Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [83]
Because he is Christian, Still is not allowed to actually attend the hajj. But he has spent many months in Saudi Arabia, working with Muslim engineers and watching thousands of hours of video footage from some three hundred cameras poised over the pilgrims’ heads. The more he learned, the more he realized the crowd crush had more to do with physics than psychology.
As long as human beings have at least one square yard of space each, they can control their own movements. With less than one square yard of space per person, people lose the ability to counter the jostling of others. Small lurches get amplified. After 11:53 that morning, Hussain and Sadiq felt shock waves pulse through the crowd. At that point, the crowd became unstable. It would have been surprising if no one had gotten hurt.
Ironically, people can actually cause more problems at this point by trying to help one another. Eddies are created when people try to form protective rings around women, the injured, or the elderly. The same thing happens when groups of people link arms. In 2004, Farid Currimbhoy, a businessman from Minnesota, and his wife, a Montessori teacher, got caught in a crush in jamarat. When another man from their American tour group fell to the ground, Currimbhoy and the man’s wife began frantically trying to rescue him. They found that the only way they could do it was by force. “We were pushing and shoving trying to prevent people from trampling on him.”
One of the big problems in a crowd is the lack of communication. The people in the back have no way of knowing that someone in the front has fallen; all they see is a small space open up, where the person used to be, and so they push forward, putting more pressure on the fallen. That’s what happened in 1990. Seven people walking across an overcrowded bridge fell when a railing collapsed. They landed at the mouth of a pedestrian tunnel leading to jamarat. The pileup caused the crowd to come to a standstill, but no one at the other end of the tunnel knew about the problem. So they kept trudging forward, strangling more than fourteen hundred people.
People who die in stampedes do not usually die from trampling. They die from asphyxiation. The pressure from all sides makes it impossible to breathe, much like getting squeezed in a trash compactor. Their lungs get compressed, and their blood runs out of oxygen. The compounded force of just five people is enough to kill a person. Pressure builds exponentially, so a crowd quickly picks up the same amount of force as a Mack truck. Humans can lose consciousness after being compressed for just thirty seconds. They become brain dead after about six minutes. They can die without ever falling down.
Once you are in a crowd crush, there is little you can do to save yourself. If possible, Still recommends gradually working your way to the outside of the crowd by stepping sideways as the crowd moves backward.
Panic can happen even without a crowd, in wide open space, as we’ll see. But in almost every case, it is a symptom of a larger problem. In fact, the reason that so many disaster researchers are loath to talk about panic is that the word is a conversation killer. The crowd panicked, end of story. But there is a problem underneath the panic. But the problem was almost always preventable. Just like hurricanes don’t have to kill people, crowds don’t have to crush.
The closer you look at the crowd, the less irrational the behavior looks. If caught in a suffocating crush of humanity, is it irrational to try to survive, even if the only way to do that is by clawing on top of people? Certainly not. So does this mean that the crowd’s behavior is irrelevant? Is a stampede simply inevitable at a certain crowd density? Is panic a myth after all?
Stampedes