VEZINA: The Astroworld Tragedy and the Importance of Crowd Control

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The Houston Astroworld music festival tragedy where 10 concert goers died is a sad reminder of the vital importance of crowd control.

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It is crucial that those responsible for public safety at such events learn from similar tragedies in the past, the final one being the Hillsborough disaster on April 15, 1989 in Sheffield, England, during a football game, which claimed the life of 96 people.

It is seldom a mistake that causes these tragedies. It’s a series of gaffes that drives them.

This is what happened in the Hillsborough disaster.

First, there was a previous warning that was ignored.

In 1981, eight years before the event, some fans were hospitalized with bruised ribs due to the crowd.

Police at the time allowed fans to sit on the perimeter of the soccer field to watch the game in order to alleviate overcrowding.

When the police indicated that if they had not done so there would have been deaths, the football club’s response was that this was nonsense and that no one would have died.

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The 1989 disaster occurred during a semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Three weeks before the event, the police superintendent, who had extensive experience in crowd control at these events, was replaced by a new superintendent who had none.

Police briefings for the event focused on how to monitor, discipline and patrol the crowd for crimes, not crowd safety.

The open seating areas in the stadium were essentially corrals with six-foot-high pointy fences separating them to prevent fans from moving between them.

The front fences were significantly taller, with pointed overhangs that prevented people from entering the field and disrupting play.

The command center was the only place where event managers could see what was happening and coordinate with officers on site.

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The incoming crowd was not distributed among the various entrance gates as had been done in the past.

The standing area known as Leppings Lane was not monitored and was left open, with fans advancing through it without any direction.

As it got more and more crowded, police observing what was happening expressed over the radio their concern that people were being crushed as they entered the turnstiles.

One officer frantically warned, “for the sake (explanatory) that if you don’t open these doors, people are going to die,” a reference to opening the exit doors to allow more people to enter, easing the crowd from outside. from the stadium. .

Eight minutes before the start of the game, the exit doors were ordered to be opened, allowing the crowd to enter through an open central door from where they could see the field.

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But the authorities did not delay the kickoff, which would normally happen in a situation like this, as the people at the back of the line still trying to get into the stadium kept moving forward, unaware of the dire situation at the front of the stadium. crowd. .

They told them to “come in.”

The match went according to schedule. Six minutes later he was stopped by the referee, although no emergency was declared, despite the fact that many people were essentially trapped in a spiked cage with no exits.

Instead, the police were ordered to form a line in the middle of the field to prevent Nottingham Forest fans from running onto the field as they expected people to interpret Liverpool fans as “vandalism”.

A pathology report would later conclude that the late response and lack of an emergency declaration resulted in 41 of the 96 deaths.

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For more than two decades, the public perception of what had happened, fueled by the government and the media, was that the main cause of the tragedy was the vandalism of drunk Liverpool fans, including claims by people who urinated on the police trying to perform CPR on those. it had been crushed by overcrowding.

But a series of subsequent investigations culminating in a higher court inquiry conducted between 2014 and 2016 concluded that what had actually happened was not an accident caused by crowd behavior, but an unlawful killing of 96 people caused by negligence. of those responsible. crowd control, exacerbated by stadium design.

The lesson is that when people are crushed to death in a crowd, it is not always the fault of the crowd.

– Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and has a graduate degree in Emergency and Disaster Management. He can be contacted at [email protected]