obviously, and clearly some serious mistakes were make, but I think it is pretty much impossible to control huge crowds of excited people. You can minimise the risk of people getting crushed but I wonder whether it is realistic to imagine that you can guarantee safety at such a huge event.
I wonder if it is ever possible to totally prevent the possibility of something like this happening at huge events where there are massive numbers of people attending?
A few years back I was crushed against a wall under a bridge at Notting Hill carnival. It was terrifying and it went on for maybe 5 minutes, but it felt like an eternity. The worst thing was, just before it eased, I was so crushed that after breathing out I couldn't inhale. There were too many people pushing against me for me to expand my lungs and breathe. There was a woman with kids next to me and she was hysterically screaming and trying to push people away from her kids, some of them were getting pushed onto me.
I think that on that occasion the problem was 2 big crowds moving in opposite directions converging under a bridge and the people in the middle and at the edges, like me, were getting crushed. Nothing as terrible as yesterdays event, obviously, and clearly some serious mistakes were make, but I think it is pretty much impossible to control huge crowds of excited people. You can minimise the risk of people getting crushed but I wonder whether it is realistic to imagine that you can guarantee safety at such a huge event.
of course not. but having a single narrow entrance to an event where more than a million people were expected makes it almost inevitable.Horrific.
I wonder if it is ever possible to totally prevent the possibility of something like this happening at huge events where there are massive numbers of people attending?
the organisers & licensing authority who allowed this to go ahead were clearly utterly out of their depths. i wonder what the health & safety / risk planning regime is like in germany? for all it's faults, i can't see the british authorities letting such an obviously flawed event go ahead...
ska invita
back on the other side
this event is on every year with similar numbers - i wonder what happened this time that doesnt usually?
bi0boy
Power User
This is the first time it's been a closed event, and the capacity was 500,000 with over 1 million attendees expected.
flutterbye
English Breakfast
There were certainly other ways in, into the back of the second stage, the second stage area wasnt overcrowded and it was a huge area.
flutterbye
English Breakfast
"The Love Parade has always been a joyful and peaceful party, but in future would always be overshadowed by yesterday's events," , Rainer Schaller said.
"Out of respect for the victims, their families and friends, we are going to discontinue the event in the future, and that means the end of the Love Parade."
"Out of respect for the victims, their families and friends, we are going to discontinue the event in the future, and that means the end of the Love Parade."
Onket
Je suis [CONTENT REMOVED]
Does seem bizarre to fence in a free event. We've been doing it here for years, of course. The cost of the fencing has been 'used' as a way of effectively stopping some free events from happening.
Terrible stuff, anyway. Just didn't know what to say when I saw it on the news at the weekend.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
RIP all who died, and condolences to everyone who's lost friends and loved ones.
I could be wrong, as info is sketchy, but from the information that's out there, this sounds like a situation where applying proper crowd control procedures could easily have prevented the situation becoming life threatening even with just the one entrance / exit.
basically in a situation such as this it would be entirely irresponsible to attempt to prevent overcrowding in the main arena site by closing off the end of the tunnel closest to the festival without first closing of entrance at the other end of the tunnel and further back to create room for people to then exit the tunnel. If such a closure was deemed necessary, then sufficient steward / security / police resources should have been moved to the opposite end of the tunnel to restrict access from a point where any build up in crowd pressure could be released in a different direction, with stewards posted further back (ie on the approach to the tunnel) prior to the closure taking place to tell people that the entrance was closed, and reduce any crowd build up at the point where it is closed itself.
This is very basic crowd management stuff, and the hazard posed by this tunnel leading up to the entrance should have been obvious in any risk assessment for the event, with the above measures incorporated into the crowd safety policy of the event.
I seriously can't believe that an organisation with the experience of the love parade would not have planned for this situation, and with all press reports quoting the police as having closed off the entrance, it looks strongly to me as if the police have acted on their own judgement without thinking it through properly, probably against the planned response of the festival organisers and in doing so have caused a bad situation to become life threatening resulting in 20 deaths. The love parade organisers are also obviously also at fault for not having taken control of the situation earlier, and had deployed sufficient stewarding and security resources on the other side of the tunnel to monitor and control the situation from that end earlier, but it looks to me like the police took the decision that ultimately resulted in these deaths.
I could be wrong, as info is sketchy, but from the information that's out there, this sounds like a situation where applying proper crowd control procedures could easily have prevented the situation becoming life threatening even with just the one entrance / exit.
basically in a situation such as this it would be entirely irresponsible to attempt to prevent overcrowding in the main arena site by closing off the end of the tunnel closest to the festival without first closing of entrance at the other end of the tunnel and further back to create room for people to then exit the tunnel. If such a closure was deemed necessary, then sufficient steward / security / police resources should have been moved to the opposite end of the tunnel to restrict access from a point where any build up in crowd pressure could be released in a different direction, with stewards posted further back (ie on the approach to the tunnel) prior to the closure taking place to tell people that the entrance was closed, and reduce any crowd build up at the point where it is closed itself.
This is very basic crowd management stuff, and the hazard posed by this tunnel leading up to the entrance should have been obvious in any risk assessment for the event, with the above measures incorporated into the crowd safety policy of the event.
I seriously can't believe that an organisation with the experience of the love parade would not have planned for this situation, and with all press reports quoting the police as having closed off the entrance, it looks strongly to me as if the police have acted on their own judgement without thinking it through properly, probably against the planned response of the festival organisers and in doing so have caused a bad situation to become life threatening resulting in 20 deaths. The love parade organisers are also obviously also at fault for not having taken control of the situation earlier, and had deployed sufficient stewarding and security resources on the other side of the tunnel to monitor and control the situation from that end earlier, but it looks to me like the police took the decision that ultimately resulted in these deaths.
Superdupastupor
fun to funky
google embedded ads on U-tube really fucking rankle sometimes
Hotels in Duisberg anyone ??
gross negilgence by the organisers. just how much would tempoary staircasing have cost, to circumvent the tunnel bottle neck
Hotels in Duisberg anyone ??
gross negilgence by the organisers. just how much would tempoary staircasing have cost, to circumvent the tunnel bottle neck
Corrected. Which is why, as above, if I were investigating I'd be looking at police, not organisers', actions most closely.
BlackSpecs
The DogFather
Death toll at 21 now...
free spirit
more tea vicar?
eh?
I was under the impression that this tunnel was the entrance and exit point, and that the police had closed it off at the entry point to the festival, thereby causing a major crush as people blocked from gaining entry to the festival turned round and tried to exit via the same tunnel that thousands more people were still trying to enter by.
Do you have a link to whatever gave you the idea they'd closed off the exit and not the entrance?
pinkmonkey
2.4 hour party person
Uhmm, well, I went to the Love Parade in Berlin in 2001 (or 1999, really can't remember which date). 1 million people and virtually no proper toilets anywhere. One of the reasons they moved the Parade from Berlin was because the Tiergarten (park where it was held) could not cope with the amount of piss from the punters (everyone went in the bushes, pretty much), it was fucking up the plants and trees. Uhh, get some loos perhaps? I'm all for unfenced festivals, but there has to be a middle ground between total unpreparedness and fenced off prison, surely?
free spirit
more tea vicar?
yeah, but that was 10 years ago, since when Love Parade have been involved in organising major largescale events in several countries as well as Germany, and this really is very basic level crowd management stuff that in essence is taught even to volunteer stewards on the glastonbury steward training courses.
If they didn't have a contingency plan for this eventuality in their risk assessment / event manul / crowd safety policy, or if they then ignored this policy, or the policy was flawed and was followed resulting in this terrible situation then the person in charge of crowd safety for Love Parade is likely to rightly be spending a long time in prison, possibly joined by the board (depending upon germany's manslaughter / corporate manslaughter).
As someone who's been the person with ultimate responsibility / liability for crowd safety at reasonably largescale events (not quite to this scale, but not that far off on occasion), I just can't believe that someone specialising in such activities would have made such a fundamental error at least at the planning stages. This combined with my personal experience of the reaction some inexperienced police forces can have when confronted with a situation such as this - ie ignore everything in the event manual, don't consult with event control, and just intervene as they see fit - plus the press reports stating that the police closed off the entrance, leads me to my initial conclusion that it's likely IMO that while the Love Parade should obviously have been more on top of the situation, it seems likely that the police ultimately took the action that caused a bad situation to turn deadly.
I may be proved wrong, but given that it's a situation where on one side there's a specialist events organisation with over 20 years experience of running events of this scale and nature vs a police in a relatively small provincial city which is likely to have virtually no comparable experience to draw on, and one of them has panicked and made such a tragic basic error, I know where I'd be looking first if I was conducting a truly independent enquiry rather than a whitewash / coverup of police incompetence / negligence.
essentially IMO its going to boil down to who gave the order to close the entry point, and who was responsible for enacting that order in the incompetent manor that it was done in, combined with whether they followed agreed procedures for such an eventuality or not.
If they didn't have a contingency plan for this eventuality in their risk assessment / event manul / crowd safety policy, or if they then ignored this policy, or the policy was flawed and was followed resulting in this terrible situation then the person in charge of crowd safety for Love Parade is likely to rightly be spending a long time in prison, possibly joined by the board (depending upon germany's manslaughter / corporate manslaughter).
As someone who's been the person with ultimate responsibility / liability for crowd safety at reasonably largescale events (not quite to this scale, but not that far off on occasion), I just can't believe that someone specialising in such activities would have made such a fundamental error at least at the planning stages. This combined with my personal experience of the reaction some inexperienced police forces can have when confronted with a situation such as this - ie ignore everything in the event manual, don't consult with event control, and just intervene as they see fit - plus the press reports stating that the police closed off the entrance, leads me to my initial conclusion that it's likely IMO that while the Love Parade should obviously have been more on top of the situation, it seems likely that the police ultimately took the action that caused a bad situation to turn deadly.
I may be proved wrong, but given that it's a situation where on one side there's a specialist events organisation with over 20 years experience of running events of this scale and nature vs a police in a relatively small provincial city which is likely to have virtually no comparable experience to draw on, and one of them has panicked and made such a tragic basic error, I know where I'd be looking first if I was conducting a truly independent enquiry rather than a whitewash / coverup of police incompetence / negligence.
essentially IMO its going to boil down to who gave the order to close the entry point, and who was responsible for enacting that order in the incompetent manor that it was done in, combined with whether they followed agreed procedures for such an eventuality or not.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
fwiw - IME it's virtually standard practice for the copper in charge at events to read the event manual for the first time while sat in event control on the day of the event (that's if they get time to read it while the event's actually running around them) if they haven't actually been directly involved in the licensing process for the event, and the chances of coppers further down the chain of command having actually read it are slim to nonexistent.
Reports say that the police closed off the exit from the tunnel - while merely making an announcement at the entrance to the tunnel that people shouldn't go in. Like up-for-it ravers are going to listen to that
free spirit
more tea vicar?
ok, but the exit from the tunnel that they closed off was on the side of the tunnel leading to the entrance to the event, not the other side, so it was the entrance to the event they closed off.Reports say that the police closed off the exit from the tunnel - while merely making an announcement at the entrance to the tunnel that people shouldn't go in. Like up-for-it ravers are going to listen to that
saying it was the exit that was closed would make it seem like it was the opposite side of the tunnel, where people exiting the event would leave from, which wasn't the case as far as I can see.
either way, I think we're talking about the same thing, but it does make a major difference as closing the other side of the tunnel first would have been the correct procedure (as well as temporarily preventing anyone from exiting the main love parade site towards the tunnel).
This is what I've been saying since I first heard about it. Stupid fuckers (on the face of it, Herr Dr. Richter) shutting off the exit from a tunnel which people are piling (and pilling) into
What did the bastards expect? 
free spirit
more tea vicar?
yep.
tbh thinking about it, if I'd been running this I think I'd have wanted to have had a channel running all the way down one side of the tunnel from the entrance to a safe exit point separated from the main tunnel by mojo barrier, with stewarded gateways at regular intervals to act as an escape lane in the event of problems, ensure a smooth flow of people in and out of the venue (with the flow being reversed at exit time), and ensure that additional security / stewards / police would still be able to get through the tunnel in the event of overcrowding to close the tunnel from the opposite end.
This would have cost £10-20k to put in place, but would almost certainly have prevented this situation from occurring as I'm thinking that part of the problem may well have been that they simply couldn't get staff through the tunnel to close it off from the other side, and didn't have staff in the tunnel to actually monitor the situation. In terms of the flow thing, I can't remember the figures now, but there's academic research been done on crowd movement which shows that having people moving both ways through a narrow space seriously reduces the flow rate of people in both directions, and increases the risk of congestion / the space blocking up as this did vs having separate walkways for each direction.
So the organisers probably do need to share a good proportion of the blame for not having done this.
tbh thinking about it, if I'd been running this I think I'd have wanted to have had a channel running all the way down one side of the tunnel from the entrance to a safe exit point separated from the main tunnel by mojo barrier, with stewarded gateways at regular intervals to act as an escape lane in the event of problems, ensure a smooth flow of people in and out of the venue (with the flow being reversed at exit time), and ensure that additional security / stewards / police would still be able to get through the tunnel in the event of overcrowding to close the tunnel from the opposite end.
This would have cost £10-20k to put in place, but would almost certainly have prevented this situation from occurring as I'm thinking that part of the problem may well have been that they simply couldn't get staff through the tunnel to close it off from the other side, and didn't have staff in the tunnel to actually monitor the situation. In terms of the flow thing, I can't remember the figures now, but there's academic research been done on crowd movement which shows that having people moving both ways through a narrow space seriously reduces the flow rate of people in both directions, and increases the risk of congestion / the space blocking up as this did vs having separate walkways for each direction.
So the organisers probably do need to share a good proportion of the blame for not having done this.
free spirit
more tea vicar?
also, why is this thread in world politics and not in the festivals forum where it'd be more likely to get noticed by people who might find this discussion valuable - ie the many people on this forum who work / volunteer at festivals and need to learn lessons from disasters like this in order to ensure that they aren't repeated?
