The crowd deaths at a Houston music festival added even more names to the long list of people who have been crushed at a major event.
NEW YORK — The crowd deaths at a Houston music festival added even more names to the long list of people who have been crushed at a major event. Tragedies like the one Friday night at the Astroland Music Festival have been happening for a long time. In 1979,11 people died in a scramble to enter a Cincinnati, Ohio, concert by The Who. At the Hillsborough soccer stadium in England, a human crush in 1989 led to nearly 100 deaths. In 2015, a collision of two crowds at the hajj pilgrimage in Saudi Arabia caused more than 2,400 deaths, based on an Associated Press count of media reports and officials’ comments. Now that more people are heading out of their homes and back into crowds after many months of being cooped up because of the pandemic, the risks are rising again. Most major events happen without a death, of course, but experts say they see common traits within the tragedies. Here’s a look at how they happen: HOW ARE PEOPLE DYING IN THESE EVENTS? They’re often getting squeezed so hard that they can’t get any oxygen. It’s usually not because they’re getting trampled. When a crowd surges, the force can be strong enough to bend steel. It can also hit people from two directions: one from the rear of the crowd pushing forward and another from the front of the crowd trying to escape. If some people have fallen, causing a pileup, pressure can even come from above. Caught in the middle are people’s lungs. WHAT’S IT LIKE TO BE SWEPT IN? A U.K. inquiry into the Hillsborough tragedy found that a form of asphyxiation was listed as an underlying cause in the vast majority of the deaths. Other listed causes included “inhalation of stomach contents.
