Similar to those that occur during earthquakes, these shockwaves cause people to fall and places them all under crushing physical pressure. At this level of crowding, physical contact between bodies becomes so intense that the slightest movement causes a surge of turbulence through the crowd. A researcher specialised in crowd behaviour, Helbing was able to uncover the key to the mystery: the “crowd-quake”, a phenomenon that arises spontaneously when human density reaches a critical threshold of about six people per square meter. This time, the accident was filmed by a CCTV camera and the footage was sent 5,000 kilometres away, to the laboratory of German physicist Dirk Helbing. In 2006, crowd turbulence caused the deaths of 362 pilgrims in Mecca. But what exactly happens in a crowd crush? Surprisingly, the dynamics of this phenomenon were only understood in the wake of a fresh tragedy. In these extreme situations, the smallest organisational lapse can quickly lead to disaster. The largest on record – 3.5 million people – gathered at Jean-Michel Jarr’s sound and light show in Moscow in September 1997. Last but not least, music festivals draw enormous crowds. Think of the Champs-Élysées, swarming with people on July 15, 2018, after the triumph of the French team in the World Cup. The capacity of a football stadium is of course far lower, in the tens of thousands, but public celebrations following key victories can attract hundreds of thousands into city streets. The Mecca pilgrimage, for example, attracts 2 to 3 million faithful every year. Three things draw the biggest crowds: religion, sports and festivities – a good summary of human interests. Time-lapse footage showing the crowd of pilgrims arriving in Mecca. The deadliest killed 2,300 in Mecca in September 2015. It is thought to be the largest peacetime tragedy the country’s history. On April 29 the same year, 45 people were crushed to death and more than 150 injured at the Lag B’Omer religious festival in Meron, Israel. The most recent was November 6, 2021, in Houston, Texas, when eight people died and hundreds were injured at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival. On average, they claim the lives of 380 people every year. There has been a steady rise in such crushes since the 1990s. When the Love Parade accident hit the news, my friends and family all asked me the same thing: what should they do if they found themselves in that kind of situation? How could they survive if they were trapped in a crowd, like the victims at the Love Parade? Let’s find out. Over three years, I had examined mass movements in all sorts of places – shopping streets, markets, even in lab experiments.
The topic of my research was the movement of crowds. Just one month earlier, I was defending my doctoral thesis in an amphitheatre at Paul Sabatier University, in Toulouse, France. There was a wall of people in front of me.”Ī glimpse of the 2010 Love Parade prior to the accident (amateur video). One survivor told the newspaper Bild: “It was impossible to get out of the tunnel. In the end, 21 people died, and 651 were injured. Around 5 p.m., to the sound of techno beats played by the best DJs in the world, the first victims began to suffocate. At the core of the crowd, some no longer had enough room to breathe. The festivalgoers, pushed up against each other, soon could barely move their arms or even hands. As the minutes went by, the human density rose dangerously.
In the mid-afternoon, heavy congestion formed at the end of the tunnel – the underground passage was too small to allow such an immense crowd to pass. Decked out in sunglasses and fluorescent wigs, the happy revellers funnelled into a 200-meter-long tunnel, heading toward a former freight station where part of the festival was taking place. They were attending the Love Parade, one of the most popular music festivals in the world. On July 24, 2010, more than a million dancing partygoers converged on an industrial zone in Duisburg, in Eastern Germany.
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