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Stampede — 8 Comments

  1. Some jihadis are making reference to Katrina being an act of God on their behalf. I wonder if this holds true for the stampede and to the recent tsunami that killed tens of thousands, mostly muslims, to the earthquakes in Iran and to the stampedes that occur frequently during the islamic haj in mecca?

  2. When people are desperate or scared anything can happen the the results are often horrific. Americans tend to think that “that” can’t happen here, but it can and it did!

  3. > What is it that gives man the ability to rise above this herd nature? Because, surely we do, on most days.

    Training, m’boy, training.

    The same thing that allows a soldier to stand under fire instead of running like a terrified colt and getting his ass blown off.

  4. “There is something so primal in the idea of a crowd being spooked by a sudden storm, and thus panicing themselves into mass hysteria.”

    I really don’t think it was “hysteria” and “panic” in the way I usually understand those word to mean. The crowd wasn’t “spooked” by a rainstorm, I’m sure, they were just trying to stay dry. No single person did anything wrong or necessarily panicked in any way. It was just a case of too many people moving into too small a space in too short a period of time. If the people at the back had known the people at the front were being crushed to death they would have backed away. No amount of rain would have panicked them into killing their fellow travelers. The problem in these situations is the lack of communication between one part of the crowd and the other. The situation is able to develop and be exacerbated because of the imperfect flow of information. The people in the back simply don’t know the people in the front are in trouble, and the panic that does begin once people start dying is only a symptom of the problem, and not the problem itself.

    I saw a very interesting show (on the History Channel, I believe) that posited that the great and unexpected victory of Henry V against a numerically superior French force at Agincourt could basically be explained as a crowd control issue. During the course of the battle, the French army was funneled into a narrow area by the natural contours of the land and met the same disaster as the crowd at the Minsk railway station. They defeated themselves (or were defeated by circumstances) as much as they were defeated by the English.

    (Well, in searching the web to find out more information about the show, it looks like the people at crowddynamics were the force behind that, too. No surprise, actually. See Agincourt.)

  5. When The Levee Breaks, The Madness of Crowds sets in:

    “Somebody fell down on the concrete floor and the first blood was shed. People were slipping over and trampling those lying on the floor…People were falling at the feet of the crowd. …there were people literally smeared against the walls, pressed into the floor, …Meanwhile, screams of those who were unable to escape on their own, kept echoing from this hellish meat grinder…”We are soccer fans, so we know what to do in a crowd–cover your head with hands and make your way to the exit.”

    A wise woman I know commented once that we are frightened because of the “chaos and anarchy that lurks so closely beneath what may be in fact an all-too-thin veneer of civilization …”

    There is something so primal in the idea of a crowd being spooked by a sudden storm, and thus panicing themselves into mass hysteria. It’s almost as if they were no better than a herd of horses.

    Hmmm.

    What is it that gives man the ability to rise above this herd nature? Because, surely we do, on most days.

  6. – of course some in certain camps are blaming this on Bush, i.e. there would no terrorist threats if it weren’t for him. I think it is a MSM notion and speculation about there being a bomb threat.

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