"[Seon Yeo-jeong, a South Korean YouTuber] described 'being swayed back and forth as if in a tug of war' before temporarily losing her vision and being squeezed from front and back. 'If my friend hadn’t held me and helped me,' she said, 'I think I would have passed out and fallen to the ground.'"
One worker at a kebab shop across from the alley where the crush happened said the numbers who turned up for Halloween festivities were the most he’d seen in five years working at the shop. “I have never seen crowds like that in my life, except maybe at a political rally,” said Ulas Cetinkaya, 36, who is from Turkey. He said at the shop they were expecting crowds, because it was the first celebration since Covid restrictions lifted, and was surprised at the minimal police presence....
ADDED: "Ten tips for surviving a crowd crush."Police did not expect crowds to be larger than in prior years and did not deploy extra personnel to the area, the minister of the interior and safety, Lee Sang-min, said in a briefing. Some police forces had been redirected because of large-scale political protests elsewhere in the city, he said.
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The TikTok effect. Meaning...that's how you get 'crowds like that'.
Humans are nothing if not lemmings. And it's not that hard to get a mass movement of people to jump off a cliff. Or storm the stage at a concert running over others while doing so. Or squeeze each other in a crowed until hundreds die. Or cheer the beheading of another human being. Or to scorn millions of people who don't want to wear a mask. Or to vote for...(fill in the blank).
The most recent Jack Ryan Jr novel zero hour included such a crowd crush event in Seoul incited as part of the fiendish government plot. Fiction becomes truth once again.
There are guys who can show you the math of how that works, sort of like how traffic engineers figure out how far apart the interchanges will need to be under the circumstances.
So terrifying. It sounds as though the threat calculation by the police focused on the other "political" events going on as being more likely to kick off but that's not really the only issue when it comes to crowd control. Even a peaceful crowd can be the threat, we see that it seems like almost every year during the Haj in Mecca.
And it sounds like another consequence of the Covid shutdowns, people eager to get back out and do what they did before or something like it. Only it's not the same as before. I am interested in all that, what behavior has changed and what hasn't and what the after effects of the pandemic are.
Puts me in mind of “The Crush” at Camp Randall stadium 29 years ago today. We beat Michigan by 3, and put us in position to win the Big Ten for the first time in forever. Students rushed the field, and many were crushed up against the railing between the student section and the field. Miraculously no one died. I was supposed to be at the game but gave my tix to a friend. He was 6’2”, and told me the crush of students literally lifted him off the ground, and he was moving forward with no way to touch the ground to stop.
They have not seen crowds like this in about 5 years? Well exhaustion of COVID bullshit is finally "releasing" the pent up energy. This time to horrible and in my mind predictable results.
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One of the most horrific crowd crush incidents happened at Hillsborough in the UK. ESPN did an excellent 30 for 30 on it. http://www.espn.com/30for30/film/_/page/hillsborough
Photos from that day are horrifying
It was explained to me that if you are in a crowd, and are being bumped on all four sides, you are already in mortal danger. Move perpendicular to the direction the crowd is moving and toward an exit or something that can be climbed.
Event planners and police make mistakes. Everyone is ultimately responsible for their own survival.
In 2016, when Cleveland won the NBA Championship, over a million people went downtown for a rather impromptu victory celebration. That is my idea of hell, but several of my students and friends went to join the party. Miraculously, everyone had a good time and there were no significant issues.
I rather doubt having a bunch of police there would have made any difference at all. If they had been there, they would have been crushed by the crowd as well.
I've read elsewhere that this was caused by the sighting of a "celebrity" at a bar in that alley. Unconfirmed, of course. It wouldn't surprise me if somebody thought they'd spotted one of the guys from BTS. But we'll probably never know what really sparked the rush.
It's just so sad that so many died when all they wanted to do was to go out and have a little fun after all the Covid restrictions.
There’s hardly any crime over there. One YouTuber said sometimes they can go over 200 days without a crime being reported.
Maybe that’s why they had scant police presence?
Politically convenient, unscientific mandates, are a first-order forcing of catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
Big cities like Seoul could learn a thing or two about crowd management from other big cities like NYC.
NYC manages new year’s celebration every year without it deteriorating into mass death traps.
larry Niven wrote a series of scifi short stories about the effect of transport technology, wherein one could instantly arrive at a location from anywhere on earth. "Flash Crowds" was the novel title and term he used to describe a mob swarming a suddenly popular site, often directed there by social media.
Those in control couldn't have mobs rioting within minutes of a social media post about a fun party at a tourist site, or a mob breaking up on cue a political rally. So they created software which monitored teleport activity, and when traffic got higher than a certain rate, all those heading to a site were detoured to a holding facility, basically a large empty field or stadium secured by police, who could process the flash mob members.
Not that this has anything except a bit of parallel social media mob promotion to do with the kind of crowd that occurred in Itaewon. Now that I think of it, the methods of riot control used in another 70s scifi story, Soylent Green, might be applied today by less kindly governments. See Tiananmen Square, 1989, as an example.
Lem, one reason crime isn't an issue in Itawewaon is that being staggering drunk in public is OK, as is public urination and vomiting when inebriated. A society as tightly wound as South Korea, on edge about their own economy and threatened existentially by their northern siblings for several generations, needs to let go many of the small methods of releasing pent-up stress.
The "How Stuff Works" channel on YouTube has a good video on the phenomenon of high density crowds, called "How Crowds Can Kill You." Recommended.
https://youtu.be/ldOprmqSt7o
I wonder what was down that alley that was so captivating and so fascinating.
It reminds me a bit of stories about long venerated shrines and crypts that actually turn out to be empty.
Whatever it was, it wasn't worth losing your life for.
Experienced similar at State Street Halloween festivities in mid eighties. Crowd moved in a mass and was pushing me towards outer edges where protruding building elements posed major risk. Complte helplessness.
Didn't go back in subsequent years there.
Made me think if the Mount Meron religious festival disaster last year. Tight space and staircase involved in crush.
South Korea should outlaw crowds.
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