Wednesday, February 08, 2006
Maxey: Too high a price to pay
By Ram Maxey
Bar None
THE deadly stampede last Saturday morning at the PhilSports Arena (formerly Ultra) in Pasig City in which 74 people died and hundreds were injured would not have happened had organizers anticipated the possibility that, with thousands of people jam-packed within a narrow alleyway that sloped down toward a steel gate, something could go wrong as it did go wrong.
During our lifetime, how many were the instances when we found ourselves part of a large crowd of people shoving and pushing during which we lost total control of our own individual movement because we had become an involuntary part of the huge mass of humanity itself. That's a fact.
The organizers claim they had assigned what they thought was enough security personnel at the site of the first anniversary celebration of the extremely popular "Wowowee" television game show to control the crowd in case it became unruly.
Well, it turned out that the crowd did become unruly when they learned that organizers had begun giving out tickets to the show to those "lucky" enough (unlucky in fact, as it soon turned out) to be at the point of that jam-packed column. The rush for tickets was instantaneous as those behind surged forward, pressing those in front against the steel gate so hard that a couple of steel bars gave way to the weight of that fluid mass of humanity.
At that precise moment, with the frenzied crowd moving inexorably forward with the force of a tsunami, little wonders that the weak, in this case mostly women, fell and were trampled upon or were lifted and carried forward until they weakened and fainted, dying of asphyxiation from all the heat generated by surrounding, sweating bodies. Given that situation, crowd control was impossible no matter how many security personnel were on hand.
In the initial investigation of the incident, organizers placed the blame for the stampede on what they described as the "unruly" crowd. They said the sheer number of people surging forward overwhelmed their security personnel. Of course, at that juncture, only Superman could have stopped the crowd in their tracks. But there was no Superman.
Now let's not talk here about crowd control because that was not the culprit. One talks about crowd control only when the crowd is already beginning to act unruly and discipline is about to break down. In the case of the "Wowowee" tragedy, the blame should be placed on the organizers' failure to anticipate long before the event itself the possibility of a stampede occurring given the anticipated number of people showing up.
While organizers were prepared for crowd control, they failed to exercise "crowd management" -- which is a horse of another color from "crowd control." They should have established a system for the orderly movement and assembly of people ahead of the event itself. This was missing at the PhilSports Arena. For instance, why did they choose the narrow corridor with the steel gate at one end for the distribution of tickets when it could have been done elsewhere? Perhaps, the PhilSports Arena was the wrong place for the event, as hindsight now tells us.
Seventy-four dead, hundreds injured. Wow! That's too high a price to pay for negligence.
For Bisaya stories from Davao. Click here. (February 8, 2006 issue)
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