Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes - and Why (25 page)

Hussain and Sadiq knew they were entering the most perilous part of the hajj. But it was a matter of degree. They had been in intense crowds since their arrival. For Westerners, it can be especially unnerving to be so close to so many strangers. The men’s bare shoulders touch, and the women’s scarves can get entangled. If a shoe falls off, you don’t dare try to salvage it. At the pillars themselves, it can be hard to even find the space to raise your arms and toss the pebbles. As the crowd pushed onward, Hussain and Sadiq clasped each other’s hands tightly. They knew they needed to stay together.

That morning, the crowd approaching the pillars was extremely dense. Some of the participants had brought their luggage on rolling carts, in violation of the rules. But the throng was flowing fairly smoothly. At 11:53
A.M
., however, something changed. The crowd began to lurch in stop-and-go waves, a pattern visible on the video footage. Hussain and Sadiq began to feel a surge of pressure from behind. The crowd was so tight that they began to have trouble breathing normally. But there was no way to turn back. They just had to make it to the pillars, throw the pebbles, and then get back to the hotel safely.

At about 12:19
P.M
., the situation became untenable. People began to be violently pushed in random directions by this amorphous force called the crowd. People stumbled, and then became obstacles for everyone else. Hussain’s wife gripped his arm tightly. The heat from the other bodies wrapped around them like a woolen shroud. Breathing became even harder. Then, suddenly, Hussain tripped over a luggage cart. He felt his wife lose her grip. Down on the ground, he saw bodies and heard screaming. People scrambled over his back, injuring his shoulder. He managed to pull himself upright, and he started yelling his wife’s name. It had been only a few seconds since he fell. She could not have gone far. But he could not see her anywhere in the thicket of humanity. It was 12:30
P.M
. Soon Saudi soldiers arrived and cordoned off the area where the stampede had occurred. They’d gotten adept at cleaning up the carnage quickly. Hussain made his way to the entrance of jamarat and looked for his wife there. “I thought that perhaps Belquis had managed to get away,” he later told the
Huddersfield Daily Examiner,
“but she did not come. So I walked back to our hotel, thinking she may be there.” By 8:30
P.M
., she still had not returned.

That night, the hotel operator took Hussain on the back of his motorbike to the two local hospitals. At the second one, Hussain found a photograph of his wife posted on the wall. She was wearing bangle bracelets in the photograph, just as he remembered. Sadiq, forty-seven, had been killed in the crush. Days later, a distraught Hussain tried to distill his wife’s essence into one sentence in an interview with the
Yorkshire Post
. “She was a brilliant girl, very hard-working, a really good wife and a very lovely lady who was always pleased to see people and happy to help people where she could.” Sadiq was buried in Saudi Arabia, along with more than 345 other victims.

The Physics of Crowds

After the stampede, Saudi Interior Ministry spokesman Mansour al-Turki blamed the victims. “Some of the pilgrims were undisciplined and hasty to finish the ritual as soon as possible,” he said. From the vantage point of the pilgrims themselves, specific nationalities seemed responsible. The Indonesians had held hands, rupturing the crowd like earthquake fault lines; the Nigerians were pushing; and on and on. It wasn’t hard to place blame. “You have all of these people from all these different places, people who may have never left their villages before, who don’t know how to line up, and they are moving simultaneously,” says Mohammed Abdul Aleem, CEO of
Islamicity.com
, an Islamic web portal run out of California. Aleem last went on hajj in 1999, and he remembers being lifted off his feet at one point, which was terrifying.

But here’s the puzzle: the crowd at the hajj is not a crowd of hooligans. It is, overall, better behaved than the vast majority of crowds. Imagine a million people seeking enlightenment. As frightening as the sheer density of the crowd could be, Aleem remembers, the crowd could also be surprisingly soothing: “You are in this sea of humanity, and when it is not threatening, and people are just moving calmly, it is one of the greatest feelings of being connected.”

That human connection, literally the opposite of panic, is what makes people want to go back to hajj, even after they’ve completed their required one trip. “Everyone is aligned, and the alignment creates harmony,” says John Kenneth Hautman, a Muslim in Washington, D.C. Hautman came to the hajj with few points of reference. He was a white, Catholic lawyer from Ohio before he met his future wife, a Muslim woman, on
Match.com
in 2005. Later that year, they got married, and Hautman converted, quit his job as a partner at Hogan & Hartson, a major law firm in town, and began to offer spiritual and legal advice on his own. Months later, he went on the hajj, and it was unlike anything he had experienced.

I met Hautman in May 2007 at the National Islamic Center, the main mosque in D.C., after Friday prayers. Over lunch outside the imam’s office, Hautman explained that he does not, in general, like crowds. If asked to watch the Fourth of July fireworks celebration on the National Mall, he would politely decline. But the hajj feels radically different, he says. There was a noticeable absence of rage, he remembers, despite the heat, despite the long waits, despite everything. “This was a colossal traffic jam, but I never heard anyone yelling.” He learned to just let the crowd carry him along, something he’d never done before.

So what happens to suddenly transform this wave of believers into a stampede? Why does the crowd coexist peacefully most of the time, only to devolve suddenly on certain occasions?

G. Keith Still is a Scottish mathematician who has spent years studying the hajj crowds and advising Saudi safety officials. His own obsession with crowds began in 1992, when he was waiting in line with some ten thousand people to get into an AIDS awareness concert in London’s Wembley Stadium. He had hours to watch the crowd move. “My friends were getting very angry, and I thought it was just fascinating,” he says now. He went to graduate school and wrote his thesis on crowd dynamics.

Because he is Christian, Still is not allowed to actually attend the hajj. But he has spent many months in Saudi Arabia, working with Muslim engineers and watching thousands of hours of video footage from some three hundred cameras poised over the pilgrims’ heads. The more he learned, the more he realized the crowd crush had more to do with physics than psychology.

As long as human beings have at least one square yard of space each, they can control their own movements. With less than one square yard of space per person, people lose the ability to counter the jostling of others. Small lurches get amplified. After 11:53 that morning, Hussain and Sadiq felt shock waves pulse through the crowd. At that point, the crowd became unstable. It would have been surprising if no one had gotten hurt.

Ironically, people can actually cause more problems at this point by trying to help one another. Eddies are created when people try to form protective rings around women, the injured, or the elderly. The same thing happens when groups of people link arms. In 2004, Farid Currimbhoy, a businessman from Minnesota, and his wife, a Montessori teacher, got caught in a crush in jamarat. When another man from their American tour group fell to the ground, Currimbhoy and the man’s wife began frantically trying to rescue him. They found that the only way they could do it was by force. “We were pushing and shoving trying to prevent people from trampling on him.”

One of the big problems in a crowd is the lack of communication. The people in the back have no way of knowing that someone in the front has fallen; all they see is a small space open up, where the person used to be, and so they push forward, putting more pressure on the fallen. That’s what happened in 1990. Seven people walking across an overcrowded bridge fell when a railing collapsed. They landed at the mouth of a pedestrian tunnel leading to jamarat. The pileup caused the crowd to come to a standstill, but no one at the other end of the tunnel knew about the problem. So they kept trudging forward, strangling more than fourteen hundred people.

People who die in stampedes do not usually die from trampling. They die from asphyxiation. The pressure from all sides makes it impossible to breathe, much like getting squeezed in a trash compactor. Their lungs get compressed, and their blood runs out of oxygen. The compounded force of just five people is enough to kill a person. Pressure builds exponentially, so a crowd quickly picks up the same amount of force as a Mack truck. Humans can lose consciousness after being compressed for just thirty seconds. They become brain dead after about six minutes. They can die without ever falling down.

Once you are in a crowd crush, there is little you can do to save yourself. If possible, Still recommends gradually working your way to the outside of the crowd by stepping sideways as the crowd moves backward.

Panic can happen even without a crowd, in wide open space, as we’ll see. But in almost every case, it is a symptom of a larger problem. In fact, the reason that so many disaster researchers are loath to talk about panic is that the word is a conversation killer. The crowd panicked, end of story. But there is a problem underneath the panic. But the problem was almost always preventable. Just like hurricanes don’t have to kill people, crowds don’t have to crush.

The closer you look at the crowd, the less irrational the behavior looks. If caught in a suffocating crush of humanity, is it irrational to try to survive, even if the only way to do that is by clawing on top of people? Certainly not. So does this mean that the crowd’s behavior is irrelevant? Is a stampede simply inevitable at a certain crowd density? Is panic a myth after all?

Stampedes are primarily a function of time, space, and density. But there is an
X
factor. If a high-density crowd is moving through jamarat, a fatal crush may result. But it won’t
necessarily
. As with a herd of cattle, something else has to happen to start the stampede.

The Prerequisites of Panic

One way to solve the panic riddle is to consider when panic does
not
happen. Before Britain entered World War II, there was a long period of anticipation in London. Evacuations of children began. Sandbags lined the roads. People carried gas masks, and movie theaters closed down. British military planes droned above the populace, day after day. Authorities worried that German attacks on civilians, when they came, would cause widespread panic. In the
Lancet,
the editor of the
British Journal of Medical Psychology
wrote: “Since air raids may produce panic in the civilian population it is well to consider the factors that facilitate or diminish panic, and what steps, if any, may be taken against it.”

But when the bombs finally started falling, people behaved unexpectedly. In her captivating dispatches from London to the
New Yorker
after the war began, Mollie Panter-Downes described the public’s defiant stoicism: “The British are either the calmest or the stupidest people in the world,” she wrote. Appealing to the national sense of humor and identity, the Ministry of Information launched a clever series of advertisements depicting “correct British behavior” under stress: “What do I do in an air raid? I do not panic. I say to myself, ‘Our chaps are dealing with them,’ etc.” (Note the wonderfully blasé use of the word
etc
.) After the first major raid killed four hundred people, train commuters bragged to one another about the size of the bomb craters in their neighborhoods, Panter-Downes wrote, “as in a more peaceful summer they would have bragged about their roses and squash.”

Forty years later, the expectation of panic consumed U.S. Authorities after a nuclear power plant accident at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania. It was an unprecedented event, and good information was slow in coming. It was not even clear who was in charge. If ever a situation was ripe for panic, this would presumably qualify. At first, the governor advised everyone in a ten-mile radius to stay inside with their doors closed. Later, the governor announced that pregnant women and preschool children within a five-mile radius should evacuate. The National Guard was readied. Air-raid sirens sounded in the downtown area of the state capital. But the evacuation turned out to look a lot like any evacuation before a hurricane. The elderly were the least likely to evacuate. And the people who did leave did so in an orderly manner. The predicted anarchy from panicking drivers did not materialize.

What kept people calm? Ed Galea, the evacuation expert in the United Kingdom, had long wondered if culture influenced a public response to an emergency. The English are notoriously self-possessed, after all, and for all the countries’ differences, American culture is closely linked to that of Britain. Perhaps public reasonableness was a matter of nationality.

In January of 2005, Galea ran an experiment to try to find out. Would Brazilians respond the same way as Brits to a surprise fire alarm? Before running the experiment, Galea took bets among his British colleagues about what would happen. Half said the Brazilians would never move as quickly as the Brits. They would sit, finish their coffees, and then consider,
just consider,
making an exit. The other half of his colleagues had an even less attractive view of Brazilians: they predicted they would break into some kind of Latin American hysteria dance—panicking and running in all directions.

First he tested the Brits. He ran an unannounced drill in the beginning of the school year at the library at the University of Greenwich, which proceeded in a very orderly fashion. Then Galea flew to Brazil. When he got there, he found that the Brazilian authorities had about as little respect for their own people as his colleagues. They were convinced the drill (an unusual event in Brazil, unlike in fire-safety-conscious Great Britain) would cause a panic. They were so distraught that Galea almost had to cancel the experiment. One high-ranking official actually said he was worried that people would bite their tongues off. And how would that look? Dozens of tongueless innocents fleeing from a library—all for the sake of research! Finally, Galea got approval to go ahead with the drill at a library.