cross-posted from: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/post/17045970
From Wikipedia
Stampede events that involve humans are extremely rare and are unlikely to be fatal.[5] According to Keith Still, professor of crowd science at Manchester Metropolitan University, “If you look at the analysis, I’ve not seen any instances of the cause of mass fatalities being a stampede. People don’t die because they panic. They panic because they are dying”.[5]
Paul Torrens, a professor at the Center for Geospatial Information Science at the University of Maryland, remarks that “the idea of the hysterical mass is a myth”.[5] Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.[16][17] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.[18][19][20] […] [M]ost major crowd disasters can be prevented by simple crowd management strategies.[22] Crushes can be prevented by organization and traffic control, such as barriers. […] Such incidents are invariably the product of organisational failures.[4]
Basically if you read the whole wikipedia article nearly all of these so called stampedes are actually crowd collapses where people are packed in too tightly and when a couple people lose their balance and fall it almost has a domino effect and people often die of injuries or asphyxiation. And panic doesn’t cause these, it’s having crowds at too high of a concentration.
At even higher concentrations, you have crowd crush, where people who are standing upright get so packed they are unable to breathe and are asphyxiated to death.
I was commenting more on the quote by the Professor where he says they are panicking because they are dying. To me that means there’s a scenario where a shooter has started killing people indiscriminately or something like that and people are panicking in an attempt to leave. It seems an odd quote/reference to use when documenting organizational failures.
They’re dying from the heat and pressure of everyone around them, and from not being able to leave to cool down or get water or more space.
People are panicking because they are dying of asyphyxiation.
But according to the wikipedia article the media tends to report on it as if the panic caused the deaths. When it’s the opposite.
From the wikipedia;
Incidents involving crowds are often reported by media as the results of panic.[16][17] However, the scientific literature has explained how panic is a myth which is used to mislead the attention of the public from the real causes of crowd incidents, such as a crowd crush.[18][19][20]