Think deadly crowd surges are a new phenomenon? They're not. Wait until you hear about the one
in 18th century Paris that involved both fire and drowning. Keep watching for that and more.
It was a time when air raid sirens were normal. In London, those sounds often meant scores of
people rushed for the safety of Underground stations, and it was during one chaotic
rush for the Bethnal Green station that the crowd surge claimed the lives of 173 people.
Londoners had already been through the Blitz, and they knew the drill:
sirens, then bombers. When the sirens sounded on March 3, 1943,
they weren't followed by planes at all. People heard something else: It was new, unfamiliar,
and terrifying, and word quickly spread that the Germans were attacking with something
revolutionary and even more terrible. Crowds ran for the station, and when one woman — who
was holding her baby — tripped and fell, others surged forward over and on top of her.
It was decades before the full story was told to the public. There were no bombs,
and no new German weapons. The entire thing had been set off by the unfamiliar sound of
anti-aircraft weapons being tested nearby. There had been no actual threat that day.
In hindsight, it was a recipe for disaster. Take 2,000 children,
put them in a Victorian-era theater, and promise them free toys.
That's exactly what happened on June 16, 1883.
Victoria Hall was host to a group of traveling entertainers, and near the end of the show,
the group announced that children with tickets that had certain numbers would be given a prize.
Then, they started handing out those tickets to the kids nearest the stage. Those in the
upper galleries — around 1,100 of them — started pushing and shoving their way toward the stairs.
With no adults and no one really in charge, the crowd jammed itself
into narrow stairways and corridors, and that's when kids started to die.
Most of the deaths happened at the front, as children in the back continued to push
their way forward, unaware of the fact that they were crushing those at the bottom of the stairs.
All 183 children who died died of asphyxiation, and ultimately,
it was ruled a tragic accident. The hall was destroyed during the Blitz,
and the tragedy kick-started the invention and installation of push- bars on doors.
It was December 5, 1876. Around 1,000 people went to the Brooklyn Theater to see "The Two Orphans,"
but before the night was over, hundreds would be dead. The play was nearly over
when the set caught fire, and although the actors attempted to
finish — and avoid a panic — they were driven off-stage as the fire spread.
Once the audience realized what was going on, panic was exactly what happened.
Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper described the scene:
"... men fell, women fainted, children were trampled underfoot,
and the whole spectacle was that of a solid body with a myriad of heads struggling for its life,
retarded by its own great weight."
That's nothing short of horrifying. As the crowd pushed toward the exits,
theater-goers died when they were pushed off balconies and down stairways,
crushed against doorways and stairs, and the living became trapped by the bodies of the dead.
The final death toll is uncertain, but it's generally said that the pleasant evening at
the theater ended in a makeshift morgue for somewhere between 275 and 300 people.
In 1964, about 53,000 people piled into the Estadio [es-STAH-dee-oh] Nacional [nah-shuh-NAHL]
to cheer on the teams: Peru and Argentina were duking it out. Argentina moved into the lead,
and then, the ref called a foul against one of Peru's players.
The crowd surge started small, with just two spectators rushing on the field.
Police intervened, and while some fans headed down
onto the field, but many headed for the exits. That's when the tear gas went off.
Jose Salas was caught in the middle of the fleeing surge.
He later said that the crowd was packed so tightly that as they moved down the stairs,
he never actually touched the ground. He was just sort of carried along, and it was only
when he got to the bottom that he found himself in a mixed pile of the living and the dead.
The official cause of death for most of the
300-plus people who died that day was asphyxiation.
On December 30, 1903, around 1,700 people — mostly mothers and their
children — woke to the excitement of knowing they were heading to Chicago's
Iroquois [EAR-uh-kwoy] Theater to see a musical called "Mr. Bluebeard." The
day would end with the deaths of more than 600 of those eager theater-goers.
The fire started when a stage light sparked, and the curtains proved to be not as fire-resistant
as they were thought to be. Eddie Foy, the star of the show, managed to keep things
calm only briefly, and he later described the scene he witnessed from stage in his memoirs:
"[it was a] mad, animal-like stampede — their screams, groans and snarls,
the scuffle of thousands of feet and bodies grinding against bodies
merging into a crescendo half-wail, half-roar."
Cast members kicked open a stage door, letting in air that caused fire to billow through the
theater. Crowds surged forward in an attempt to make it to the exits, but even those who
made it started to die. Fire exits had no ladders, people fell off makeshift bridges
thrown down by nearby construction workers, and people were crushed by the crowds behind them.
Living people were sandwiched between the remains of those who had been crushed and those who had
been burned, and one good thing came of the 602 deaths — an overhaul to building codes,
and laws requiring things like emergency lighting in aisles and around exits.
In 2005, Iraq saw what "The New York Times" described as the largest,
single-day loss of life since the United States invasion of 2003, leaving 950 dead.
A religious procession was en route to a shrine that had just been attacked, leaving seven dead
and dozens wounded. Then, rumors that one of the men in the procession was wearing a suicide belt
caused a widespread panic. Even though it was just a rumor, the crowd lunged forward.
One man described the scene as it unfolded:
"... people started shouting about a suicide bomber. They started crashing
into each other; no one would look back or give a hand to help the ones who had fallen.
People started running on top of each other, and everyone was trying to save himself."
The crowd surge was made even worse by the fact that it passed over a bridge.
The procession going toward the shrine collided with pilgrims leaving it,
and not only were people crushed and trampled. The concrete barriers only served as a funnel,
and when the non-concrete barriers broke, people began to drown in the Tigris.
The Maha Kumbh Mela festival is one of the largest gatherings of humanity in the world — according to
"The New York Times," more than 80 million people show up to the festival. For an idea of just how
many people that is, the BBC says that the crowds show up on images taken from space.
It's not entirely surprising, then, that crowd surges have caused scores of deaths,
with major events taking place in 1840, 1906, and 1986. The deadliest, though, happened in 1954.
Press photographer NN Mukherjee was there and witnessed how it started.
He wrote in his memoir that a group of holy men had been passing before a crowd
when the mob pushed through the separating barriers and surged forward. Mukherjee wrote,
"When the mob came crashing at the slope of the barricade, it appeared like waves
made by standing crops when a storm strikes just before they tumble. Those who fell could
not rise again. ... I saw with my own two eyes, someone crushing a three-or four-year-old child."
The government denied the scale of the tragedy, but when Mukherjee returned to the site as they
were burning quote "mounds of bodies," he took a series of photos that made the
extent of the event undeniable. Around 1,000 people were killed in the crush.
It's not clear how many people died in what became known as the Khodynka Tragedy in 1896. Pieced
together from translations of news reports and first-hand accounts from the time, some sources
put the death toll at 1,389, while others — like the BBC — give the equally exact number of 1,429.
Between 9,000 and 20,000 people were injured, and it was all because of free
gifts and beer that were being given away to celebrate the coronation of Nicholas II.
There were some half a million people who showed up to commemorate the rise
of the new tsar ... and, let's be honest, most were probably more interested in the freebies.
And that's why the problems started. A crowd surge of people determined
to get their free food and gifts caused hundreds to be trampled in
a scramble that was particularly bad because of the layout of the field.
Once used for military training exercises, people tripped and fell in the trenches.
While Nicholas II was pressured into attending a ball afterwards,
he also visited the injured, gave families financial support from his personal wealth,
and gave orphaned children a pension until they were old enough to support themselves.
Images of the hajj — the mandatory once-in-a-lifetime Muslim pilgrimage to
Mecca — are nothing short of awe-inspiring. Unfortunately, they're also dangerous.
In 2015, more than 2 million people attended.
People were carried along by a crowd that seemed to move without any actual human intervention,
and shockingly, those people were alright with it. Until, that is, two opposing streams of people
met at an intersection, and the crush of those in the back started to suffocate those in the front.
Some died where they stood, and when others fell, the crowd pushed forward and made it even worse.
Some were able to climb onto the top of the crowd and get above the crush — even as they
reached down and tried to pull others free — but by the end, around 2,400 people were dead.
"I can blame Saudi government, because they didn't control it. I was there."
That wasn't the only time crowd surges turned deadly at Mecca. In 1990, 1,400 people were killed
in a crowded pedestrian tunnel. "The Guardian" notes that a slew of other crowd crushes have been
reported: 270 people died in 1994, 118 in 1998, 251 in 2004, and in 2006, there were at least 360
people killed. Those aren't the only years it's happened, either — they're just the most deadly.
It was May 30, 1770, and a royal wedding was wrapping up with a display of fireworks.
The Ruggieri [roo-JERRY] brothers were fireworks geniuses, but that didn't keep the post-wedding
show from going seriously sideways when the massive amount of fireworks being fired from
the top of a massive wooden temple perhaps predictably set the whole thing on fire.
Scores of people from across Paris had turned out to see the show,
and then? They ran, fleeing the burning structure down Rue Royale, trampling others as they went.
Still more people were drowned in the Seine [sen] when they were pushed in by the hysterical crowd.
Even though there were only officially 132 people killed,
no historian — contemporary or modern — believes that.
Contemporary historians wrote that the number was closer to 1,200,
while others suggest it was more like 3,000. The entire incident only added to the talk
of outrageous displays of wealth put on in front of starving Parisians.
In his first-century work "The War Of The Jews," Titus Flavius Josephus tells
the rather bizarre story of one pretty stupid, indecent act that turned very,
very deadly. It took place at the Feast of the Unleavened Bread, which is the time of
the year when the faithful honor their ancestors who fled Egypt during Exodus.
Josephus says that gatherings at Jewish temples were always guarded by armed Romans,
and it was one of these Romans who decided it was a great idea to moon those gathered there.
Dumb idea? Absolutely, and to make things worse, the soldier reportedly shouted, quote,
"such words as you might expect upon such a posture."
The crowd demanded that the soldier be reprimanded, but before much of anything
could be done, some decided to take the matter into their own hands. The scene
turned into complete chaos. More armed guards descended on the temple, and the crowd rushed
out into the city. Josephus says that around 10,000 people were killed, writing
"this feast became the cause of mourning to the whole nation,
and every family lamented their own relations."
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