Crowds are usually a nuisance that we have to deal with in our daily activities. There are really no ways to avoid a crowd unless you are a hermit and will never go to a major sporting event, concert or even to see a movie. There are a lot of people in the world, 7.2 billion is the current estimate (United Nations). With that number continuing to increase, it is a certainty that we will run into more crowds in the future.
Ordinarily, crowds cause little problems other than causing slight frustration and delays. However, some crowds can turn deadly. There are multiple examples in the past that show why proper crowd management is important. If the population of the earth is going to increase, then crowd management techniques need to be continually developed to prevent a tragedy that few are aware exists.
A crowd disaster is an event in which people are injured or killed due to forces that manifest themselves in crowded areas. The news media states that these people have been trampled is in the case of a Wal-Mart employee during a Black Friday Sale in 2008. (Fruin, 5) Their deaths however, may be more gruesome than being trampled by 1000 people. The victims are actually suffocated. A condition called compressive asphyxia (Seabrook, 192).
When the crowd forces become great enough people become compressed together so tightly that their chest cavity is not allowed to expand. Thus this person is unable to breath and suffocates in the middle of the crowd. Unlike falling to the ground and being “trampled to death,” victims of compressive asphyxia have been found both standing up in a crowd as well as underneath it. In this instance, a few members of the crowd inadvertently are standing on the victim making it impossible for them to brea...
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...ntioned as well as numerous other crowding tragedies and found ways to make their venues safer. Many venues no longer allow for festival seating, or have designed queuing systems that have ways to disperse crowds. Like everything else in nature, we are not 100% safe from crowding incidents even with all the precautions the venues take. Thankfully, we have been given some warning signs to look for ourselves so that we may be our own last line of defense.
Works Cited
Fruin, John J. “The Causes and Prevention of Crowd Disasters”. Crowdsafe.com. Web. 10 Apr. 2013.
Helbing, Dirk and Pratik Mukerji. “Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster. EPJ Data Science. 1.7. 2012: 1-40. Print
Seabrooke, John. “Crush Point” The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2012. Ed. Dan Ariely. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2012, 190-205. Print.
In West Warwick Rhode Island, on February 20th, 2003, during the performance of the band Great White, a fire broke out that eventually claimed the lives of 100 people and injured an additional 200. The band’s tour manager arranged for, and ignited pyrotechnic props, large fireworks designed to display a shower of sparks. The sparks ignited foam soundproofing near stage. The fire spread quickly. Most were killed either in the crush to exit the building or overcome by fumes while trying to find an exit. The immediate cause was well documented due to witness reports and a videotape that was taken during the concert. In the period that followed the tragedy there were many attempts to fix blame. Following a Grand Jury investigation, several of the parties involved plead guilty to violations of the law and served or are currently sentences in prison.
Drea Knufken’s thesis statement is that “As a society, we’ve acquired an immunity to crisis” (510-512). This means that humans in general, or citizens of the world, have become completely desensitized to disasters, we think of them as just another headline, without any understanding of their impact upon fellow
In conclusion, it is clear that situations like this could easily be prevented with a few vitals steps. The first step in the line of prevention is restriction of flammable materials in nightclubs and other buildings, especially in enclosed spaces. Second is the installation of fire prevention systems—fire extinguishers, sprinkler systems and fire alarms with early notification to the local fire authorities. Also, the prevention of using dangerous pyrotechnics in enclosed spaces is imperative. Finally, the need for sufficient exits is vital to the safety of the people in any building, especially a crowed nightclub.
Kitty Genovese case led to the development of the 911 emergency call system and inspired a long line of research led by psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley around the time of 1970 into what circumstances lead bystanders to help someone in need. They discovered that, the more people available to help, the less likely any individual person would help—a phenomenon they called the “bystander effect.” If you are the only one around when an elderly person stumbles and falls, the responsibility to help is yours alone, but, with more people present, your obligation is less clear. Latané and Darley called this the “diffusion of responsibility” (CSI). A more recent case of the bystander effect was when assault victim Marques Gains laid motionless in the street due to by a hit-and-run; traffic whizzed past along with a few people stopped and seemed to stand over Gaines, who was crumpled near the curb on North State Street. No one tried to lift him from the pavement or block traffic. The lack of action by passers-by cost the hotel cocktail server his life after a cab turned the corner and drove over him. Experts says that a traumatic or odd event occurring in a public setting triggers an array of social and cultural cues and, combined with human nature, often leads to the lack of action by witnesses
The town was especially quiet and no one walked into the town. People in the town close the doors and shuttered the windows as if it was a ghost town. I was wondering if the people here could be filled with hundreds of seats. However, the day of our opening ceremony, the audiences were packed the theater. I was wondering where these people jumped
Bystander inaction is more influenced by the bystander’s response to other observers. The experimenters hoped to inform people of the situational forces that affect people’s behaviors in emergency situations in order to help people overcome forces that result in inaction.
While the man was dangling to his death “the crowd gathered in the street, silent” (Olds 3), and while this silence may represent calmness, it actually represents calamity because the reason they are silent is because of the potential of a death. This understanding can alter the viewpoint of those who are engaged in this poetic suicide, the same way understanding this gargantuan gravity of a neutron star despite its small size can change the viewpoint of the astronomers observing and engaging this mass, when you understand how the details of the star work the way you view the physical properties around it changes
In the early twentieth century, San Francisco, a bustling city full of people with diverse cultures, stood in the midst of the Second Industrial Revolution. At this time, the brilliant inventions of airplanes, automobiles, and radios were changing the everyday lives of many. San Francisco had just recovered from the four-year burden of the bubonic plague (“Bubonic”). However, right when things were getting back to normal, a destructive earthquake hit the city on April 18, 1906. Although the shaking lasted for less than a minute, the devastated city had crumbled buildings and a substantial loss of lives. The San Francisco Earthquake of 1906 had a lasting effect on the city and its people, and it proved to be one of the most catastrophic disasters in history.
We play music loudly with our friends and families at social gatherings and ultimately it creates a friendly and open atmosphere. Now the last thing we would think about would be that at one of these social events one of us may die. In recent years there have been more and more deaths and injuries at musical festivals all throughout the United States. Although the number is much lower than deaths and injuries from automotive accidents they should not be over looked. Music festivals are becoming more and more popular and people are flocking to festivals all around the United States. These music festivals in today’s society have turned into drug infested parties in which people’s live are endangered and people themselves are exposed to drugs and unsafe festival conditions.
On December 3, in full view of a number of witnesses standing within close proximity, Ki-Suck Han, a 58 year-old male entered into an altercation with Naeem Davis, a 30 year-old homeless male at the Times Square subway station. Han was pushed down into the tracks and then struggled and pleaded for help for what was reported to be a full 22 seconds, as witnesses watched, took pictures, and failed to come to his assistance (Petrecca & Eversley, 2012). The man was then hit by the approaching subway train as it dragged into the station. This is a sad example of the Bystander Effect which demonstrates that people are less likely to come to the assistance of another in an emergency situation when other bystanders are present and also perceived to be responsible and able to help (Schneider, Gruman, and Coutts, 2012). Moreover, we are most of the time influenced by Social Loafing. Social loafing is the diffusion of responsibility among a group of people. When a group of people are perceiving an emergency situation, all of them tend to think that others are available to help. Social influence explains that people always look to others to evaluate a situation as a real emergency. We assume that others may know something that we do not know and we measure their reactions before we decide how we will respond. If we noticed that those around us are acting as if it is an emergency, then we will view the situation in the same way and act accordingly. However, if those around us are acting calm, then we may not realize the immediacy of the situation and therefore fail to respond appropriately. Maybe this is the answer to why people did not help the homeless who was attacked by the 58 year- old man. They failed to see the situation as a real emergency, and as a result they did not act
Martin Gansberg's "Thirty-Eight Who Saw Murder Didn't Call the Police" is about a case where a man stabbed a woman three time separated instances; in front of audience of 38 men and woman who did nothing to help the defenseless woman. They all had sorry excuses for apathy of the situation even when the woman yelled that she was dying. They said "’ I didn't want to get involved’" and "’We went to the window to see what was happening’" he said, "’but the light from our bedroom made it difficult to see the street.’" The wife, still apprehensive, added: "’I put out the light and we were able to see better.’" (Gansberg) But in Stanley Milgram and Paul Hollander's "Paralyzed Witnesses" they give reasons as to why these law abiding bystanders got paralyzed and watched as if it were a show of gladiators in the great Coliseum of Rome. As Stanley Milgram and Paul Hollander State “Modern societies are organized as t...
... (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8, 377-383.
Darley, J.M., Latane, B. (1968). Bystander intervention in emergencies: Diffusion of responsibility. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 8 (4), 377-383.
Bystander effect refers to the instance in which there is an emergency and people witnessing don’t respond when there are others around witnessing the same event. This happens because of pluralistic ignorance which is when people assume that there is nothing wrong because others surrounding them don’t look concerned. Two researchers, Latan and Darley, conducted an experiment to further study the bystander effect. In this experiment, Latan and Darley took multiple college students and one at a time, put them into cubicles. In a cubicle next to them there would be a recording device producing noises emulating distress noises in the form of choking. Eighty five percent of the students went to help; this is not an alarming number. The surprising
Stephens, K. (2010), How can the emergency management community use technology to improve resilience?. Retrieved from http://idisaster.wordpress.com/2010/09/23/how-can-we-use-technology-to-improve-community-resilience/