Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [87]
Firefighter Tommy Walker found himself inside a ministampede most unexpectedly one Sunday afternoon in Kansas City, Missouri. He and a friend were off duty, sitting in a booth eating lunch at a busy pizzeria when a water heater blew up in the basement. No one knew what had happened. They had just heard an explosion, louder than fireworks, which shook the building. People started heading for the door. At first, the crowd was quiet, Walker remembers. There was no smoke or fire, no other threat aside from the initial noise. But very quickly, as the crowd clogged up at the small doorway and the exit slowed, the dynamics shifted. Walker watched from his seat as people started trampling over one another in their rush to get out. He could have been watching the Manchester evacuation. “People started yelling. People tripped over chairs, and they were just walked over. Good God, I kind of liken it to a cow going down in a cattle truck,” he says. “Those cows usually perish.”
Suddenly, Walker’s friend, a fellow firefighter, got up to leave too. The aisle was jammed with people, so his friend started walking over the table. Walker couldn’t believe what he was seeing. He grabbed his friend. “Sit the fuck down!” he told him. “There is no smoke, there is no fire, and that crowd is a lot more dangerous than anything else here.” His friend sat down.
The crowd thinned out a few moments later. There was still no actual fire, smoke, or any threat at all. Walker and his friend walked outside. There, on the sidewalk, were the wounded. Ambulances began to arrive. A handful of people had broken bones and sustained other injuries—not from the explosion, which turned out to be minor, but from the crowd. Says Walker: “Literally it was a nothing incident that turned into complete chaos in five seconds.”
It is hard to re-create panic in a laboratory without violating basic ethical principles. But after the Manchester crash, aviation safety researchers tried their best. In a series of experiments, they ran volunteers through evacuation drills in a mock-up of the plane. They couldn’t do it. People remained fairly calm, as they do in most evacuations.
But then something amazing happened. The researchers offered the volunteers $10 if they were among the first to get out of the plane. Things changed. This time, people began tripping and falling as they raced off the plane, piling up in the doorway and halting the evacuation—just as the Manchester passengers had done! So even without the threat of death, people could become their own worst enemy. The volunteers thought they might not make it out in time to get the money; perhaps they also started to feel helpless as the line out the door slowed; and then they may have felt the isolation that accompanies an every-man-for-himself rampage. The prize injected competition into the crowd, just as fire creates competition for air and space. The competition motivated people to move faster, which increased the density of the crowd. Then physics took over.
Tragedy at IKEA
Money, as it turns out, often has deadly consequences for crowds. The list of fatal crowd crushes over the past twenty years is stacked with events that should have been frivolous—giveaways, sales, store openings. On September 2, 2004, three people were killed at the opening of a new IKEA store in Saudi Arabia. In England, just four months later, a man was stabbed in a crowd crush at the opening of another IKEA. Some six thousand customers had shown up for the midnight opening of the largest IKEA in the country. Witnesses reported people punching each other in the face to get a sofa. The chaos finally ended when IKEA shut down the store and riot police dispersed the crowd.