I saw lady Gaga have a 2 million person concert this week and from what I’ve seen there was no safety concerns . And I’ve seen other concerts or event with less people be complete dangerous safety hazards . What is the difference how are such large crowds maintained ?
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When it comes to concerts the way the barricades are set up is important. For large shows they should be using T barricades that spit the crowd down the middle, which helps reduce crushing and allows security to see everyone better. If people are hurt they can be brought to the center if it’s closer than the front or back.
Planning, organization, a small (or in her case, quite large and potentially actual military) army of staff, security, vendors, etc.
You have to set up the area very carefully, with built in egress points, zones for relieving the pressure of the crowd, lots and lots of security around the exterior screening for bad actors, etc.
Travis Scott set the recent example of what not to do in that his crowd enclosures were extremely poorly designed and had no contingency plans in place for what to do in case of a sudden rush of people.
Well, if you aren’t a large scale event planner you hire someone that is. They have contacts and experience in handling large numbers of people and can work with the city to handle how to get people into an area, how to make sure they have water and somewhere to poop, and how to safely get them into then out of the event venue that will itself have to be planned to allow people though.
They hire people that will set up barriers and signs to direct people and let them get into the event, and hire a LOT of security to handle getting people processed and into the event at a reasonable rate. Two million is a really big number, but the math isn’t too hard. You need a toilet for every 100 people or so, so you need 20,000 for the event. You can get some from the event venue capacity, some from local public toilets, and the rest you bring in with portable toilets to get up to the capacity.
I do public safety consulting for events, so let me help explain how I look at things and a bit of how I plan.
The first thing to consider is, what are people going to be doing? A concert like this will have some dancing and moving around, but it isn’t like a big punk rock concert where there is a mosh pit (ton of people moving in a violent circle). The less people are doing, the safer it is, generally.
The next thing to consider is where will people go if they’re scared? The most dangerous thing that can happen is mass panic. People will try to quickly find a way out, and they don’t care what they step on to save themselves. This is why all major buildings have “crash bars” for exits (the kind that open when you push on them). Because it’s in a huge, open space, there are lots of ways out. Temporary fences will fall over and people will go over them. Unlike a building, you can clear people off a beach very quickly. The faster people can leave, the more people you can safely have in an area. The number of people allowed in a concert is based on exits. You could have a room the size of a football field, but if it only had one regular sized door, you would only be allowed to have maybe 200 people in it. The rules are different in different places, but the idea is the same.
We plan exit routes and safe corridors based on computer simulations. While a panicked person is unpredictable, a large group of panicked people are surprisingly predictable. Before we had the computer power to do it on a screen, studies were done with ants. Watching how they moved and what they did when something got in their way. We would also study herds of animals when being chased by predators. We could then look at a space and be fairly confident in seeing how people would move if they were panicked. The majority of deaths and injuries from large gathering incidents have been due to something called Crowd Crush.
Then comes the physical security side of things. Huge events have huge budgets and major support from police and sometimes local military. There are a TON of security staff, making sure people don’t have weapons, looking out over crowds and controlling the area around the concert. One of the events I’m involved with has attendance of around 300,000 people. The checkpoints and exclusion zones make a huge difference. Anything big enough to be a risk for a terrorist attack is kept far enough away that it isn’t a threat to the event. Often, there are also no fly zones, frequency jammers for drones and snipers looking over things.
The highest risk events aren’t actually the really, really big ones. They’re the ones with 2000-5000 people. They don’t have the big budgets for all of the support services. They don’t get the same support from local emergency services or federal agencies and they often don’t have someone like me involved to deal with emergency response planning.
There are always new risks and threats, but consultants like me work with authorities and review previous incidents to best understand how likely something is and how dangerous it could be.
How do you not attend to safety concerns without proper crowd management?
It’s part design and part preparation. Usually a large crowd is in an open area or a building that some smart person designed to accommodate the crowd. Including things like vomitoriums (funnels people into the area, but when leaving allows them to quickly disperse once they are through the doorway). Other factors in the design are pillars or otherwise unnecessary turns. These will cause a crowd to slow down and minimize the risk of a crush incident.
As for preparation, it’s things like on site EMS and plenty of security. There’s a reason that in larger crowds a barricade is put in front of the stage (3 to 5 foot gap) in the event of a crowd crush, the barricade will fail and give more room to the crowd. It also allows security to monitor and extract anyone in the crowd causing a ruckus or having a medical incident. The best and smallest preparation is having flashlights on stage. A simple thing, but allows the band members to point out exactly where security or medical needs to go.
At the end of the day, everyone is there to have a good time and go home safe. I’ve witnessed plenty of mosh pits completely stop when someone requires medical (bloody noses from face planting into someone’s shoulder for instance) When the fans are onboard with safety then things are easier.
As for a concert with 2 million people, you’re going to have safety incidents. People are going to be dehydrated, or exhausted. Providing ample medical support is a given. People are going to fight, have security stop that then provide medical. I’d expect at least one person needed to be transported to the hospital (heart attack from over excitement?), so contact the locals and arrange an ambulance on standby on site.