yes and .. add to that.. years ago there was a parade on a very hot day; many, many people .. perhaps South East Asia (?).. floats in the parade included cars or trucks with large gaudy (sometimes cheap) decoration.. Someone in one of the cars did not get enough fresh air, and succombed apparently, to carbon monoxide poisoning while crawling along at a fixed rate of about 5 mp/h. The auto had some kind of auto-drive activated.. the driver passed out, but no one noticed. The crowd is still chanting and the parade continuing, but the car slowly lost direction, and slowly, unstoppably inched into the crowd. people yelled, no change, too crowded.. people were pushed into each other but at 5 mp/h slow motion.
The entire scene was so vivid from an art point of view -- the mindless mob, the auto-power of gasoline, the heat, the useless reactions.. this was in the TV news long ago.
I was actually there for this event (just as a spectator): most of the people were gathered down at the intersection. The car came down the hill, and then it slowed down as it approaching the intersection because there were.. obviously a ton of people in the intersection. _Then_ everyone swarmed the car / surrounded it / jumped on it / tagged it. It basically didn't move while this was happening. Then eventually the crowd let it through.
I was at the love parade in Duisburg in 2010 when IIRC 20 people died and over 500 were injured after too many people tried to rush through a tight ramp and it caused a mass panic. I think most of the victims literally suffocated from having their chests crushed.
Having had some personal experience in hugely dense crowds (like the Edinburgh Hogmanay Street Party[1]) it does indeed feel exactly like being carried along in a shoulders-deep irresistible flow of people. There were actually perceptible currents & flows, areas of turbulence around obstacles, and many other things that suggest they behave something like a fluid.
Resistance is, as explained elsewhere, extremely challenging. The sheer force of a column of people and lack of any sort of feedback means it's quite dangerous and uncomfortable. A friend and I had to rescue several people who'd fallen and were struggling to get back up, or who were being forced into obstacles. The solution was to surround them and form a sort of rugby-huddle that left enough space in the middle for them to get back up or catch their breath.
They might have better crowd management measures these recent years, but I haven't been tempted to go back on new years.
Can anyone who was there verify the "stampede" or "mayhem"? I'm really curious about the actual truth of how crowds of people react to imminent danger; I keep hearing one thing about how people go nuts and another about how this is completely untrue.
Basically, exits were blocked off on both ends and the crowd was large enough that people trapped in the middle were crushed by enough force to led to suffocation. People attempting to move caused compression waves to ripple through the crowd which injured hundreds.
Of course Humans resemble animal swarms, but not just during protests, during religious gatherings (Hajj, Kumbh Mela etc.), the crowds celebrating sports victories, rush-hour traffic etc.
There is a large body of research around Human crowds in different circumstances.
Reminds me of during the world expo in Shanghai where people would push their older relatives in wheelchairs to skip the long lines in the hot humid weather.
The entire scene was so vivid from an art point of view -- the mindless mob, the auto-power of gasoline, the heat, the useless reactions.. this was in the TV news long ago.
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