Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [88]
Is it true that there is not much IKEA can do about customers who behave “like animals”? There is a reason stampedes happen over and over again in the same locations, says crowd expert Still. The problem lies in the design of the space and the management of the crowd. Simply put: too many people are moving through too small a space too quickly. There are plenty of practical solutions for these problems, at jamarat or at IKEA, says Still. One of the easiest fixes is to allow more time for the crowd to pass through. Also, traffic should be one-way, to avoid the turmoil of counterflow. Putting a column in front of an exit is an elegant way to help prevent clogging. In every case, communication between organizers and with the crowd is critical. Officials need to constantly monitor the crowd’s movement and quickly relieve pressure points. The New Year’s Eve celebration in Times Square in New York City is a model event, Still says. Police funnel over half a million revelers into separate viewing pens. Once people leave a pen, they cannot come back. That rule reduces the amount of traffic flow. At police headquarters, meanwhile, about seventy officers monitor live feeds of the crowd from dozens of cameras.
We understand how to prevent crowd crushes. That’s not the problem. The problem is convincing the people in charge to make the changes. In 1971, at the Ibrox stadium in Glasgow, Scotland, sixty-six people were killed in a grisly scene in a stairway after a soccer game. But the very same stairway, which was dangerously long and steep, had been the scene of major accidents in 1961, 1967, and 1969, which had left two people dead and dozens injured. It was only after the fourth disaster in 1971 that the stairway was removed.
Panic has been used too many times as a way of blaming the victims. The tradition of negligence has been particularly acute in Saudi Arabia, where officials tend to alternately blame the crowd or God for the disasters. After the 1990 stampede, King Fahd called the catastrophe “God’s will.” Of the 1,426 victims, he said: “Had they not died there, they would have died elsewhere.”
Even before a disaster occurs, the people in charge—of the hajj or the U.S. Department of Homeland Security—use panic as an excuse to discount the public. People will panic, the legend says, so we can’t trust them with the information or the training—the basic tools of their own survival. When John Sorensen, director of the Emergency Management Center at the federal government’s Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, offered to develop easy-to-understand brochures to help people prepare for chemical and biological attacks in the late 1990s, the Federal Emergency Management Agency told him, “We’re not in the business of terrifying the public,” Sorensen says. It is a perverse cycle. “Do you know how many Americans have died because someone thought they would panic if they gave them a warning?” says disaster expert Dennis Mileti. “A lot.”
In some ways, the hajj is uniquely, unintentionally designed for failure. To begin with, the pilgrimage is an inherently populist event. All men, rich or poor, wear two white sheets. A prince prays next to a peasant. That is part of the appeal. So the hajj must be made available to as many people as possible. Saudi officials restrict the number of visas permitted to each country, but, under pressure to keep the event accessible, not nearly enough to make it safe.
Until relatively recently, almost no one but princes could afford to travel to Mecca for the pilgrimage. In the 1930s, the crowds numbered approximately seventy thousand. Then, in the last half of the twentieth century, air travel became much cheaper. At the same time, Saudi rulers began to encourage more pilgrims to come. The government dropped its normal tax on pilgrims and spent millions to increase