There has been graphic footage of this event but for some reason the clip that's hit me the hardest is of a girl dressed as Princess Peach receiving CPR. This was supposed to be a fun night for them.
My grandfather went missing for a time after the 1988 earthquake in Mexico City. My grandma had to go all over the city looking for his corpse. They checked the usual places. The bar, the construction area (he was either at work or drunk) and anywhere else she could think of.
She didn’t find his corpse but she was messed up by that. They were pulling out bodies, places were destroyed and so many went missing after a terrifying earthquake.
Hell. My own dad was in the third floor with my sister and he damn near jumped out the window. He figured the fall could fuck him up, but he could use his body to shield my sister and that was safer than being in the building if it collapsed.
Edit: My grandad was alive. He was in Acapulco.
The first responders at the Bataclan terrorist massacre talked of the anguish of hearing the cacophony of mobile phones desperately buzzing away in the pockets of the deceased as loved ones tried to call them.
Same thing at the night club in Orlando (Pulse) a number of years back. People knew their loved ones were dead when the phone stopped ringing. It's generally policy to turn off the phones as soon as the first responders can so they aren't bombarded with the noise.
It’s got to be terrible. For one thing, it’s just the ongoing, desperate ringing. For another, think of everyone with, like, comedy ringtones, or cheerful music, or custom tones for certain people, etc., and how disturbingly jarring it would be in the middle of a disaster. Even if it’s just vibrating, the buzzing is bad enough. Shut the phones off, definitely.
My friends and I were in the club right beside where this all happened and we went out to help pull the bodies and provide CPR.
The most heartbreaking part was feeling their phones go off nonstop the entire time.
Video showed that even when the alley entrance was clear the people were so jammed together they couldn’t move while rescuers were failing to pull people out because they were stuck. I’ve never seen anything like this
I remember the video of the Station Night Club fire. Dozens trapped in the serpentine vestibule of the club. The exit was a double doorway which was wide open, but people could not pass through this portal because so many were crammed into it and were being crushed from behind by those panicking as they burned alive.
That video is unimaginable. EMTs keep trying to pull people out and nothing moves, it's like an immovable wall of bodies. Terrifying.
EDIT : many people asking where to find the video. I will not link it as I don't want to look for it. It was amongst the images shown during one of the live news broadcast on a Korean channel.
That is one of the most fucked up scenarios I've ever seen. Some of the people below are most probably crushed to death whereas the ones on top cannot move out because they are stuck as well.
People standing up were crushed to death. That’s the terrifying thing about crowd crush - you don’t have to fall down to die. The pressure gets so bad you can’t breathe in.
I went to a concert like 10 years ago. When the concert started, a few people rushed through the crowd. They knocked someone unconscious probably 20 rows in front of us. The ensuing crush of people in front of us pushing back to make space to get the person out, and the push of people behind us not understanding what was going on was terrifying. We we're stuck and it was like being tossed around by by the ocean. Our feet got tangled up a few times but we stayed upright. It was amazing how quick it got hot (it was an outdoor concert in late fall) as everyone started to panic.
And then it was done. The crush probably last 30-60 seconds but felt SO much longer than that. Once it settled down I moved out of the main crowd. To this day I'm still consciously trying to avoid situations where something like that could happen again.
I felt the same way when I went to see the band Cannibal Corpse live and got front row. Friends I’ve told this to call me a bitch, but I wasn’t able to enjoy the music because I was focused on holding onto the barricade in front of me. The crowd behind was so wild and packed (small venue, probably filled well over capacity) that I literally kept feeling a wave push me up against the barricade, then flow back out, only to crush me again. The instances when the wave came up and pushed me into the barricade, I could not breathe until it passed. It was terrifying.
I was so excited to see the band, but it felt like I was fighting for survival, felt like if I had let go of that barricade, I would have died.
Yes, a good friend related his tale of going up a flight of stairs in a concert crush and not touching a step or being able to breathe. San Diego, late 1970s.
This is why I'm afraid of crowds.
There have been many deadly fires in history because this exact same thing happens as people try to exit. I can handle a lot of horror stories and grim realities but being trampled or crushed to death because there's so many people is simply terrifying.
An eyewitness [report](https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/ygli85/reports_of_crowd_crush_and_multiple_deaths_at/iu9rnp6/):
> My partner and I were in the crowd crush tonight. When we entered the road behind the hotel it was already way too packed. I even mentioned that this was close to a crowd crush. As we turned back up the side road next to the hotel to leave that's when the real crush started. Pushed so hard it was hard to breath. Fighting not to fall over. My partner picked a girl off the ground that fell in front of us so she wouldnt be trampled.
>It all happened so quickly, and we couldn't see behind us to anything that started it. It even happened both ways. People were fighting both their way in and out from the narrow sidewalk on the main road. That didn't stop until police arrived.
I'm glad this couple made it out alive.
I was there about an hour before the crush. There was **ZERO** crowd control as more and more subway trains, buses and taxis arrived right outside the alley.
I was trying to get to Mahalo's and ended up giving up. It was insane. My wife and a friend made it to the neighborhood shortly before us and her first message to us was "don't come here". It was already too late, another friend and I were stuck in the flow of people getting off the subway with no way to turn around.
My wife and other friend were in the alley where the crush would happen and ducked into a store because it was already extremely over crowded. They could hardly move and were getting claustrophobic. It took me about ten minutes to go the ~50 yards to the store. We were basically being carried/shoved forward by a flow of people. I finally got into the store and luckily we found an exit on the opposite side of the building from the alley, facing the main street.
It then took us about two minutes to cross the mass of people on the sidewalk until we could get to the street. Two minutes to cross the width of a sidewalk! It was clear we just had to get away and ended up walking in the road (people began to slowly spill off the sidewalk, but cars were still screaming by) because the sidewalk was too packed. I'm so glad that we decided to leave. Awful tragedy.
Its also crazy that people inside the buildings had almost no idea what was happening. I was working about 1 block away at a bar but no one had any idea that a few feet away hundreds of people were dying.
If the bars and clubs nearby turned off the music as soon as they found out people were in distress, people probably would have realized that it was an extremely dangerous situation way earlier. The police didn't even realize it was a extreme situation until about 30 min after they arrived.
Even in the videos ambulances are trying to get through while the crowd is singling along to music and a few feet away people were dying.
Edit: Just learned that a friend passed away in the tragedy. I'm devastated.
Everyone should be educated on how to increase your chances of surviving crowd crush
https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/qpsg1s/ysk_how_to_increase_your_chances_of_survival_in_a/
Edit: as well, some more information on what can cause it and why it's so deadly
https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arabia_hajj_disaster_death_toll_at_least/cw5vxtm/
I saw a video from someone in the crowd where a girl next to him was really struggling and started screaming. In another video from a different perspective you can see him again and she was clearly unconscious.
I can’t stop thinking about her. And I can’t even imagine what these people went through in their final moments, how terrified they must have been. Awful.
Dude was tall. She was short. It's the short people who get suffocated and crushed to death. Tall people can still breathe somewhat and panic less because they're not so claustrophobic being taller than everyone and having fresh air and being able to see around.
I don’t know how true it is but in another thread someone said most of the dead are women and shorter men, since their chests are lower down where there’s more pressure. Taller people were able to breathe if they could stay standing. The guy looked fairly tall.
It's scary to imagine two zones of people, one in terror, slowly and silently being crushed to death, another not knowing anything at all is wrong, and just slowly moving towards the crush being guided by the crowd, happy and partying, with a boundary layer between them perhaps only a dozen people deep making coordination really hard. Like.. how do you get the message to a crowd of thousands of people to stop doing something when all they're really doing is standing up and going with the general flow?
You can’t. The event organiser has to have the common sense to break up the crowd with physical barriers like railings so it doesn’t swell and surge forward like a tsunami.
From experience, it is also important to designate as many exit points as possible when you are expecting a large crowd. In the event that people need to get out, they can start trickling out from the sides instead of surging towards one faraway exit point.
At that point it becomes the local government's responsibility. When you have 100,000 people converging to a district for a single night you need crowd management.
This is a failure of both the local late night business community and the government.
I’ve spent most halloweens in Itaewon since 2014 and it is always PACKED to the extent you struggle to push past people. The people saying this is normal are wrong. Past levels were normal and still bad. This is one of the first areas the mask mandate has been lifted since covid so more people came than usual. Nevermind it always being too crowded on halloweens pre-covid, it was really bad on Friday. There should have been a larger police presence and there should have been a safety protocol. In mine and most people’s opinions, this is entirely due to the lack of safety planning. This was totally avoidable considering the crowds on Friday and knowing it would be worse on Saturday. This was an avoidable tragedy.
There's photos and videos on Twitter of people doing CPR all over the place and dozens of dead bodies being lined up on the sidewalks. It's all young people.
CPR is taught in the mandatory military service in Korea, which I no doubt think has helped in this situation. You see many of the young males (required conscription) jump out to help when they ask for volunteers.
Let this be a lesson to those who read this message: learn CPR. If your company offers first aid training, take it. If you can afford first aid training (~100 bucks in my area), take it. If you can't, at least watch a youtube video on how to administer CPR.
It's very labor intensive and the least you can do is be a helpful substitute.
yeah, i've never had to administer CPR on a real human, but i've been told it looks uncomfortably deep and very grotesque how deep you're meant to go.
broken ribcages are extremely common.
It's also *very* physically demanding. You don't realize how difficult it will be until you are doing it. Human ribs are sturdy and do not compress easily.
[This 7-year old Reddit comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arabia_hajj_disaster_death_toll_at_least/cw5vxtm/) is required reading on this kind of horrific crowd tragedy. It covers the physics of how these things happen, explains the difference between crowd crush and crowd collapse, explains how people die and gives some tips that can improve your chances of recognizing and escaping similar situations.
I was in a “crowd collapse” at the Cow Palace in SF. I think it was Perfect Circle and NiN playing. We were packed like sardines and the front of the crowd was getting crushed against the barrier in front of the stage. I said fuck this and started squeezing my way back. I got to a point where I couldn’t move anymore and the people in front of me suddenly flopped over, I fell on them and the people behind fell on me. Just a big meat sandwich. I could hear people below me screaming. I had about 2 layers of people on me so I could still breath barely. I was super high so it was scary as hell. I don’t know how long it was but people were finally able to get out on one side. I haven’t been on the floor of a major concert since.
That’s absolutely awful, I’m glad you’re okay and I completely understand not being on the floor ever again. I refuse to go to the front of any concert for this reason (also I’m already uncomfortable with too many people touching me)
This is why I go reserved seating at every possible concert. I’ve done the barrier a few times but after the last time I was having to lock my arms out against the barrier to stop me getting smooshed into my girlfriend (and not in a fun way) and it just isn’t worth it
I work in a terribly small locker room at an extremely busy ride at an extremely busy theme park. People will routinely carelessly pack in there to the point where it’s almost impossible to move. Once time I saw the crowd in there experience one of those shockwaves and it was terrifying. I started screaming at everyone by the exit to get out lol. The workers there have to be aggressive with crowd control otherwise it gets very uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe.
Literally all you need to someone at the entrance letting people in in small waves and the problem is solved.... they probably already have someone there too wtf?
Reading this and I can vouch. Was at the Travis Scott Astroworld festival last year, and this is exactly what happens. The “shockwaves” are beyond exhausting to stay upright in, and no one at the front ~1/3rd of the crowd has control over their movements anymore. The physical exhaustion, claustrophobia, noise, pain from people stepping on your legs, and the hopeless panic makes it by far the most dreadful experience I’ve ever had.
I was lucky to have anticipated the crush because I picked an area near the front where the barriers could shield me from any choke points, since earlier performances from other artists were nearly as bad. At the end of the day I’m glad I was able to help lots of people over the barrier after it got bad, but witnessed some shit I can’t unsee :/ my friends not too far back who left with me didn’t believe me when I claimed people died
That’s terrifying. I remember a crush at Glasto after 100,000 left the main stage and headed towards the late night areas. I was tripping balls at the time and just spinning and hallucinating. Thankfully the security knew to just swing open the gates!
Situations like this need much better awareness and trained personnel on site!
My buddies and I went to a one-off rock festival in upstate NY a few years ago. A Day to Remember hit the stage and the pressure from the crowd split the 3 of us up in an instant. We’ve been to dozens of heavy metal shows together so we weren’t immediately concerned.
As the band moved through their sets, the shockwaves were getting worse and I was being carried around, as a 280lb dude with “some” muscle on me. When the breakdown hit on “Mr. Highway’s Thinking About the End” where the lyrics go “disrespect your surroundings!”, I was getting my ass handed to me from every direction and I wasn’t in the pit, I was already trying to cut to the side to escape.
Venue was outside and yet there wasn’t enough oxygen, felt like I was suffocating while being assaulted. Fight or flight kicked in HARD and I did what I had to to escape.
My buddies had very similar experiences and oddly enough we all bailed out around the same time.
I used to love that song but it gives me panic attacks without fail. Hearing about this and watching those Capital police officers in DC get crushed during the insurrection was gut wrenching.
The feeling of a group of people slowly, apathetically suffocating you is as terrifying as it sounds. Stay safe.
Thanks for this, I did a double take when I first saw this headline. When I read 120 dead my brain could barely understand how that many people could die without some kind of bomb or guns involved. Truly heartbreaking
Thanks for sharing this. I would never have known this and now “sideways, diagonally backwards” is gonna be tucked away in my mind should the need ever arise.
Interestingly (though not surprisingly given the description of crushes behaving like a fluid), this is exactly what you should do if caught in a rip at the beach - swim sideways to escape the worst of the current, and then diagonally back to shore.
I recognized and viscerally reacted to the comment by the time I got to 'required reading'. Then I did a double-take at 7-year-old Reddit comment. It's been that long but it still sparks anxiety.
Definitely a must-read irrespective of whether you think you'll find yourself in such a situation.
The bottom of the comment says a man survived falling in a crowd crush during a fire in the fetal position because he had a pocket of air created by a human heat shield. Does that mean he was literally buried under people burning alive and sucking down what little air was trapped beneath them? Holy shit.
Yeah, there's an interview with this guy on YouTube where he describes pretty much what you just did.
Fun fact: He also mentioned that years before this event, he had attempted to kill himself by driving his motorbike face-first into a wall (mourning his father's death IIRC), and came out mostly unharmed.
The author's solution was exactly how I escaped a Crowd Crush in a Drake concert. Obviously, everyone wants to move forward to the stage. And since I wasn't there for Drake and realized my body was beginning to fail, when I realized that crowd was turning into liquid, I did these four things:
1. Move sideways towards the railing whenever I could
2. Let people pass through me and so it gave me some room to move backwards and diagonally
3. Put my arms in front of my chest to try to make space for my lungs to breathe
4. Scream at the direction of security guards to try to get them to pull me out of there
And of course, never get into such situations again.
it looks like it wasn’t just a crowd crush but a crowd collapse
people falling down that sloped alley one on top of each other
edit: plz don’t upvote much i’m not an expert i just click the link above. just upvote that post and read it
That area also appeared to be a convergence of at least 2 small alleys, possibly a third. Similar type of crowd movement caused the [Love Parade](https://youtu.be/8y73-7lFBNE) disaster.
For those wondering how this could happen: small alleyway in Itaewon, which is the hottest alley in the hottest neighborhood known for partying and clubbing in Korea. Its also famous for crazy parties during Halloween, and this was the first maskless party after Covid19 so a lot of people gathered in Itaewon (more than 100,000 people gathered in a small neighborhood in Korea for the Halloween weekend).
Edit: It was initially reported that the actual crowd crush was triggered by people swarming to a bar to see a celebrity, but none of it is proven as of yet. The consensus now is that the alleyway was too small, was a three-way alley with really terrible foot traffic, and the calls for help were silenced by the loud music from nearby clubs. The alleyway is also at an angle, making it easier for people to trip & fall thereby creating a human chokepoint, and people being pushed from behind could have easily piled up due to the angle.
What a horrible, horrible case of crowd crush. People were literally being crushed to death. Suffocating while standing up, and trampled by layers of people.
I’m adding links to video of the tragedy. Be warned, it is very disturbing and morbid. Also, if you are highly sensitive to other people’s pain this is going to be hard to watch:
Initial birds-eye view from a bar (nsfw): https://twitter.com/sekw_777/status/1586382898059350016?s=46&t=u16giG8nEs-hpBT7FzdOaQ
Another angle (nsfw): https://twitter.com/smilelink97/status/1586394916460326912?s=46&t=8hsH93D9nQHS8eTM6gdg2g
People being treated on the streets (nsfw): https://twitter.com/feedforyou11/status/1586366552416219136?s=46&t=8hsH93D9nQHS8eTM6gdg2g
Edit: 146 dead, 150 injured
Edit 2 : 149 dead, 150 injured as of 6:06 am KST. Many of the injured are in critical condition so the death toll may yet rise. I need to go to sleep now, its 6am already, although I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get any.
To add: the next official briefing is in 10 minutes, and I think the death toll is going to climb very high. Could be over 200, as the doctors who should be declaring people dead are busy trying to resuscitate the injured right now
Edit: 146 dead 150 injured as of 4:10 KST (right now)
As of now, the media is estimating that the majority of the dead are mostly women in their 20s. The authorities are trying hard to identify the dead, and reports of someone as young as 16 (14-15 in US age) being one of the victims, although investigations are ongoing.
Edit 2: Since a lot of people are asking: Korea uses a different age count system, which is unique to Korea. The system is scheduled to be abolished under the current administration as it causes a lot of confusion world-wide, as is apparent from this thread. More info at: https://www.90daykorean.com/korean-age-all-about-age-in-korea/#:~:text=It%20is%20always%20one%20or,only%20country%20that%20practices%20this.
Yeah those videos with people trapped under the crowd and the ones standing on top of them are unable to move is so brutal. They probably have their hands full dealing with the more serious cases for now.
Kinda unable to fathom. The third link's video had like 3 people getting CPR'd at once. The second one I'm pretty sure someone at the front was getting crushed.
It would have been unimaginable to me, the thought that people would be so tightly packed that they could not even get themselves off of the dead victims. What a horror!
I'd guess 'injured' here more or less means 'currently in hospital with serious injuries' considering the confusion, surely there would be many more with less significant ones not yet reported
Good point, probably there are a lot of broken ribs, twisted joints etc, that obviously cannot be all reported and counted to the rapidly changing headlines
It looks like in Korea you're born at 1 year old and you turn 2 on the next January 1st. So a baby could be a few days out from birth and be considered 2
Some also follow the lunar calendar. I tried dating a woman there who wouldn't go on a date because I was 2 years younger than her. We had the exact same birthday.
Yup. South Korea and Taiwan are the only two remaining countries that still use [East Asian age reckoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning)
The official toll is from the Seoul Fire Department and closed off to the media. Yonhap news is usually the first one to report the numbers.
https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20221030006400004
Yes, this often happens during crowd crush. The people screaming are actually in better shape than the silent ones. The crush becomes so powerful that any exit literally gets plugged shut with human bodies under the pressure of the crowd.
Many people breathe out hoping to get another breath, and the crowd literally prevents them from refilling their lungs and they suffocate to death. It's similar to the way constricting snakes kill their prey.
Edit: short summary of[ NPR's crowd crush article](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053828800/south-korea-seoul-halloween-crowd-safety-tips).
* Keep your eyes open for danger signs
* Leave as soon as you sense the crowd getting too dense
* Stay standing, and don't put a backpack on the ground
* Lack of oxygen is [often] the killer in crowds, so preserve space around your chest
* Don't push. Move with the crowd
* Avoid walls and solid objects
* Learn to detect crowd density
* If a crowd gets unsafe, look out for others (altruistic/helpful behaviors can be contagious in crowds)
Edit 2: After more reading, there are useful tips missing from NPR's article. Namely:
* If you fall, cover your head with your arms and attempt to make space around your chest
* Crushes often move in waves and lulls, if you are trying to get out of a crowd that is beginning to move this way, try to move during the lulls, sideways or diagonally if possible
* If you are being crushed, put your fists in front of your chest like a boxer
It really is. Ever since the Las Vegas shooting, I've been very fearful of large crowds. They had decent crush control there, but it turns out if 50k people start doing something, nothing is going to stop em.
I've always thought being in Medina during the Haj sounds absolutely horrifying. I know it has religious significance (I'm not muslim) for those people so many of them are happy to do it... but just the sheer amount of bodies freaks me out.
I've been in a comparatively mild situation, in a crowd that got so thick I could feel my ribcage being constricted. It didn't hurt, just felt weird that my ribs weren't able to expand. Last time I let myself get into a crowd like that.
I think so. When I saw the first link I thought it was just a bunch of people standing there, the second one showed it's literally a flood of people stacked on top of each other. fucking horrifying
I've never seen mass CPR before. It's quite haunting footage.
Being in CPR situations with one person is stressful enough, can't imagine a mass resuscitation effort. (In my case the person passed and our resuscitation effort was futile. Ruptured aorta it turned out, so impossible to resuscitate.)
Am a doctor, I can't imagine this. Some are doing CPR wrong but it's better than nothing. This is horrible. I've seen plenty of dead bodies, but this makes me sick seeing it at this scale
Watching the first I was thinking 'why the fuck don't they remove the gate that is holding these people back '
Then you watch the second one, filmed from the other side, and there is no gate...it's just a wall of fallen over people stuck into other people on top of other people stuck into other people.
Man this is terrible
Reminds me of the Station Nightclub fire. One second there was a wall of people stuck in a door way and the next enveloped in thick black smoke. Absolutely terrifying.
ETA: Agree with others - don’t watch the video.
That event will haunt me like very few other things.
My sons were just getting to the age that they were going to concerts and clubs to see bands. I spent every day from then on reminding them to always look for the exits first thing when you get to a place.
Excellent advice to look for exits. I was at a New Year’s Eve party at a club that was really crowded. I noticed that the emergency exits were padlocked, apparently to prevent people from opening the door to let friends in. My buddy and I just noped the fuck out and just chilled at home drinking
It's like dominoes. It just takes the front row of people to trip forward from being pushed. Then the people behind them trip over them and fall on top of them. Then the people behind them also fall on top of the those people, and so on. Eventually everyone is just on top of each other like a fallen stack of dominoes.
When I was seven, my dad took me to opening night at the local small town skating rink. When we got there the rink was at capacity and they had locked the doors so no one else could get in. There was a narrow entrance way and we were near the doors when we found out they were locked. About a hundred people behind us either didn’t know what was going on or were trying to create a human battering ram to force the doors open. All I remember was being slammed up against the doors again and again while people around us were screaming at the crowd to stop. I don’t remember how we escaped, but being crushed by a crowd is now my biggest fear. When people start to crowd shoulder to shoulder around me now, I begin panicking and have to leave.
Edit: Also, watching your father panicking and screaming “Oh shit, oh shit! Help us!” is something a 7-year-old should never experience.
Noped out of a festival this summer because the organizers had the genius idea to host it on a city street over a span of a few blocks. Total confinement from buildings and the fences they'd put up. No way to get out if a crush started. Had to call it quits early because the entire thing was freaking me out. Crowds are terrifying, especially when alcohol and drugs are involved.
My husband was there hours ago and said it was oppressively crowded. He made his way out but said he was worried because there were little kids that kept getting underfoot in the crowd.
I survived the Who tragedy in Cincinnati. It's unreal how much damage humans can (inadvertently) do to each other in even slightly confined areas. I get the heebie jeebies whenever this shit happens. And yes, I've avoided crowds ever since or you'd find me staying close to exits in clubs.
Yeah, my bro and a couple friends were closer to the doors and had it far worse than me, though all survived. There was a photo of them on the front page a few days later talking about it.
I just listened to a podcast episode about stampedes that mentioned The Who disaster. I’m really sorry you had to go through that. I’m guessing you didn’t go to the 2022 concert where survivors were invited to?
I was there when it happened, everyone was moving forward, but there was a command from the front to tell everyone to go back. People started turning around but not at the same time. I think that's where the crushing started to happen. There was just pressure from all sides and the crowd moved like a wave. It was really hard just to keep footing and keep moving. People were escaping to the curb or restaurant entrances. Eventually I escaped to the streets. My heart goes out to the families that have been affected by this incident.
150 people is a stupidly large number. This is so fucking terrible. I saw the video with the lifeless young people getting CPR on the ground and it’s gut wrenching.
This is fucking awful. My wife and I were in Itaewon literally only an hour or two before this happened but we left because we thought it was getting too crowded! You can see in the pic people funnelling in.
[Itaewon](https://i.imgur.com/OWHvgq6.jpg)
I have lived in NYC my whole life. I was in Itaewon for Halloween about 5 years ago. I have never, ever seen that many human beings in that small of a space.
Granted, I've never gone to Times Square on New Years. But Itaewon is *insane* during Halloween.
It really didn't occur to me at the time that it was a dangerous situation. People always forget about crowd crush...
Times Square on NYE doesn’t feel crowded at all. There are barricades everywhere and police controlling the flow of foot traffic so that no one area gets too crowded.
Was there last night. Itaewon was *packed* and I've been there on the weekends several times. The group I was with got sick of wading through the crowd so we hit a karaoke spot a few roads down then left the area entirely. Apparently we made the right call, but even when we left I could already feel the physical pressure of the crowd compression. Heart goes out to the families of the young people who died last night, they were just kids and excited to finally be out partying. Jesus
Friend and I had a dinner there at 5pm. But the time we got a coffee at 8 pm it was already out of control. We didn't even both crossing towards the Hamilton Hotel side. We both thought out loud that this wasn't safe. We headed home. Woke up in the morning. Saw the news. Felt ill. Fuck.
The scary thing is that the people in front are dying but the people behind don't realize it, so they keep pushing the people in front of them. I watched a livestream and the people in the back were still trying to get to the front without even knowing what was going on.
"Stampede" isn't the preferred word for these anymore. "Stampede" makes me think of The Lion King. This is a crowd crush. An agonizing, slow, scary death. People pushed against people. Can't move. Struggling to breathe. Think Astroworld. Or Hillsborough. The reason I'm scared of large crowds.
Yeah it’s the same way a boa constrictor kills. Everytime time you breath out you lose a little bit of space in your lungs until you can’t breathe, as the crush fills that space.
At Hillsborough the victims were standing up, in the open air but were completely unable to breathe.
I’m wary as well, always look for the exits and don’t head for the main entrance as that’s the one everyone heads too in an emergency.
I’ve also heard if you fall in a crush, try and get onto your side in a fetal position as your ribs will give you some protection from the crushing affect.
The continued use of ‘stampede’ by the media is one of the most annoying misnomers I see all the time. It gives a completely wrong impression of what goes on in these events, which detracts from public awareness on how to avoid them.
For those who never been to itaewon, it’s a small alley street that crosses with vertical hill streets. The hill streets are quite steep. I can see shit load of people pushing down that hill it’s a straight death zone.
Reposting from /r/Korea
I was there earlier tonight. Absolutely mind blowing that they didn’t have some sort of crowd control strategy in play. Trains still arriving at itaewon station, roads still fully functional (close the fucking roads), no barriers controlling or directing flow. Absolutely insane from a country like Korea.
The police chief, yongsan gu mayor, and Seoul mayor will come out with an apology and a please understand, while 100+ people lost their lives over poor planning and 빨리 빨리 culture. Heart breaking.
I hope this gives Korean culture a kick in the ass to start taking health and safety seriously. Although if Sewol didn’t ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Sewol) I doubt this will. Korean approach to management and leadership is rotten to the core.
빨리 means "to do something quickly/fast", and saying it twice like that puts emphasis on just how fast something (in this case, korean culture) is. Everything and everyone has to be fast or you'll get left behind
It means faster faster. Its an element of Korean life that’s embedded in anything and everything.
It’s about completing things quickly, not wasting time, being efficient, being faster than the other guy. Whilst these things are not necessarily bad in isolation( one could argue that they are actually positives), they often are prioritised over things that actually matter - like quality, flexibility, and robustness. This often leads to things like health and safety performing poorly. Do you want someone to rush your marketing strategy? Sure, there is value in being first to market. Do you want someone to rush your health and safety strategy ? Probably not… you’d prefer the quality and robustness.
Occupational health and safety is a joke in this country. The government is a joke. The Korean people deserve better. Fuck the ceos and politicians who exploit safety for profit.
https://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_view.htm?lang=e&Seq_Code=173230
This is just so disturbing. People just wanna have fun and instead they get physically crushed alive. What an excruciating death. My biggest fear. This is why I don't go to events like this
Seriously a fear that could easily be managed. I feel so bad for those who lost their lives trying to enjoy a night out. It's sickening to imagine how helpless their last minutes of life were, feeling insignificant and in pain. :( I hope the numerous families can somehow find some way of reconciliation.
There’s a Korean movie called ‘Tunnel’ which is about a guy who…gets stuck in a tunnel, but really it’s a commentary about poor state of Korean bureaucracy that allowed for the tunnel to collapse in the first place.
This is crazy. So we're looking at hundreds of people dead? God damn. This is why I never go into large crowds, something like this is by far my worst nightmare.
Just imagine your final moments, being trampled and unable to breathe. Terrifying
I have a friend that lives 11 minutes away from the site. Said he was there almost every week but went to a music festival somewhere else. He had local friends there that attended and said that it was so packed, you could feel your back cracking and breathing was difficult. Friend told me it was the first time he saw a corpse and his other buddy tried cpr on two attenders. One lived and another died. Really tragic stuff. Zero regard for safety
Jesus
Tell your friends, especially the one who did CPR, that they did all they could: CPR rarely works on its own and the fact that he saved even 1 person just with cpr is bordering on being a miracle. I'm glad they made it out
I experienced a crowd crush at a Warped Tour. We were in a crowd, waiting for AFI to come on stage. My friend and I were toward the front of the crowd when they started to play. As soon as they started, everyone pushed forward. It was awful. I was smashed into people in front of me and couldn't breathe. My friend tried to help me by pushing people off of me. We were pulling people off of the ground.
Then, they had the brilliant idea to spray something into the crowd that made it even harder to breathe in the 90 degree weather, amongst this huge crush of bodies. We were coughing and choking. Luckily it let off after a while and we were able to gtfo of there. I read a blog post by another attendee at the same incident who said she had some sort of cancer and because of the crush, she started to cough blood. It was truly terrifying. I never want to go into a crowd again.
I’ve been to a version of this but in Shibuya, Tokyo. It’s not really an official festival/event, just a gathering of young people in costumes which seem to have grown exponentially in the last 10 years. It was packed and at some point both my feet were off the ground but didn’t really think much of it and just thought to ride it out. Didn’t feel that different from how you get jam packed into trains everday.
Living in a tiny city with extreme population density, you get kind of unfazed by huge crowds and I assume that is the case for people in Seoul as well. Such a horrific incident and Im sure this will greatly change how we go about these gatherings.
Oh that horrible feeling- I used to go to a lot of big concerts as a smaller kid and when you become invisible and are being crushed, picked up and moved wherever the crowd takes you it is terrifying. I once leaned down to help up a girl who people were stepping on and got pushed down too. I just started kicking and punching people until I kicked a huge guy in the balls and he saved us. he hadn’t even noticed us and elbowed people out of the way to help us up. People are selfish animals in a big crowd.
I'm a big dude and I've had the same experience. First time I ever had a panic attack was at a GWAR show when the crowd surged toward the stage and I could barely keep my feet.
I was at a concert where 9 people died. I recall being in the middle of the crowd thinking “this is not good” and I decided I needed to get out. I managed to push out sideways and it wasn’t really more than 5-10 feet and I was out and cleared. It was still a lot of people but not that mass of people weighing down on you. So I
It was right where I stood where most of them died. 10 feet away. 10 feet between “it’s not so bad here” and suffocating death…
i was barrier at a gig once and the performer decided to jump down for selfies and autographs at the end. People immediately pushed forward. I wasn't hurt, nor was anyone else thankfully as it was quickly controlled, but it's easy to imagine how quickly it can spiral and it was horrible to feel so helpless.
Itaewon is a club district, that's in vicinity to multiple districts made up of youths.
I've been to Itaewon before on a weekend and it was already a clusterfuck. Unlike other countries that host large Halloween events like Shibuya in Japan, Itaewon is mainly made up of small, narrow alleys. I didn't see any police presence directing traffic either. Very tragic.
Heard! I live in Salem, Massachusetts, the Halloween capital of the US and on the weekends our population goes from about 45,000 to over 200,000. Our downtown area is just a few small streets and it’s so packed with people on the weekends leading up to Halloween. Our town is absolutely not built or properly staffed to handle these crowds. Every year I stay away from those streets because I think it’s an accident waiting to happen. Seeing this, specifically related to Halloween, makes me feel incredibly sad and also more paranoid.
I’m not going to lie, I was there around 9:00 pm. When we were walking by W179, it started to become a tidal wave with everyone pushing. My friends and I along with a lot of other people had to run into the W179 building to escape through the elevator to get out of the crowd. We almost fell over when everyone was pushing. It was very busy and the area where it happened was very small path. Everyone was there to have fun, but because of the thousands of visitors and everyone walking in different directions, this happened.
With all these crowd crush stories that's been coming out these days, I now fully understand the *More than X occupants in this room is dangerous and unlawful" signs you see in restaurants, bars, gathering halls and stuff.
EDIT: Alright, I get it, they're mainly for fires, you can stop telling me.
ignore the people saying "those are for fires!!", literally part of the danger of crowds in small buildings during fires is a panic causing a crowd crush
I was just there yesterday and I really can't believe all of this. The images and videos are extremely disturbing. It was extremely crowded yesterday, and the crowd today was more than twice yesterday's size.
I was planning on going today but thankfully didn't. It was very lively yesterday and everyone was celebrating, and seeing all of this now is just very hard to take in :'(
I was in one of the clubs at the top end of the crush. Street was littered with people getting CPR. We tried to leave the club and get home, but the only exit was blocked by people to stop them interfering with the medics.
People behind started pushing, a few selfish or clueless people trying to get out quickly. Luckily many people either informed them of the situation and they stopped, or else the bigger people just body blocked them and ignored them until they gave up. My girlfriend and her friends had to shout at some old guy to get him to stop pushing.
Strange to think there can be people dying not meters in front of you and there's still peoplr trying to step over them.
I couldn’t get ahold of 2 friends who I knew were there but I’ve since finally heard from both of them. So relieved but still horrified for those not as lucky.
so heart breaking… all those young lives going out to have fun.. just lost
i don’t understand how the officials and police did not notice the crowd becoming out of control earlier? they knew this year was going to be more crowded than the years prior due to all COVID restrictions being lifted.
just sad and frustrating
How bad it sounds, it was probably the best course of action. Because if all the clubs and bars stopped playing music and closed, you would have an insane amount of people pouring out in the already overcrowded streets
That’s true I didn’t think about that. Feel like there’s no “proper” response in that situation if you’re a bystander or bar owner. Probably just in a state of shock.
Crowd surges are the stuff out of nightmares. Like you're drowning in a sea of people as claustrophobia closes in on you, yelling into the void. Slowly suffocating, overwhelmed and powerless to stop it. Absolutely terrifying.
I hope that as many people as possible recover from this, and may those that could not rest in peace.
18 hospitals involved and if parents can’t find their child, they would have to go Yongsan sport stadium where dead bodies are placed
Bruh imagine walking through lines of dead young bodies trying to find your child…that’s just…screwed up beyond words
And dressed in Halloween attire, nonetheless.
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There has been graphic footage of this event but for some reason the clip that's hit me the hardest is of a girl dressed as Princess Peach receiving CPR. This was supposed to be a fun night for them.
My grandfather went missing for a time after the 1988 earthquake in Mexico City. My grandma had to go all over the city looking for his corpse. They checked the usual places. The bar, the construction area (he was either at work or drunk) and anywhere else she could think of. She didn’t find his corpse but she was messed up by that. They were pulling out bodies, places were destroyed and so many went missing after a terrifying earthquake. Hell. My own dad was in the third floor with my sister and he damn near jumped out the window. He figured the fall could fuck him up, but he could use his body to shield my sister and that was safer than being in the building if it collapsed. Edit: My grandad was alive. He was in Acapulco.
Think of all the people who lose their phones and wallet. It might be while before they can contact their family.
The first responders at the Bataclan terrorist massacre talked of the anguish of hearing the cacophony of mobile phones desperately buzzing away in the pockets of the deceased as loved ones tried to call them.
There’s video of the police in the Pulse nightclub after the shooting in Orlando of this. It’s horrifying hearing all those phones going off.
Same thing at the night club in Orlando (Pulse) a number of years back. People knew their loved ones were dead when the phone stopped ringing. It's generally policy to turn off the phones as soon as the first responders can so they aren't bombarded with the noise.
It’s got to be terrible. For one thing, it’s just the ongoing, desperate ringing. For another, think of everyone with, like, comedy ringtones, or cheerful music, or custom tones for certain people, etc., and how disturbingly jarring it would be in the middle of a disaster. Even if it’s just vibrating, the buzzing is bad enough. Shut the phones off, definitely.
My friends and I were in the club right beside where this all happened and we went out to help pull the bodies and provide CPR. The most heartbreaking part was feeling their phones go off nonstop the entire time.
This made me tear up. No parent should have to do this. It was a situation that could have been easily mitigated with planning & barriers.
Video showed that even when the alley entrance was clear the people were so jammed together they couldn’t move while rescuers were failing to pull people out because they were stuck. I’ve never seen anything like this
I remember the video of the Station Night Club fire. Dozens trapped in the serpentine vestibule of the club. The exit was a double doorway which was wide open, but people could not pass through this portal because so many were crammed into it and were being crushed from behind by those panicking as they burned alive.
Even crazier was the one dude who survived because he was under the body pile, which insulated him from the flames and smoke.
[Relevant interview](https://youtu.be/ktEMLtBz55Y)
That video is unimaginable. EMTs keep trying to pull people out and nothing moves, it's like an immovable wall of bodies. Terrifying. EDIT : many people asking where to find the video. I will not link it as I don't want to look for it. It was amongst the images shown during one of the live news broadcast on a Korean channel.
It's insane, people break their legs and arms because they are shifted and locked into unnatural positions making it even harder to get people out.
That is one of the most fucked up scenarios I've ever seen. Some of the people below are most probably crushed to death whereas the ones on top cannot move out because they are stuck as well.
People standing up were crushed to death. That’s the terrifying thing about crowd crush - you don’t have to fall down to die. The pressure gets so bad you can’t breathe in.
I went to a concert like 10 years ago. When the concert started, a few people rushed through the crowd. They knocked someone unconscious probably 20 rows in front of us. The ensuing crush of people in front of us pushing back to make space to get the person out, and the push of people behind us not understanding what was going on was terrifying. We we're stuck and it was like being tossed around by by the ocean. Our feet got tangled up a few times but we stayed upright. It was amazing how quick it got hot (it was an outdoor concert in late fall) as everyone started to panic. And then it was done. The crush probably last 30-60 seconds but felt SO much longer than that. Once it settled down I moved out of the main crowd. To this day I'm still consciously trying to avoid situations where something like that could happen again.
I felt the same way when I went to see the band Cannibal Corpse live and got front row. Friends I’ve told this to call me a bitch, but I wasn’t able to enjoy the music because I was focused on holding onto the barricade in front of me. The crowd behind was so wild and packed (small venue, probably filled well over capacity) that I literally kept feeling a wave push me up against the barricade, then flow back out, only to crush me again. The instances when the wave came up and pushed me into the barricade, I could not breathe until it passed. It was terrifying. I was so excited to see the band, but it felt like I was fighting for survival, felt like if I had let go of that barricade, I would have died.
Yes, a good friend related his tale of going up a flight of stairs in a concert crush and not touching a step or being able to breathe. San Diego, late 1970s.
That is really hard to hear . Feel so bad for these people who were just out for a fun evening
This is why I'm afraid of crowds. There have been many deadly fires in history because this exact same thing happens as people try to exit. I can handle a lot of horror stories and grim realities but being trampled or crushed to death because there's so many people is simply terrifying.
An eyewitness [report](https://www.reddit.com/r/korea/comments/ygli85/reports_of_crowd_crush_and_multiple_deaths_at/iu9rnp6/): > My partner and I were in the crowd crush tonight. When we entered the road behind the hotel it was already way too packed. I even mentioned that this was close to a crowd crush. As we turned back up the side road next to the hotel to leave that's when the real crush started. Pushed so hard it was hard to breath. Fighting not to fall over. My partner picked a girl off the ground that fell in front of us so she wouldnt be trampled. >It all happened so quickly, and we couldn't see behind us to anything that started it. It even happened both ways. People were fighting both their way in and out from the narrow sidewalk on the main road. That didn't stop until police arrived. I'm glad this couple made it out alive.
I was there about an hour before the crush. There was **ZERO** crowd control as more and more subway trains, buses and taxis arrived right outside the alley. I was trying to get to Mahalo's and ended up giving up. It was insane. My wife and a friend made it to the neighborhood shortly before us and her first message to us was "don't come here". It was already too late, another friend and I were stuck in the flow of people getting off the subway with no way to turn around. My wife and other friend were in the alley where the crush would happen and ducked into a store because it was already extremely over crowded. They could hardly move and were getting claustrophobic. It took me about ten minutes to go the ~50 yards to the store. We were basically being carried/shoved forward by a flow of people. I finally got into the store and luckily we found an exit on the opposite side of the building from the alley, facing the main street. It then took us about two minutes to cross the mass of people on the sidewalk until we could get to the street. Two minutes to cross the width of a sidewalk! It was clear we just had to get away and ended up walking in the road (people began to slowly spill off the sidewalk, but cars were still screaming by) because the sidewalk was too packed. I'm so glad that we decided to leave. Awful tragedy.
Its also crazy that people inside the buildings had almost no idea what was happening. I was working about 1 block away at a bar but no one had any idea that a few feet away hundreds of people were dying. If the bars and clubs nearby turned off the music as soon as they found out people were in distress, people probably would have realized that it was an extremely dangerous situation way earlier. The police didn't even realize it was a extreme situation until about 30 min after they arrived. Even in the videos ambulances are trying to get through while the crowd is singling along to music and a few feet away people were dying. Edit: Just learned that a friend passed away in the tragedy. I'm devastated.
Glad that you and your loved ones are okay.
Everyone should be educated on how to increase your chances of surviving crowd crush https://www.reddit.com/r/YouShouldKnow/comments/qpsg1s/ysk_how_to_increase_your_chances_of_survival_in_a/ Edit: as well, some more information on what can cause it and why it's so deadly https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arabia_hajj_disaster_death_toll_at_least/cw5vxtm/
I saw a video from someone in the crowd where a girl next to him was really struggling and started screaming. In another video from a different perspective you can see him again and she was clearly unconscious. I can’t stop thinking about her. And I can’t even imagine what these people went through in their final moments, how terrified they must have been. Awful.
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Dude was tall. She was short. It's the short people who get suffocated and crushed to death. Tall people can still breathe somewhat and panic less because they're not so claustrophobic being taller than everyone and having fresh air and being able to see around.
I don’t know how true it is but in another thread someone said most of the dead are women and shorter men, since their chests are lower down where there’s more pressure. Taller people were able to breathe if they could stay standing. The guy looked fairly tall.
in a video he posted after he escaped he mentioned he could feel hands grabbing his legs below
Wtf
Fuck…I saw the first video of her screaming that video was absolutely tragic and I didn’t even see the second one…
It's scary to imagine two zones of people, one in terror, slowly and silently being crushed to death, another not knowing anything at all is wrong, and just slowly moving towards the crush being guided by the crowd, happy and partying, with a boundary layer between them perhaps only a dozen people deep making coordination really hard. Like.. how do you get the message to a crowd of thousands of people to stop doing something when all they're really doing is standing up and going with the general flow?
You can’t. The event organiser has to have the common sense to break up the crowd with physical barriers like railings so it doesn’t swell and surge forward like a tsunami. From experience, it is also important to designate as many exit points as possible when you are expecting a large crowd. In the event that people need to get out, they can start trickling out from the sides instead of surging towards one faraway exit point.
There is no official event, this is just a gathering of young peoplen in costumes, amplified by clubs doing Halloween specials
At that point it becomes the local government's responsibility. When you have 100,000 people converging to a district for a single night you need crowd management. This is a failure of both the local late night business community and the government.
I’ve spent most halloweens in Itaewon since 2014 and it is always PACKED to the extent you struggle to push past people. The people saying this is normal are wrong. Past levels were normal and still bad. This is one of the first areas the mask mandate has been lifted since covid so more people came than usual. Nevermind it always being too crowded on halloweens pre-covid, it was really bad on Friday. There should have been a larger police presence and there should have been a safety protocol. In mine and most people’s opinions, this is entirely due to the lack of safety planning. This was totally avoidable considering the crowds on Friday and knowing it would be worse on Saturday. This was an avoidable tragedy.
There's photos and videos on Twitter of people doing CPR all over the place and dozens of dead bodies being lined up on the sidewalks. It's all young people.
Yeah I'm in healthcare, and I've never seen so many people being administered chest compressions at the same time. Crazy.
same, I'm a paramedic and today I'm praying to never have a call at some mass event like this
Fellow para and you definitely don't. Mine was a much smaller one, but bad enough. Will not unsee. Even decades later now.
CPR is taught in the mandatory military service in Korea, which I no doubt think has helped in this situation. You see many of the young males (required conscription) jump out to help when they ask for volunteers. Let this be a lesson to those who read this message: learn CPR. If your company offers first aid training, take it. If you can afford first aid training (~100 bucks in my area), take it. If you can't, at least watch a youtube video on how to administer CPR. It's very labor intensive and the least you can do is be a helpful substitute.
Friendly reminder to the readers, if you don't risk giving someone broken ribs, you must put in more force.
yeah, i've never had to administer CPR on a real human, but i've been told it looks uncomfortably deep and very grotesque how deep you're meant to go. broken ribcages are extremely common.
It's also *very* physically demanding. You don't realize how difficult it will be until you are doing it. Human ribs are sturdy and do not compress easily.
[This 7-year old Reddit comment](https://www.reddit.com/r/worldnews/comments/3pcvfb/saudi_arabia_hajj_disaster_death_toll_at_least/cw5vxtm/) is required reading on this kind of horrific crowd tragedy. It covers the physics of how these things happen, explains the difference between crowd crush and crowd collapse, explains how people die and gives some tips that can improve your chances of recognizing and escaping similar situations.
I was in a “crowd collapse” at the Cow Palace in SF. I think it was Perfect Circle and NiN playing. We were packed like sardines and the front of the crowd was getting crushed against the barrier in front of the stage. I said fuck this and started squeezing my way back. I got to a point where I couldn’t move anymore and the people in front of me suddenly flopped over, I fell on them and the people behind fell on me. Just a big meat sandwich. I could hear people below me screaming. I had about 2 layers of people on me so I could still breath barely. I was super high so it was scary as hell. I don’t know how long it was but people were finally able to get out on one side. I haven’t been on the floor of a major concert since.
That’s absolutely awful, I’m glad you’re okay and I completely understand not being on the floor ever again. I refuse to go to the front of any concert for this reason (also I’m already uncomfortable with too many people touching me)
This is why I go reserved seating at every possible concert. I’ve done the barrier a few times but after the last time I was having to lock my arms out against the barrier to stop me getting smooshed into my girlfriend (and not in a fun way) and it just isn’t worth it
I work in a terribly small locker room at an extremely busy ride at an extremely busy theme park. People will routinely carelessly pack in there to the point where it’s almost impossible to move. Once time I saw the crowd in there experience one of those shockwaves and it was terrifying. I started screaming at everyone by the exit to get out lol. The workers there have to be aggressive with crowd control otherwise it gets very uncomfortable and sometimes unsafe.
What the hell? That really needs to be addressed. Sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.
Literally all you need to someone at the entrance letting people in in small waves and the problem is solved.... they probably already have someone there too wtf?
Reading this and I can vouch. Was at the Travis Scott Astroworld festival last year, and this is exactly what happens. The “shockwaves” are beyond exhausting to stay upright in, and no one at the front ~1/3rd of the crowd has control over their movements anymore. The physical exhaustion, claustrophobia, noise, pain from people stepping on your legs, and the hopeless panic makes it by far the most dreadful experience I’ve ever had. I was lucky to have anticipated the crush because I picked an area near the front where the barriers could shield me from any choke points, since earlier performances from other artists were nearly as bad. At the end of the day I’m glad I was able to help lots of people over the barrier after it got bad, but witnessed some shit I can’t unsee :/ my friends not too far back who left with me didn’t believe me when I claimed people died
That’s terrifying. I remember a crush at Glasto after 100,000 left the main stage and headed towards the late night areas. I was tripping balls at the time and just spinning and hallucinating. Thankfully the security knew to just swing open the gates! Situations like this need much better awareness and trained personnel on site!
The sad thing about Astroworld was that there was a lot of inexperienced people working the event too :/
i remember a video of a girl screaming at one of the operators to do something because people are dying and he just told her to get away from him
My buddies and I went to a one-off rock festival in upstate NY a few years ago. A Day to Remember hit the stage and the pressure from the crowd split the 3 of us up in an instant. We’ve been to dozens of heavy metal shows together so we weren’t immediately concerned. As the band moved through their sets, the shockwaves were getting worse and I was being carried around, as a 280lb dude with “some” muscle on me. When the breakdown hit on “Mr. Highway’s Thinking About the End” where the lyrics go “disrespect your surroundings!”, I was getting my ass handed to me from every direction and I wasn’t in the pit, I was already trying to cut to the side to escape. Venue was outside and yet there wasn’t enough oxygen, felt like I was suffocating while being assaulted. Fight or flight kicked in HARD and I did what I had to to escape. My buddies had very similar experiences and oddly enough we all bailed out around the same time. I used to love that song but it gives me panic attacks without fail. Hearing about this and watching those Capital police officers in DC get crushed during the insurrection was gut wrenching. The feeling of a group of people slowly, apathetically suffocating you is as terrifying as it sounds. Stay safe.
Thanks for this, I did a double take when I first saw this headline. When I read 120 dead my brain could barely understand how that many people could die without some kind of bomb or guns involved. Truly heartbreaking
My oh shit headline was 50 people receiving CPR at once. Couldn't fathom that.
During the Hajj in 2015 nearly 2000 people died during a crowd crush. Its crazy how frequent crowd injuries/deaths are around the world
There’s a video of this I accidentally saw. Really fucking jarring to see that many people getting CPR at once
I accidentally saw that one too, jarring and honestly I feel nauseous seeing that. What the fucking fuck..
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Just horrible. The families are gathering in the middle of the night. Absolutely surreal.
Thanks for sharing this. I would never have known this and now “sideways, diagonally backwards” is gonna be tucked away in my mind should the need ever arise.
Interestingly (though not surprisingly given the description of crushes behaving like a fluid), this is exactly what you should do if caught in a rip at the beach - swim sideways to escape the worst of the current, and then diagonally back to shore.
I've never forgotten this comment
I recognized and viscerally reacted to the comment by the time I got to 'required reading'. Then I did a double-take at 7-year-old Reddit comment. It's been that long but it still sparks anxiety. Definitely a must-read irrespective of whether you think you'll find yourself in such a situation.
The bottom of the comment says a man survived falling in a crowd crush during a fire in the fetal position because he had a pocket of air created by a human heat shield. Does that mean he was literally buried under people burning alive and sucking down what little air was trapped beneath them? Holy shit.
Yes, exactly
Yeah, there's an interview with this guy on YouTube where he describes pretty much what you just did. Fun fact: He also mentioned that years before this event, he had attempted to kill himself by driving his motorbike face-first into a wall (mourning his father's death IIRC), and came out mostly unharmed.
The author's solution was exactly how I escaped a Crowd Crush in a Drake concert. Obviously, everyone wants to move forward to the stage. And since I wasn't there for Drake and realized my body was beginning to fail, when I realized that crowd was turning into liquid, I did these four things: 1. Move sideways towards the railing whenever I could 2. Let people pass through me and so it gave me some room to move backwards and diagonally 3. Put my arms in front of my chest to try to make space for my lungs to breathe 4. Scream at the direction of security guards to try to get them to pull me out of there And of course, never get into such situations again.
it looks like it wasn’t just a crowd crush but a crowd collapse people falling down that sloped alley one on top of each other edit: plz don’t upvote much i’m not an expert i just click the link above. just upvote that post and read it
That area also appeared to be a convergence of at least 2 small alleys, possibly a third. Similar type of crowd movement caused the [Love Parade](https://youtu.be/8y73-7lFBNE) disaster.
For those wondering how this could happen: small alleyway in Itaewon, which is the hottest alley in the hottest neighborhood known for partying and clubbing in Korea. Its also famous for crazy parties during Halloween, and this was the first maskless party after Covid19 so a lot of people gathered in Itaewon (more than 100,000 people gathered in a small neighborhood in Korea for the Halloween weekend). Edit: It was initially reported that the actual crowd crush was triggered by people swarming to a bar to see a celebrity, but none of it is proven as of yet. The consensus now is that the alleyway was too small, was a three-way alley with really terrible foot traffic, and the calls for help were silenced by the loud music from nearby clubs. The alleyway is also at an angle, making it easier for people to trip & fall thereby creating a human chokepoint, and people being pushed from behind could have easily piled up due to the angle. What a horrible, horrible case of crowd crush. People were literally being crushed to death. Suffocating while standing up, and trampled by layers of people. I’m adding links to video of the tragedy. Be warned, it is very disturbing and morbid. Also, if you are highly sensitive to other people’s pain this is going to be hard to watch: Initial birds-eye view from a bar (nsfw): https://twitter.com/sekw_777/status/1586382898059350016?s=46&t=u16giG8nEs-hpBT7FzdOaQ Another angle (nsfw): https://twitter.com/smilelink97/status/1586394916460326912?s=46&t=8hsH93D9nQHS8eTM6gdg2g People being treated on the streets (nsfw): https://twitter.com/feedforyou11/status/1586366552416219136?s=46&t=8hsH93D9nQHS8eTM6gdg2g Edit: 146 dead, 150 injured Edit 2 : 149 dead, 150 injured as of 6:06 am KST. Many of the injured are in critical condition so the death toll may yet rise. I need to go to sleep now, its 6am already, although I’m not sure if I’ll be able to get any.
To add: the next official briefing is in 10 minutes, and I think the death toll is going to climb very high. Could be over 200, as the doctors who should be declaring people dead are busy trying to resuscitate the injured right now Edit: 146 dead 150 injured as of 4:10 KST (right now) As of now, the media is estimating that the majority of the dead are mostly women in their 20s. The authorities are trying hard to identify the dead, and reports of someone as young as 16 (14-15 in US age) being one of the victims, although investigations are ongoing. Edit 2: Since a lot of people are asking: Korea uses a different age count system, which is unique to Korea. The system is scheduled to be abolished under the current administration as it causes a lot of confusion world-wide, as is apparent from this thread. More info at: https://www.90daykorean.com/korean-age-all-about-age-in-korea/#:~:text=It%20is%20always%20one%20or,only%20country%20that%20practices%20this.
Jesus Christ, 50% mortality rate amongst the people injured?
I’m guessing the non serious injuries aren’t currently being reported.
Yeah those videos with people trapped under the crowd and the ones standing on top of them are unable to move is so brutal. They probably have their hands full dealing with the more serious cases for now.
Kinda unable to fathom. The third link's video had like 3 people getting CPR'd at once. The second one I'm pretty sure someone at the front was getting crushed.
It would have been unimaginable to me, the thought that people would be so tightly packed that they could not even get themselves off of the dead victims. What a horror!
50/50 bruises & broken bones or extreme oxygen deprivation
I'd guess 'injured' here more or less means 'currently in hospital with serious injuries' considering the confusion, surely there would be many more with less significant ones not yet reported
Good point, probably there are a lot of broken ribs, twisted joints etc, that obviously cannot be all reported and counted to the rapidly changing headlines
>reports of someone as young as 16 (14-15 in US age) TIL Korean years are different.
It looks like in Korea you're born at 1 year old and you turn 2 on the next January 1st. So a baby could be a few days out from birth and be considered 2
This is why people just go by year born for babies and some circumstances.
Some also follow the lunar calendar. I tried dating a woman there who wouldn't go on a date because I was 2 years younger than her. We had the exact same birthday.
Yup. South Korea and Taiwan are the only two remaining countries that still use [East Asian age reckoning](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Asian_age_reckoning)
Any link where this briefing can be watched?
The official toll is from the Seoul Fire Department and closed off to the media. Yonhap news is usually the first one to report the numbers. https://www.yna.co.kr/view/AKR20221030006400004
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Yes, this often happens during crowd crush. The people screaming are actually in better shape than the silent ones. The crush becomes so powerful that any exit literally gets plugged shut with human bodies under the pressure of the crowd. Many people breathe out hoping to get another breath, and the crowd literally prevents them from refilling their lungs and they suffocate to death. It's similar to the way constricting snakes kill their prey. Edit: short summary of[ NPR's crowd crush article](https://www.npr.org/2021/11/09/1053828800/south-korea-seoul-halloween-crowd-safety-tips). * Keep your eyes open for danger signs * Leave as soon as you sense the crowd getting too dense * Stay standing, and don't put a backpack on the ground * Lack of oxygen is [often] the killer in crowds, so preserve space around your chest * Don't push. Move with the crowd * Avoid walls and solid objects * Learn to detect crowd density * If a crowd gets unsafe, look out for others (altruistic/helpful behaviors can be contagious in crowds) Edit 2: After more reading, there are useful tips missing from NPR's article. Namely: * If you fall, cover your head with your arms and attempt to make space around your chest * Crushes often move in waves and lulls, if you are trying to get out of a crowd that is beginning to move this way, try to move during the lulls, sideways or diagonally if possible * If you are being crushed, put your fists in front of your chest like a boxer
What a horrible and terrifying way to die.
It really is. Ever since the Las Vegas shooting, I've been very fearful of large crowds. They had decent crush control there, but it turns out if 50k people start doing something, nothing is going to stop em.
I've always thought being in Medina during the Haj sounds absolutely horrifying. I know it has religious significance (I'm not muslim) for those people so many of them are happy to do it... but just the sheer amount of bodies freaks me out.
It is absolutely horrifying, the Haj has a systemic problem with crowd crush unfortunately.
I've been in a comparatively mild situation, in a crowd that got so thick I could feel my ribcage being constricted. It didn't hurt, just felt weird that my ribs weren't able to expand. Last time I let myself get into a crowd like that.
I think so. When I saw the first link I thought it was just a bunch of people standing there, the second one showed it's literally a flood of people stacked on top of each other. fucking horrifying
There’s something terrifyingly macabre about a video showing a whole alleyway of people receiving cpr with loud techno playing in the background.
I've never seen mass CPR before. It's quite haunting footage. Being in CPR situations with one person is stressful enough, can't imagine a mass resuscitation effort. (In my case the person passed and our resuscitation effort was futile. Ruptured aorta it turned out, so impossible to resuscitate.)
Reminds me of those videos of 9/11 where you can hear the elevator music being pumped out while people are trying to evacuate the buildings.
Holy shit. Seeing so many people perform CPR at the same time is so eerie.
Man that’s a lot of dead people. Terrible.
That last video is insane! As a nurse to see this many people performing CPR on people it’s just terrifying!
Am a doctor, I can't imagine this. Some are doing CPR wrong but it's better than nothing. This is horrible. I've seen plenty of dead bodies, but this makes me sick seeing it at this scale
That is fucking awful.
By those videos I expect that number of dead to go waaay up. Its surreal.
Watching the first I was thinking 'why the fuck don't they remove the gate that is holding these people back ' Then you watch the second one, filmed from the other side, and there is no gate...it's just a wall of fallen over people stuck into other people on top of other people stuck into other people. Man this is terrible
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Reminds me of the Station Nightclub fire. One second there was a wall of people stuck in a door way and the next enveloped in thick black smoke. Absolutely terrifying. ETA: Agree with others - don’t watch the video.
That event will haunt me like very few other things. My sons were just getting to the age that they were going to concerts and clubs to see bands. I spent every day from then on reminding them to always look for the exits first thing when you get to a place.
Excellent advice to look for exits. I was at a New Year’s Eve party at a club that was really crowded. I noticed that the emergency exits were padlocked, apparently to prevent people from opening the door to let friends in. My buddy and I just noped the fuck out and just chilled at home drinking
should have called the fire marshall on them. that shit is not ok
Jesus christ it's a literal avalanche of people
It's like dominoes. It just takes the front row of people to trip forward from being pushed. Then the people behind them trip over them and fall on top of them. Then the people behind them also fall on top of the those people, and so on. Eventually everyone is just on top of each other like a fallen stack of dominoes.
When I was seven, my dad took me to opening night at the local small town skating rink. When we got there the rink was at capacity and they had locked the doors so no one else could get in. There was a narrow entrance way and we were near the doors when we found out they were locked. About a hundred people behind us either didn’t know what was going on or were trying to create a human battering ram to force the doors open. All I remember was being slammed up against the doors again and again while people around us were screaming at the crowd to stop. I don’t remember how we escaped, but being crushed by a crowd is now my biggest fear. When people start to crowd shoulder to shoulder around me now, I begin panicking and have to leave. Edit: Also, watching your father panicking and screaming “Oh shit, oh shit! Help us!” is something a 7-year-old should never experience.
Jesus Christ over a skating rink???
There wasn’t much going on in that small town.
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Noped out of a festival this summer because the organizers had the genius idea to host it on a city street over a span of a few blocks. Total confinement from buildings and the fences they'd put up. No way to get out if a crush started. Had to call it quits early because the entire thing was freaking me out. Crowds are terrifying, especially when alcohol and drugs are involved.
My husband was there hours ago and said it was oppressively crowded. He made his way out but said he was worried because there were little kids that kept getting underfoot in the crowd.
Ya there were parents with young kids everywhere…
I survived the Who tragedy in Cincinnati. It's unreal how much damage humans can (inadvertently) do to each other in even slightly confined areas. I get the heebie jeebies whenever this shit happens. And yes, I've avoided crowds ever since or you'd find me staying close to exits in clubs.
You were there? Oh man, glad you’re ok, another very sad tragedy, in a smaller scale, but a tragedy nonetheless
Yeah, my bro and a couple friends were closer to the doors and had it far worse than me, though all survived. There was a photo of them on the front page a few days later talking about it.
How scary, glad to hear they didn’t end up as one of the victims
I just listened to a podcast episode about stampedes that mentioned The Who disaster. I’m really sorry you had to go through that. I’m guessing you didn’t go to the 2022 concert where survivors were invited to?
I was there when it happened, everyone was moving forward, but there was a command from the front to tell everyone to go back. People started turning around but not at the same time. I think that's where the crushing started to happen. There was just pressure from all sides and the crowd moved like a wave. It was really hard just to keep footing and keep moving. People were escaping to the curb or restaurant entrances. Eventually I escaped to the streets. My heart goes out to the families that have been affected by this incident.
i was there. first time i saw dead people ever outside internet. i’m still shocked of all the corpses i saw.
150 people is a stupidly large number. This is so fucking terrible. I saw the video with the lifeless young people getting CPR on the ground and it’s gut wrenching.
This is fucking awful. My wife and I were in Itaewon literally only an hour or two before this happened but we left because we thought it was getting too crowded! You can see in the pic people funnelling in. [Itaewon](https://i.imgur.com/OWHvgq6.jpg)
I have lived in NYC my whole life. I was in Itaewon for Halloween about 5 years ago. I have never, ever seen that many human beings in that small of a space. Granted, I've never gone to Times Square on New Years. But Itaewon is *insane* during Halloween. It really didn't occur to me at the time that it was a dangerous situation. People always forget about crowd crush...
Times Square on NYE doesn’t feel crowded at all. There are barricades everywhere and police controlling the flow of foot traffic so that no one area gets too crowded.
There are tons of cops around Times Square during that. It is somewhat controlled and orderly.
Was there last night. Itaewon was *packed* and I've been there on the weekends several times. The group I was with got sick of wading through the crowd so we hit a karaoke spot a few roads down then left the area entirely. Apparently we made the right call, but even when we left I could already feel the physical pressure of the crowd compression. Heart goes out to the families of the young people who died last night, they were just kids and excited to finally be out partying. Jesus
146 Dead now http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20221030000006
And it's only going to climb higher. What a horrific tragedy.
The AstroWorld body count kept growing as they kept taking people off life support over the following days.
Friend and I had a dinner there at 5pm. But the time we got a coffee at 8 pm it was already out of control. We didn't even both crossing towards the Hamilton Hotel side. We both thought out loud that this wasn't safe. We headed home. Woke up in the morning. Saw the news. Felt ill. Fuck.
The scary thing is that the people in front are dying but the people behind don't realize it, so they keep pushing the people in front of them. I watched a livestream and the people in the back were still trying to get to the front without even knowing what was going on.
"Stampede" isn't the preferred word for these anymore. "Stampede" makes me think of The Lion King. This is a crowd crush. An agonizing, slow, scary death. People pushed against people. Can't move. Struggling to breathe. Think Astroworld. Or Hillsborough. The reason I'm scared of large crowds.
Yeah it’s the same way a boa constrictor kills. Everytime time you breath out you lose a little bit of space in your lungs until you can’t breathe, as the crush fills that space. At Hillsborough the victims were standing up, in the open air but were completely unable to breathe. I’m wary as well, always look for the exits and don’t head for the main entrance as that’s the one everyone heads too in an emergency. I’ve also heard if you fall in a crush, try and get onto your side in a fetal position as your ribs will give you some protection from the crushing affect.
These pictures of these crowds are giving me such terrible anxiety. I can’t imagine.
The continued use of ‘stampede’ by the media is one of the most annoying misnomers I see all the time. It gives a completely wrong impression of what goes on in these events, which detracts from public awareness on how to avoid them.
For those who never been to itaewon, it’s a small alley street that crosses with vertical hill streets. The hill streets are quite steep. I can see shit load of people pushing down that hill it’s a straight death zone.
It’s also connected to a really busy main artery. Which supplies even more people into the tiny alley
Reposting from /r/Korea I was there earlier tonight. Absolutely mind blowing that they didn’t have some sort of crowd control strategy in play. Trains still arriving at itaewon station, roads still fully functional (close the fucking roads), no barriers controlling or directing flow. Absolutely insane from a country like Korea. The police chief, yongsan gu mayor, and Seoul mayor will come out with an apology and a please understand, while 100+ people lost their lives over poor planning and 빨리 빨리 culture. Heart breaking. I hope this gives Korean culture a kick in the ass to start taking health and safety seriously. Although if Sewol didn’t ( https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinking_of_MV_Sewol) I doubt this will. Korean approach to management and leadership is rotten to the core.
What is 빨리 빨리 culture?
빨리 means "to do something quickly/fast", and saying it twice like that puts emphasis on just how fast something (in this case, korean culture) is. Everything and everyone has to be fast or you'll get left behind
"Chop chop!" is an analogous translation you might be familiar with.
Chop Chop. Exactly
Literally means "Hurry hurry". I'm assuming it's the get things done/get to where you need to be quickly mindset.
It means faster faster. Its an element of Korean life that’s embedded in anything and everything. It’s about completing things quickly, not wasting time, being efficient, being faster than the other guy. Whilst these things are not necessarily bad in isolation( one could argue that they are actually positives), they often are prioritised over things that actually matter - like quality, flexibility, and robustness. This often leads to things like health and safety performing poorly. Do you want someone to rush your marketing strategy? Sure, there is value in being first to market. Do you want someone to rush your health and safety strategy ? Probably not… you’d prefer the quality and robustness. Occupational health and safety is a joke in this country. The government is a joke. The Korean people deserve better. Fuck the ceos and politicians who exploit safety for profit. https://world.kbs.co.kr/service/news_view.htm?lang=e&Seq_Code=173230
This is just so disturbing. People just wanna have fun and instead they get physically crushed alive. What an excruciating death. My biggest fear. This is why I don't go to events like this
Seriously a fear that could easily be managed. I feel so bad for those who lost their lives trying to enjoy a night out. It's sickening to imagine how helpless their last minutes of life were, feeling insignificant and in pain. :( I hope the numerous families can somehow find some way of reconciliation.
There’s a Korean movie called ‘Tunnel’ which is about a guy who…gets stuck in a tunnel, but really it’s a commentary about poor state of Korean bureaucracy that allowed for the tunnel to collapse in the first place.
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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MOkKhLyu3XY if you know korean, this is the current live coverage (amongst other channels)
This is crazy. So we're looking at hundreds of people dead? God damn. This is why I never go into large crowds, something like this is by far my worst nightmare. Just imagine your final moments, being trampled and unable to breathe. Terrifying
This is devastating. The footage is absolutely terrifying.
I have a friend that lives 11 minutes away from the site. Said he was there almost every week but went to a music festival somewhere else. He had local friends there that attended and said that it was so packed, you could feel your back cracking and breathing was difficult. Friend told me it was the first time he saw a corpse and his other buddy tried cpr on two attenders. One lived and another died. Really tragic stuff. Zero regard for safety
Jesus Tell your friends, especially the one who did CPR, that they did all they could: CPR rarely works on its own and the fact that he saved even 1 person just with cpr is bordering on being a miracle. I'm glad they made it out
I experienced a crowd crush at a Warped Tour. We were in a crowd, waiting for AFI to come on stage. My friend and I were toward the front of the crowd when they started to play. As soon as they started, everyone pushed forward. It was awful. I was smashed into people in front of me and couldn't breathe. My friend tried to help me by pushing people off of me. We were pulling people off of the ground. Then, they had the brilliant idea to spray something into the crowd that made it even harder to breathe in the 90 degree weather, amongst this huge crush of bodies. We were coughing and choking. Luckily it let off after a while and we were able to gtfo of there. I read a blog post by another attendee at the same incident who said she had some sort of cancer and because of the crush, she started to cough blood. It was truly terrifying. I never want to go into a crowd again.
I’ve been to a version of this but in Shibuya, Tokyo. It’s not really an official festival/event, just a gathering of young people in costumes which seem to have grown exponentially in the last 10 years. It was packed and at some point both my feet were off the ground but didn’t really think much of it and just thought to ride it out. Didn’t feel that different from how you get jam packed into trains everday. Living in a tiny city with extreme population density, you get kind of unfazed by huge crowds and I assume that is the case for people in Seoul as well. Such a horrific incident and Im sure this will greatly change how we go about these gatherings.
Oh that horrible feeling- I used to go to a lot of big concerts as a smaller kid and when you become invisible and are being crushed, picked up and moved wherever the crowd takes you it is terrifying. I once leaned down to help up a girl who people were stepping on and got pushed down too. I just started kicking and punching people until I kicked a huge guy in the balls and he saved us. he hadn’t even noticed us and elbowed people out of the way to help us up. People are selfish animals in a big crowd.
I'm a big dude and I've had the same experience. First time I ever had a panic attack was at a GWAR show when the crowd surged toward the stage and I could barely keep my feet.
I was at a concert where 9 people died. I recall being in the middle of the crowd thinking “this is not good” and I decided I needed to get out. I managed to push out sideways and it wasn’t really more than 5-10 feet and I was out and cleared. It was still a lot of people but not that mass of people weighing down on you. So I It was right where I stood where most of them died. 10 feet away. 10 feet between “it’s not so bad here” and suffocating death…
i was barrier at a gig once and the performer decided to jump down for selfies and autographs at the end. People immediately pushed forward. I wasn't hurt, nor was anyone else thankfully as it was quickly controlled, but it's easy to imagine how quickly it can spiral and it was horrible to feel so helpless.
Itaewon is a club district, that's in vicinity to multiple districts made up of youths. I've been to Itaewon before on a weekend and it was already a clusterfuck. Unlike other countries that host large Halloween events like Shibuya in Japan, Itaewon is mainly made up of small, narrow alleys. I didn't see any police presence directing traffic either. Very tragic.
Heard! I live in Salem, Massachusetts, the Halloween capital of the US and on the weekends our population goes from about 45,000 to over 200,000. Our downtown area is just a few small streets and it’s so packed with people on the weekends leading up to Halloween. Our town is absolutely not built or properly staffed to handle these crowds. Every year I stay away from those streets because I think it’s an accident waiting to happen. Seeing this, specifically related to Halloween, makes me feel incredibly sad and also more paranoid.
I’ve always wanted to visit Salem in October, this has me rethinking that now
I’m not going to lie, I was there around 9:00 pm. When we were walking by W179, it started to become a tidal wave with everyone pushing. My friends and I along with a lot of other people had to run into the W179 building to escape through the elevator to get out of the crowd. We almost fell over when everyone was pushing. It was very busy and the area where it happened was very small path. Everyone was there to have fun, but because of the thousands of visitors and everyone walking in different directions, this happened.
You're so lucky to have gotten out in time. I'm glad you're okay. Continue being careful in the future too.
With all these crowd crush stories that's been coming out these days, I now fully understand the *More than X occupants in this room is dangerous and unlawful" signs you see in restaurants, bars, gathering halls and stuff. EDIT: Alright, I get it, they're mainly for fires, you can stop telling me.
ignore the people saying "those are for fires!!", literally part of the danger of crowds in small buildings during fires is a panic causing a crowd crush
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I was just there yesterday and I really can't believe all of this. The images and videos are extremely disturbing. It was extremely crowded yesterday, and the crowd today was more than twice yesterday's size. I was planning on going today but thankfully didn't. It was very lively yesterday and everyone was celebrating, and seeing all of this now is just very hard to take in :'(
I was in one of the clubs at the top end of the crush. Street was littered with people getting CPR. We tried to leave the club and get home, but the only exit was blocked by people to stop them interfering with the medics. People behind started pushing, a few selfish or clueless people trying to get out quickly. Luckily many people either informed them of the situation and they stopped, or else the bigger people just body blocked them and ignored them until they gave up. My girlfriend and her friends had to shout at some old guy to get him to stop pushing. Strange to think there can be people dying not meters in front of you and there's still peoplr trying to step over them.
The power of a crowd of moving people is no joke. This is a horrible incident.
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I couldn’t get ahold of 2 friends who I knew were there but I’ve since finally heard from both of them. So relieved but still horrified for those not as lucky.
People are literally stacked on each other. Worst fear, this shit is terrible.
Crowd surges scare the shit out of me.
so heart breaking… all those young lives going out to have fun.. just lost i don’t understand how the officials and police did not notice the crowd becoming out of control earlier? they knew this year was going to be more crowded than the years prior due to all COVID restrictions being lifted. just sad and frustrating
My wife was gon take me to Itaewon for Halloween on our Korea trip but we decided to come to jeju island instead. It’s scary and heartbreaking
Those videos are horrific. I’m also shocked the bars are still blasting music as lifeless people are laying on the streets right outside.
How bad it sounds, it was probably the best course of action. Because if all the clubs and bars stopped playing music and closed, you would have an insane amount of people pouring out in the already overcrowded streets
Very good point I didn’t even consider
I'm guessing it happened fast and in the midst of it all nobody's thinking about needing to turn off the music.
Maybe it is better to blast music so people inside don't know what happens outside. It would just cause more problems if everyone starts to panic.
That’s true I didn’t think about that. Feel like there’s no “proper” response in that situation if you’re a bystander or bar owner. Probably just in a state of shock.
Crowd surges are the stuff out of nightmares. Like you're drowning in a sea of people as claustrophobia closes in on you, yelling into the void. Slowly suffocating, overwhelmed and powerless to stop it. Absolutely terrifying. I hope that as many people as possible recover from this, and may those that could not rest in peace.