Is to keep well away from them.
At least 59 people were killed and 150 injured in a stampede after a crowd poured into a central district of the South Korean capital Seoul for Halloween festivities on Saturday night, a fire official said.
The incident took place at about 10:20 p.m. (1320 GMT). A large number of people fell down in a narrow alley during the Halloween events, Choi Sung-beom, head of the Yongsan Fire Station, said.
The number of casualties could rise as the rescue effort was still under way.
BBC and others now have the death count at 120 or more. Video and images coming out of Seoul are grim.
There’s a video in that feed of people being pressed together like the scene in the garbage compactor in Star Wars. I’m not sure how the crowds got to that point, but the forces gathered together are incredible. Small sliver of good news is that it doesn’t look like terrorism or an attack from the North.
The scene of would be rescuers trying to pull people out of a human snarl is heart breaking. I hate crowds. This only affirms why I avoid them.
The scenes of multiple rescue workers performing CPR on young people at the same time with no sign of life from their patient are gut wrenching. They don’t give up, they just go on and on compressing, each one presiding over a personal and family tragedy. Horrible.
If you can’t maintain 3-4 feet of distance, make your way to edges and break away from the crowd.
If possible, avoid dense crowds entirely.
If they’d only maintained the mandatory 6ft spacing. Fauci was right … it is dangerous to be close to your fellow humans.
Avoiding crowds is my new core competence.
I was a commercial interior designer for 30 years ( hotels, restaurants and some resorts). I ALWAYS look for the exits and plot my line of escape should the need arise. It is always good to be “situationally aware”.
Gateway Pundit is reporting that there were dozens of people that had cardiac arrests. If people were randomly dropping, I could see how that would lead to panic. Zerohedge has a picture of the crowd in the streets with nowhere to move. Yeah, that’d freak me out.
I don’t believe in the 5G theories, since I haven’t looked into them, but I could imagine dozens of jabbed people among thousands having heart attacks during a stampede event. I’d expect more of this in the months ahead anywhere there are tens of thousands gathered.
I love the South Koreans. I was there for a while teaching. Wonderful people.
https://www.thegatewaypundit.com/2022/10/dozens-suffer-cardiac-arrest-others-trampled-south-korean-halloween-celebration-video-warning-graphic/
I was thinking the same thing. A set up for multiple heart attacks.
I suspect the weirdness with the multiple cardiac arrests is just a translation thing.
Hearts stopped from trauma and suffocation, not a heart attack
Quite.
Terrible loss of life. I’ve never understood why people would choose to be packed together that tightly. A necessary evil for airplanes and such but otherwise to be avoided at all costs, imo.
On a more philosophical note, I follow the wisdom of “be careful about following the masses because the “m” is often missing and you’ll find yourself following a bunch of asses”
Looking at scenes from beehive cities like Hong Kong and Macau … it appears as though Asians LIKE squeezing together into tight spaces?
There’s only two things that won’t spook a crowd into stampeding. Nobody knows what they are.
Senseless, pointless loss of life. This is what happens when you condition people to always placing the collective over the individual. Koreans are wonderful people … in small groups. Unfortunately in large groups people turn into UnMes.
Don’t we all
Yes, that is why I said “people” not “Koreans” in my last sentence.
Not even remotely true.
The collective over the individual? That’s Canada. That’s why people still wear masks while sitting alone.
Try over-taxing Koreans. The convoy would look like a picnic. Justin wouldn’t just sh– his pants but die in them.
We do it and they do it even more. The approach is somewhat different but collectivism is very strong within Korean society and sticky nails get hammered in.
Capitalism is also strong there.
What happened in Itaewon wasn’t collectivism but clearly poor crowd management.
Yes capitalism is strong but so is the absolute trust in the state, witness their response to Wuhan Flu and the nearly universal compliance to fascist measures involved.
What happened was both. You see a tightly pack crowd, you recoil and move away. Koreans assume all is good because they’re used to high density, crowded space and thus keep packing it. That’s primal collectivist behavior. They’re not unique.
I’m fortunate to live in a small town, that even on a long weekend, the Mall is “busy” but not overcrowded. We just don’t really have “crowds”. However, when I rarely visit a larger town or city, and there always seems to be legions of people turning into crowds massing around me, I really do feel a little more anxious and not at ease. There is also the mob mentality that seems to pervade large crowds. As astutely said above, it wouldn’t take much to panic a large tight crowd, and if you’re part of that crowd, you’ll also be part of the panic that rises. Yes, best to avoid crowds, and if they appear to be forming, seek an exit asap! Conditioned as I am to a small friendly town for the past forty years, it has made me hostile to large cities and crowds, and I prefer it that way!
I moved from YXE to YYC with some trepidation, given the 4x size difference. I was an uneasy fit at some times, especially around Xmas. And then I went to Japan on holiday. Needless to say, the scales do not compare.
When I got back after that holiday, I looked around at “busy Calgary” and wondered where all the people were. My perceptions were reset.
But I still try to avoid the malls at Xmas.
Heart attacks?.. 50 kids in their 20s.. This is not normal by a long shot.. I feel deeply sorry for everybody involved with this tragedy..
Good point about the heart attacks. Normally most dead in a stampede are suffocated or crushed.
Exactly!
Sadly, doctors will be baffled.
A lot of deaths caused in crowd surges are usually due to trampling or compressive asphyxia (Where it becomes difficult to breathe to to an inability to expand the chest and take in air). The way people can pack up during such a disaster is effectively like being crushed.
…annnnd if they already had damaged hearts from…anyone? Anyone?…myocarditis….?
On the count of three, we will all coagulate.
And precisely why being amongst large crowds gives me the god damned heebie jeebies. I content myself by hanging out around the perimeter… the logic being I can outrun the retards who ultimately would end up killing me when things go South.
As a card carrying introvert I’m super good with that.
The Who concert and Hillsborough disaster is still fresh on my mind.
I hear you. Since seeing a documentary on the 2003 Station Night Club fire in Rhode Island I’ve been content to get all my entertainment from the comfort of my dock. People were stacked like cordwood at the front doors (all other exits were locked tight) screaming for their lives as the flames grew closer…horrific.
One of the reasons I haven’t visited Disneyland in more than 30 years … they don’t appear to have ANY maximum capacity … or the one they have is absurdly high.
I have no interest in watching the video – the description was horrific enough. Now, if it was a Liberal convention in Canada on the other hand…
Brings me to tears.
Crowd surges are a very common disaster throughout history, often with high death tolls.
The “crash bars” that are used on venue doors to this day were invented in response to crowd surge disasters such as the Victoria Hall Disaster of 1883, which killed 183 children.
News on a slow day:
Orientals celebrate Celtic pagan holiday and die.
Halloween is the 31st anyway.
But people can only have parties on the week-ends. They are too busy not pretending to work at home but wasting time on Amazon.
Koreans are workers who show up at nine AM and leave at ten PM, something the idle Canadian public wouldn’t get.
My brother lived in the UK when they had standing room areas in the soccer pitches. Always trouble as the beer began to flow and several death scenes due to overcrowding. Pretty well stopped when they eliminated the standing areas and replaced them with seats.
Alway try to avoid large crowd situations as I would have to pee and I would be trapped in the centre!
Absolutely NOT a fan of crowds ever.
Don’t even care to be in a stadium or a Hockey arena. With a 60″ hi Def screen and $2 beer, Why the hell would ya…??
On that note: Go Flames Go..!!
Exactly right. I haven’t been to a large venue concert, nor a football or baseball game in going on 6 years now.
Itaewon has always been a crowded den of iniquity with signs of foreign companies glaring at one from a distance.
Behind these signs is a veritable slum.
I am saddened but not surprised that this happened.
I hope that this does not diminish any future attempts to celebrate Halloween.
Yes, Itaewon has always been a little (sometimes a lot) seedy. However, once you get off the main drag, it is a rather normal Korean neighborhood (or at least it was 15 years ago). Lots of apartment buildings, many occupied by western ex-pats, and it was anything but a slum. My wife and I lived just 3 blocks from that main drag, and we NEVER felt that it was a dangerous place to live.
Perhaps.
The areas I went to weren’t too upkept, shall we say.
I did not like going there and only went a few times. Sometimes to find phone cards or a few creature comforts.
In Manitoba, many doors in public places, still open inwards….
People are wondering about all the “heart attacks”…. This mob scene resulted in a lot of people being compressed by the crowd of people pushing in behind them. That adds up to a lot of pressure, and the first thing that happens is that a victim will be compressed enough that they are unable to freely breath. That’s bad, but there is another phenomenon that also occurs in severe compression incidents.
Researchers studying constrictor snakes, wondered why the victims of these snakes die rather more quickly than would be expected by simple suffocation. It turned out that suffocation was not the cause of death… it was cessation of heart activity. For some reason, the severe pressure/constriction on the body caused the heart to simply stop.
I’m guessing that the alarming incidence of “heart attacks” in this tragedy is very much related to this phenomenon.
The heart is a muscle and enough pressure on it will stop it from beating.
Some say the heart is just like a wheel.
Cowards scared of crowds now. Canada is screwed.
Colonialista, you clearly don’t understand Korea or Koreans.
First of all, they are smart enough to have a five year term limit and unseat their presidents for corruption, which they’ve done.
This tragic event was poor planning, lots of drinking, bottle-necking people in old neighbourhoods and no crowd control.
Canada is as collectivist as it gets and no one, not even the amoebae who vote for Justin, would get stuck in a crowd like that.
Yup.
Most dicey crowd situation I was in was at an Ozzy concert in the 1990s: Ozzy was singin’ away, then his voice broke, and he walked off the stage. I was near the sound/security booth on the floor, so I went and asked them what was goin’ on. Security didn’t have a clue, so I told him he better find out fast, or he’ll have a mob of over 15 000 angry people on his hands, that got him on his radio, so I found out that the show was over, and me and my buds left, telling other folk the news as we went. They announced the show was over as I hit the exit. Ozzy fans, being of a civilized bent, left in an orderly fashion.