About the Halloween Crowd Crush in the Itaewon District of Seoul, South Korea
The information here is to provide some clarification on crowd crushes, and some specific information on what happened in Itaewon. First, some general information:
The circled parts are very important: uneven ground + narrow passageway.
Let’s compare this to another crowd crush that happened in April of 2021 in Israel:
Again, we have a situation with a narrow passageway and a sloping floor (a staircase, in this case).
There is an idea that people will file through an area without much incident, it’s crowded and slow but it’s otherwise not going to be a problem. After all, if I fall down, I can just stand up again. But in reality, it is a matter of physics…at this density, we almost behave as a liquid. You fall down, and suddenly there are people on top of you.
Being on top of the pile, you cannot easily push yourself off. You can roll, but you’re only rolling across the pile, not off. You’re too high/far for any of the rescue people on the ground to pull you off (to reduce the pressure on lower layers). And you can’t easily push yourself up because people are squishy and squirming, there’s no way to get firm enough “ground” to push off. So you’re stuck trying to rock yourself off of the pile, putting additional pressure and taking more time. This is why rescue workers began pulling at the bottom layers rather than trying to pull/push off the top layers.
My students have been haunted by the images (not shown here, but shared on social media). Those images may haunt them for years, maybe forever. What we can do is use those bad images to remind us to be safe. It’s not their fault, of course. The victims had no idea this would happen…most people don’t understand crowd crushes. I know about them because of my fields of study. So it’s not to say it was their fault. But from this lesson, we can stop others from being in this situation. We can pause and go the long way, or wait a few more minutes to let the crowd dissipate, and we will be safer and the crowd will also be safer.
Unfortunately, VERY unfortunately, safety lessons are “hard learned”. It means that we only pay attention after a tragedy. THEN we think about safety.
It’s hard to deal with because this was something no one expected. It was an accident. And I think people are upset because they “should have” expected it. But really, only people like me who had to study this stuff, we know it’s a reasonable expectation but most people don’t. It’s not their fault; but now we are all very aware of it at the same time. Maybe now politicians can understand this risk better.
We have to remember there is no one to blame. Some people want to place blame; I think it helps them feel safe. If they can blame X, then avoid X, they believe they are safe from this type of harm. They blame “being drunk” or they blame “pushing”, or “they were too young to know better.” But really, it is not that. It was pure physics. A lot of people in a narrow alley + uneven/sloping ground + one or two people tripping and falling = a “wave” of people falling, too. It’s not about age, drunkenness, etc.
And that’s hardest for people to accept. We want to think we have control over our lives, over our safety. We want to think we can be safe if only we do XYZ. But a lot of life is just luck. And this makes people feel really uncomfortable, so they get upset and try to blame someone or something.
I think that’s why these tragedies are burned into our memories so hard, because not only are they devastating and tragic as a human loss, but they are also a very horrifying reminder that any of us or our loved ones can just…not be here tomorrow.
We do the most we can, and have to accept that it’s the most we can do.
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