Unthinkable_ Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why - Amanda Ripley [89]
The hajj is also merciless on the body. Hundreds of people die on the hajj every year, whether the crowd kills them or not. In 2007, no one died in a crowd accident, but 431 Indonesians (of the 205,000 who came) died from pneumonia, heart attacks, and other “natural” causes. Most people catch vicious fevers or colds, and the poor endure the harshest conditions of all. Days of waiting in exhaust fumes and sleeping in crowded tents try the patience of even the most devout. But believers have embraced the suffering as part of the challenge of the hajj, and so the crowds keep growing. Each day of the hajj, the Saudi police bring the new corpses into the Grand Mosque on gurneys for funeral prayers. Those who die on the hajj are said to be guaranteed a place in heaven. So the hajj tragedies become cruelly self-perpetuating.
In their defense, Saudi officials have made many costly attempts to prevent crowd disasters over the years. If they cannot manage Islam’s holiest places, after all, then the legitimacy of the entire government is in question. After a fire in the tent city of Mina killed three hundred people in 1997, the government equipped the tents with sprinklers. After the 2004 stampede, officials widened the pillars into walls, giving pilgrims a wider target for the stoning ritual and spreading the crowds. But after the 2006 disaster, Interior spokesperson al-Turki fell back on the usual rhetoric. “This was fate” he said, “destined by God.”
Crowd expert Still has spent years wrestling the Saudi status quo. “You’re dealing with a culture where God is the final arbiter, and only he can decide to take or give life.” He would warn authorities about new bottlenecks and then watch as his predictions came true, he says. Over the past few years, however, he believes the Saudis have made tremendous progress. The design, management, and scheduling teams have been working together at last. The Saudis have invested $1.2 billion in rebuilding the jamarat bridge, creating a much bigger, four-story complex with many more entrances and exits. Today, when pilgrims arrive in the airports, officials hand them pamphlets instructing them how to behave safely in the crowd. The warning urges people to be patient and, above all, not to push. Perhaps most important, after the 2006 disaster, some Islamic clerics issued fatwas, or religious edicts, declaring that pilgrims do not have to wait until noon to carry out the stoning ritual. That way the crowd can be spread out over the entire day.
In the last hajj in 2007, no one was killed in a crowd crush. With that, Still’s job advising the Saudis officially ended, he says. “Unless of course there is another accident.”
The Panic of One
If we think of panic as an overreaction, it starts to make more sense. The way to avoid a panic, then, is to reduce the causes of overreaction—by reducing the density or turbulence of the crowd or by giving the crowd better information. But sometimes panic happens to just one person, all alone, and no one else. Sometimes a single exception is enough to change history. So what causes this kind of overreaction?
Early in the morning on Memorial Day in 1993, a scuba club gathered to go diving off Singer Island in Florida. The divers wanted to be among the first to check out a brand-new artificial reef, the largest in Palm Beach County. The week before, local officials had sunk the Princess Anne, an old, 340-foot ferry,