Throngs of people in the form of a city neighborhood or a music festival are one thing. Surging, turgid1 crowds are another.
You may be aware that over 150 Koreans died in a crowd crush recently in Seoul, mostly young people out on the streets celebrating Halloween after three years of COVID shut-downs. Hundreds more were injured.
They got caught in a log-jam of fans in a narrow, sloping alley. Most suffered cardiac arrest, still in their costumes, just out for some fun.
Panic at the Disco
I was reminded of my own brush with a similar terror in Philadelphia on July 4th, 2014.
Our Maggie was 15. We were standing on a curb, catching a glimpse of Nicki Minaj performing 100 yards away at PhillyJam, the "country's largest free concert," according to the marketing.
Earlier, when our family group was arriving on foot and cutting through the crowd to get closer to the stage in front of the Museum of Art, I had a thought:
💡What if something goes wrong? Would we make it out?
We pulled back to higher ground, to a metal policing gate directly behind us. Sight lines were better but not great.
On our right stood a woman and her granddaughter. I jested with her about something innocuous, putting on my best Philly gritty talk.
On our left, three college girls were taking selfies and singing raucously, deftly holding up beer cans wrapped in bandanas.
Kayla, the blonde, was particularly effusive and flattering toward me and my ward:
I just can’t effin' believe you’re down in the city with your daughter! My dad would never do such a thing.
[Directly in Maggie’s face]
You have the best effin' Dad in the world, and you should be so effin' happy!
Grateful for her earnest affirmation and her initiative in reminding my teen of my awesomeness, I casually replied,
Well, thanks. We trust God and have fun.
There was no time to elaborate on our parenting philosophy because . . .
Suddenly from near the stage came POP POP POP, and a living wave of screams and bodies began to surge our direction. Folks near us began to shout and scramble.
The very thing Maggie had secretly feared and that had crossed my mind was happening.
Now What?
That awe-ward moment of panic landed on my chest. The choice was clear: either get away from this tsunami of humanity or get trampled to death like those eleven kids at The Who concert in 1979.
To my right the stampede had already reached the security gate and broken it down. As bodies spilled over into the grass, I grabbed Maggie from behind and roughly escorted her to the left, running with the barrier.
It felt like some silly game we once played in which she "carried" me on her back.
We spotted an opening in the yellow hazard tape at a Red Cross station. We plunged under it. A lady behind me screamed and tugged at her purse, which had somehow gotten wrapped around my right arm. I shook it off.
Two policemen with blaring radios shouted for us to stay down. We crouched. My finger hurt, but otherwise we were unharmed. Partially shielded by a lamp post, we felt safer.
Because the rampage had no insidious source like a bomb, it died out quickly. We noticed young parents clutching babies. More than the usual trash lay everywhere.
My daughter said she heard the word "firecrackers" on one of the cops' radios. I wanted to give the guy who started this panic a piece of my mind.
What a nifty-neat-o prank, you dumb-ass (redacted to a G-rating).
Angels in the Outfield
When the noise and panic cleared, we emerged to run into Kayla and her crew again. She continued her colorful praise and asked us to remember to "say a prayer for Kayla," clumsily completing two genuflections in the process.
She was thoughtful, humorous, and bawdy all it once. I’m no prophet, but I imagined Kayla as one of the many Philadelphians raised in the fear and admonition of the Roman Catholic Church and Eagles games on Sunday.
I responded, "OK, great to meet you, Kayla.” Other pleasantries were exchanged. It was a harrowing night, capped off with a bit of holy hilarity.
Tree Hugging
My son-in-law Ben, who chose not to catch a glimpse of the concert, gave some advice I’ll never forget: “Always look for a tree in a crowd like that.”
Sadly for the Korean kids, the escape route was was a pinhole in a water balloon, and the protective tree was a commercial alley with too few doorways.
A few weeks ago, another iteration of our family group was in the the Wells Fargo Center for a Sixers game. I can’t speak for Ben, but I never once considered if the exit tunnels in the arena could handle a mass exodus.
Not that I’m an anxious or worrisome person by trade. In fact, I love crowds. They are not the real sources of concern, it seems to me. Panic is. And panic can cascade quickly into calamity.
This Don’t Look Right
In November of 2021, I noticed a live event called Astroworld pop up on Apple TV. I was surfing for something to watch in one of my rare moments of boredom. Travis Scott was performing, an artist unknown to me. Then I noticed that the aerial crowd shots disturbed me.
Forgive the following graphic image—I’m certainly not disparaging the fans, but the crowd reminded me of maggots on an animal carcass: groups of bodies pulsating (not to the beat), moving, yet going nowhere. “Roiling” is what came to me at the time. It was eerie, and the music was lame, so I turned it off.
I learned the next day that ten people died at that festival, possibly during the moments I had tuned in. Allegedly, Scott stoked the catastrophe as concert-goers pleaded with him to settle the crowd. He didn’t listen or seem to care.
The roiling I saw was a crowd crush. This phenomenon occurs when a group’s density is so great it collapses in on itself. The pressure exerted on individuals can create asphyxiation.
At this density, a crowd can start to act like fluid, sweeping individuals around without their volition.2
This may explain why there were no crowd crushes at the Woodstock Music and Arts Festival of 1969. Though it was a human s**t show on many levels, those cats were mellow, if you catch my drift. Plus they had forests to run off into in every direction if things got panicky.
Unawares
Back at PhillyJam, Mags and I eagerly made base camp, where our family was set to watch fireworks, far from the maddening crowd. In minutes our hearts were back in their places, and we were laughing and sharing our experience of the calamity with our loved ones.
Maggie turned to me and revealed that Kayla had spread her arms around us, even pushing her neck like a football safety, just before we bolted. I was unaware of her protective gesture.
Why wouldn’t an angel’s wing appear in the form of a tough policeman, or a svelte paramedic, or even a party girl holding a Yuengling lager?
News From Town
Welcome to six new readers!
Marianna, Diana, Chris, Ashley, Keith, Andy
And three cheers for three new paid subscriber/readers!
Mike, and Kathe, and Zach (upgrade from free)
The Stats
Readers: 212
Paid Subscribers: 18
The subject matter of this column is mournful and sobering. So before I go that direction, I want to acknowledge that sometime in the early 90s when I was traversing central PA and ministering to college students, I borrowed a cassette tape from the public library that introduced me to numerous poignant and intelligent vocabulary words such as turgid (swollen). It felt good to slap that one down here in Town Character. A close cousin, homophonically, is turbid, which means “muddy” or “dense.” And it’s coming to a future episode of Town Character near you. Wait for it.