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154 killed, hundreds injured in Halloween stampede in Seoul


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Posted

omg this is horrible 

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Posted

The videos look awful. So tragic. 

Posted

What the actual ****. Rip to the lives lost. 
 

 

Posted

Da videos have me so shook. Praying for everyone in Seoul 

Posted

i remember back in New Years Eve 2018 i was in Shibuya and the crowd looked similar to this

 

that feeling of not being able to move and your body just follows wherever the crowd is getting pushed while you get suffocated is a horrifying experience :chick3: RIP to them

Posted

Oh… RIP.

  the reason why I don't want to watch a live concert without precautions.

Posted

146 now confirmed dead.. this is so awful, it’s hard to believe how it could happen 

Posted
3 minutes ago, Flanders said:

146 now confirmed dead.. this is so awful, it’s hard to believe how it could happen 

The number keeps jumping :chick3:

 

It seems like the deadly part of the crush happened almost entirely in one particular side road about 30m long, people just got so trapped they couldn’t even move their arms an inch and started falling over each other. Maybe they were being pushed from both ends of the road?? Awful way to go. 

Posted

I saw a video where they were trying to pull people out. People were piled on top of each other covering the whole street. Awful.

 

This is why I avoid overcrowded places. It only takes one little thing for things to go awry.

Posted

The videos :mazen:

Posted

I can’t even begin to imagine what it was like. My thoughts are with the victims and their loved ones. 

Posted
1 hour ago, Cloudy said:

That's horrific. Something similar happened in Spain years ago at a Halloween party also and I remember the images were horrific

Yeah, they are so strict now. There are plaques or documents on the doors of bars, restaurants, clubs even some gyms or schools detailing how many people can be in one room at a time. Many times cops show up to make sure everything is in place. People were very traumatised by that accident 

Posted

one of my best friends was there as well as a dozen of my friends from school and they're all traumatized.

 

my best friend called me and told me there were soooo many people the cellular service and internet weren't even working so absolutely nobody even knew what was happening and people kept coming to itaewon and were partying. he went home as soon as he became aware of the situation. the bodies were all aligned near the subway station too :mazen:

 

itaewon is always so crowded even on normal weekends so i dont understand why there wasn't any filtering and how they let 100,000 people in considering how tiny the streets are...

 

must have been a nightmare...

Posted

im watching the news and they're saying that most of the deaths were people in their 20s... heartbreaking

Posted
1 hour ago, Windy Day said:

one of my best friends was there as well as a dozen of my friends from school and they're all traumatized.

 

my best friend called me and told me there were soooo many people the cellular service and internet weren't even working so absolutely nobody even knew what was happening and people kept coming to itaewon and were partying. he went home as soon as he became aware of the situation. the bodies were all aligned near the subway station too :mazen:

 

itaewon is always so crowded even on normal weekends so i dont understand why there wasn't any filtering and how they let 100,000 people in considering how tiny the streets are...

 

must have been a nightmare...

**** that's terrible omg

Posted

horrific. how traumatic to see all those people trying to resuscitate others. how can this even be allowed to happen? :deadbanana4:

Posted

Omg 120 is really tragic! :chick3:

Posted
3 hours ago, Taylucifer said:

i remember back in New Years Eve 2018 i was in Shibuya and the crowd looked similar to this

 

that feeling of not being able to move and your body just follows wherever the crowd is getting pushed while you get suffocated is a horrifying experience :chick3: RIP to them

That's not what kills you. 

I've been in these situations many times and it's true that you're completely helpless not matter how big or strong you are. You're squeezed and pushed in every direction with no control. You know what ultimately dooms you? You trip and fall, that's it then, you're done.

 

As long as you keep your feet grounded, your chance of gettin suffocated are slim to none.

Posted

I've traveled to Seoul a few times and unfortunately this isn't surprising, but it's really sad. People overcrowd there like crazy on trains and in public space with little regard for others. Itaewon is where all the bars are too so add that into the mix and it's chaos. It's devastating 

Posted

Absolutely horrific. :frown:

Posted

The mayor of Seoul is probably in a tough situation right now as this is preventable. 

Posted

A friend of mine is currently in Itaewon :biblionny:

Posted
2 hours ago, Eóghan said:

That's not what kills you. 

I've been in these situations many times and it's true that you're completely helpless not matter how big or strong you are. You're squeezed and pushed in every direction with no control. You know what ultimately dooms you? You trip and fall, that's it then, you're done.

 

As long as you keep your feet grounded, your chance of gettin suffocated are slim to none.

how can you keep your feet grounded when you're literally being pushed by hundreds of people? if you watch the videos and see the waves, there's no way you could just keep your feet grounded, no matter how hard you try. with that many people, there's not even any space for you to fall on, you just move with the crowd and you get suffocated by the weight of others... you can breathe out, but not breathe in.

there is one reddit comment that explain this terrifying situation really well

 

Spoiler

link to original comment

 

comment:

I actually happen to have done a slightly creepy amount of research into the phenomenon of 'crowd crush' and 'crowd collapse' recently, and can probably shed some light here. First I'll say **these are not stampedes**, but some background info is needed. **IF YOU HAVE A WEAK STOMACH YOU MAY WANT TO CONSIDER NOT READING THIS.**

 

Basically when people start to move in very high density crowds, each individual physically doesn't have enough space around them to behave like a normal person who acts based on decisions anymore, but rather **the entire crowd starts moving like a fluid**, forced forward by the pressure of the people walking forwards behind them. We're talking densities of 5+ people per square meter (you can roughly equate 4 people per square meter to being in a tightly packed crowd but still being able to move 360 degrees, just brushing up on people on all 4 sides. At about [5-6 people/meter^2](http://imgur.com/ksSg3MU) you start to lose that freedom of movement). The crowd starts to literally behave by the laws of fluid dynamics, and can experience [shockwaves](https://youtu.be/BgpdmAtbhbE?t=4m4s) that ripple up and back through the mass of people when a push comes from any given direction... anyone who's been in a moshpit knows what I'm talking about.

 

These crowd densities aren't dangerous in themselves until you start reaching more than 8+ people/meter^2 , however [starting at about 5-6 they become extremely risky](http://www.gkstill.com/_Media/density.m4v) to facilitate movement in for two major reasons: **1) the risk of hitting a choke point** and **2) the risk of someone falling over**.

 

The first one results in what is called **'crowd crush'**. This is where you have an extremely large and high density crowd, typical for those seen at events like the Hajj, moving in one direction in a confined space. This can be as wide as a city block or as narrow as a hallway. The crowd will be moving in its desired direction, but as soon as it hits a **choke point**, such as a blocked entrance, a sharp turn, a single open doorway, or even another high density crowd coming from the opposite direction, the people at the front face a serious problem. They are not merely walking anymore, they are being carried in the crowd fluid and could not stop if they tried (and would probably fall over). Survivors of crushes have described the experience like you're being carried by a *river* of people. The people at the *very* front of the crowd (who are not at dangerous densities) will make it through the choke point, unless it's a blocked entrance of course, but the high density crowd inevitably follows, carried by force. If the choke point is too narrow for the entire crowd to fit through, people literally just plug it up and are unable to squeeze through the gap anymore, and are being evermore crushed by the force of people behind them. For a morbid but good example of this, watch the video of [the Station Nightclub fire that happened in ~~2001~~ 2003](https://youtu.be/OOzfq9Egxeo) (NSFW/NSFL). For those who don't want to watch, basically what happened is a fire broke out in a nightclub, and nobody really bothered to run for the emergency exits (plus some other things but another post entirely) but instead all pushed for the front door. When the crowd density trying to leave the club out of the double doors became too great, the people got stuck and knocked over *in the doorway*, and bodies kept piling on top of more bodies from the flow of people behind until there was a helpless 6ft high pile of people with their heads and arms sticking out the front door packed too tightly for anyone on the outside to wedge them free.

 

Here's the ****** up part though: *people do not die from being 'trampled'* as if everyone is wildly running around and stepping on each other, in fact there's literally no way that's possible because people couldn't be running around in high density crowds even if they wanted to. What they die from is **compressive asphyxiation** (yes, suffocation by crushing) from the sheer force of all of the weight of bodies being stacked on top of them. In the worst of choke points, a completely blocked exit, people can be crushed *standing up* because they breathe out and simply cannot overcome the pressure of all of the people around them to breathe back in. That happens at densities of about 12+ p/sqm. 'Crowd pressure' has been known to collapse walls, bend steel guard rails, and of course kill a *shitload* of people.

 

The next scenario, and in my opinion the much more horrifying one, is **crowd collapse**. This happens when a high density crowd is moving and someone *falls over*. If you can imagine yourself in a fluid-like crowd, the pressure of the person behind you pushes you forward, and in turn you exert the pressure on the person in front of you, facilitating the crowd's (the fluid's) movement. If suddenly the person in front of you *falls*, they are no longer there for you to 'lean on' (to exert pressure on to), and guess what? You fall too. And the person behind you. And the person behind them, and anyone who tries to help someone else up, all just being pushed against their will into the new wall of bodies in front of them. The crowd **collapses** behind the original hole. Aaaaand now you have a choke point, *just made of bodies*. Surprisingly even here the main cause of death is almost always compressive asphyxia rather than trampling, as the pressure just gets too great when you have 2000lb of flesh on top of you. The crowd doesn't even have to be moving very fast for this to happen (or even can be stationary in the case of [a grandstand collapse](http://www.gkstill.com/_Media/animation7.mp4) ), and is *especially dangerous* when the people are moving down a steep or slippery slope.

 

Here's the kicker: in both of these scenarios the death tolls are so high because the people in the back of the crowd, propagating the crowd force, are almost always *too far away to know what's going on at the crush point*. These sorts of crowds are extremely noisy and essentially impossible to stick your head up and over to get a better view, this combined with the fact that the back of crowds are usually at safe densities and people have no reason to panic and just keep walking means that the people at the front have no choice but to be crushed. Or in the case of a fire, where people sometimes *are* aware of what's happening in the front, they will simply keep pushing because it's either that or wait to die, worsening the crush at the front. Hundreds upon hundreds of people can be screaming for help and for people to stop or turn back... the ones who can hear them are already too stuck in the flow to do anything, and the ones who can do something can't hear. 

 

So now the Hajj. This annual event is basically something any Muslim (who is able) has to do in their lifetime, and involves traveling to Mecca and surrounding areas over the span of *four days* to perform some religious rituals and visitations etc. The super short timespan of this event and the [insane amount of people it draws](http://imgur.com/2hZglhw) means there's a huge amount of high density crowd movement, and one of the most notorious areas is a city called Mina, by which a particular ritual called the Stoning of the Devil is performed. Basically people need to throw rocks at a particular set of pillars, and so as you can imagine there's a giant potential for dangerously packed crowds when you have to move so many people to such a small location. This particular one happened when one road was closed in Mina and people didn't follow the detour or something (the news isn't very reliable because these events become so political for some reason), and basically two extreme density crowds coming from opposite directions collided in a single intersection, causing the pileup you're reading about above. There was also extreme heat on that day; you'll get people dropping like flies once densities start to get crush-worthy. There has been a crush or a collapse at the Hajj that's killed hundreds of people roughly every two years for the past couple of decades.

 

In fact, the global rate of crushes has increased exponentially in the past ~50 years or so as cities have become dense and urbanization is commonplace, **this is a real problem that you may encounter in your own lifetime**. If you do realize you're in a crowd that's heading towards a crush, unfortunately it probably means it's too late for you at that point. However, if you're actually serious about avoiding one of the most horrible deaths you could imagine, whenever you start to notice you're in a crowd that is reaching dangerous densities (4+) and is starting to behave like a fluid, you can work to **get out of it**. The key is the shockwaves you'll feel travel through everyone as the pressure pushing y'all starts to outpace how fast you can physically move. These are the sorts of crowds that if someone steps on your foot you'll probably lose your shoe because your foot will simply be carried out of it by the movement of the crowd. When you feel a shockwave, *absolutely do not fight it*. That's one of the quickest ways to fall over. What you should instead do is let it carry you wherever it needs to, and then immediately **start moving sideways, and diagonally backwards if that's possible**, avoid falling over at all costs though. You simply want to GET OUT of that crowd at that point (even if it's headed somewhere you needed to be) however possible. People may start dying. And you may be one of them.

 

EDIT: If you do every find yourself in the worst-case scenario and are knocked over, attempt to fall in a **rigid fetal position** (arms over your face and chest) to attempt to make room for your lungs to breathe. One man [survived the Station Fire](https://youtu.be/ktEMLtBz55Y) (NSFW/NSFL) by doing this and having a small supply of fresh air, protected from the fire by a man-made heat shield.

 

Posted

 

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