Wal-Mart, The Who and a Brief History of Stampedes
December 7, 2008 at 6:23 PM |
15 comments
I am endlessly fascinated by the science of crowds. Why do some crowds remain orderly and safe, while other, equally large and rowdy crowds become deadly? The death of a security guard working at Wal-Mart on Black Friday was a reminder of the importance of physics—and fairness. Check out my latest Time.com story on how to prevent a crowd crush.
Thanks to Dr. G. Keith Still, my go-to guy on the science of crowds.
R1 said on March 24, 2009 at 7:14 pm
I actually don’t look at crowds as being deaf and dumb, I see event or facility management and promoters being such. The crowd is simply at management mercy for providing them information and the “space” to cue so that crowd forces are managable. Not providing information to the folk in back of the queue along with having this large queue being directed into a right angle bend in the foyer of the store along with a total lack of planning on Walmart’s part does not make a crowd deaf and dumb, it makes Walmart very dumb.
This type of “blitz” as Walmart calls it has been repeated at many Walmart’s for years and maybe Time can do a literature search and then show how many chances Walmart has had to get this right and then one will see that the crowd is not deaf and dumb. I hope this is not the study language that Dr. Still uses.
The real crowd experts in the US are Dr. John Fruin, a recognized pedestrian engineer and Paul Wertheimer, of http://www.crowdsafe.com and the organizer of the committee that put the Who Concert Study together. The author would be well advised to seek their advice in putting together future stories on crowd issues.
It will be interesting to see how the local and Federal safety agencies that are investigating this will view the crush on black Friday.
Amanda Ripley said on March 25, 2009 at 3:31 pm
R1, thanks for the comment. I did not mean “deaf and dumb” in the literal sense. If you read that section in context, you’ll see that I was trying to explain that crowds are not generally malicious. When crowd pressure kills someone, it is not because the crowd meant to do so—it is because they do not know what is happening in the front of the crowd. And that is because the organizers have not set up a way to communicate with the crowd.
I agree with you about the expertise of John Fruin. You may notice that I quoted him in the story.
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