Crowd Crush Incidents

Below is some footage from crowd crushes that I've gathered from reddit posts, twitter, and youtube. Crowd crushes are an interesting phenomenon that need several factors present to happen; they are not merely tramplings or stampedes. People get so packed into such a small area that the mass acts almost as a liquid with the people involved having no control over their own body or how they are moving anymore. There has been a lot of work into figuring out why/how this happens by people who are much smarter than me, so I'll keep the descriptions of the events brief, mainly putting in things that I find interesting. Videos below have very little, if any, gore, but have an intense feeling of claustrophobia and chaos.

1. The Halloween Seoul Crowd Crush

159 dead, 196 injured

This crush happened on the 29th of October, 2022 in Seoul, South Korea. Before the crush, there were at least 11 calls related to the size of the crowd in the area, the first of those calls being as early as four hours before the incident. There are witness statements that a group of young men were pushing people over and this may have been what started the crush. The main factor for this and most crushes, though, is lack of preparation and planning. Reportedly, there were only 137 police officers on duty at that event for a crowd of ~100,000 people.

2. The Station Nightclub Fire

100 dead, 230 injured

On the night of February 20, 2003 in West Warwick, Rhode Island, a fire broke out. This sent the crowd into a panic attempting to escape from the building, causing a crowd crush at the main entrance and trapping others inside to succumb to the flames. This disaster was wholly preventable and reading over some details, it is LAUGHABLE how little planning went into the safety of this event. There were no sprinklers installed at the venue, the fire alarms were only an internal alert for the patrons and not connected to the local fire department, and there are multiple reports that the stage door was blocked by bouncers, turning people away and stating that the exit could only be used by the band. One of the more harrowing videos for me, personally. The image of people laying on top of eachother in the doorway pops into my mind a lot.

3. Astroworldfest

10 dead, 300 injured

This happened on November 5, 2021, during the annual ASTROWORLDfest which is an event hosted by rapper Travis Scott. The video posted is obviously a gross exaggeration or misunderstanding of events as there were nowhere near 100 people dead and a lot of the people that person saw were most likely just unconscious. Travis Scott kept the event going despite being told by multiple crowd-goers that people were passing out and dying while he was performing. Reports say the first screams for medical attention happened around 9:12 pm and the show went on until around 10:08 pm, coming to a natural close (meaning they did not stop the show early at all) when Travis and Drake sang a final song together. Scott's actions were beyond despicable and he clearly knew this was happening as sections of the crowd were chanting "stop the show!" and between songs, he was reported saying "make some noise for my boy right there hanging in the tree" and telling people to flip off the drones that were flying overhead taking footage of the event.

4. Love Parade Crowd Crush

21 dead, 652 injured

This crush happened on the 24th of July, 2010 during an EDM festival in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany. This was the last "Love Parade" festival, despite being an annual event before this incident. The crush was mostly localized inside of a tunnel which was the only entrance/exit point of the festival of which there were at least 200,000 attendees. Lopavent GmbH, the organiser of the Love Parade, released a film, depicting an explanation of the events which I'm sure you can find if you are interested in more of the details of this particular crush and why it happened.

While these crushes are the ones that I was able to find videos on, there have been a lot more crowd crushes throughout history, many have higher death tolls than those I listed here. Wikipedia has a decent list of crowd crushes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fatal_crowd_crushes#::text=Many%20such%20accidents%20are%20also,2015%20Mina%20stampede%20claiming%202%2C400