The tragic occasion within the South Korean capital is being described as a crowd crush or surge, which is totally different from a stampede.
Not less than 150 individuals have been killed in a crowd crush in South Korea’s capital, Seoul, with most of the victims dying of cardiac arrest, marking the deadliest of such incidents within the nation’s historical past.
The tragic occasion is being described as a crowd crush or surge, which is totally different from a stampede.
A crowd crush is when persons are packed in a confined area and maintain pushing, inflicting the group to fall in a “domino impact” making it exhausting for individuals to rise up once more. The larger the group, the stronger the impact of the group crush is.
The result’s that folks’s lungs don’t discover sufficient area to develop, making it troublesome to breathe.
“As individuals battle to rise up, legs and arms get twisted collectively. Blood provide begins to be decreased to the mind,” Keith Nonetheless, a visiting professor of crowd science on the College of Suffolk in England, instructed NPR after 10 individuals died at a pageant in Houston final November.
“It takes 30 seconds earlier than you lose consciousness, and round about six minutes, you’re into compressive or restrictive asphyxia. That’s a usually the attributed reason behind dying – not crushing, however suffocation,” he added.
Halloween celebrations
The catastrophe in Seoul passed off on Saturday as an enormous crowd thronged a slim alley throughout Halloween celebrations within the nightlife district of Itaewon. Witnesses’ harrowing accounts of the incident described individuals scrambling to get out of the suffocating crowd within the downhill alley as individuals ended up piling on high of each other.
About 100,000 individuals thronged the world identified for its bars and golf equipment.
“Individuals saved pushing down right into a downhill membership alley, leading to different individuals screaming and falling down like dominos,” one unidentified witness was quoted as saying by the Yonhap information company.
One of many deadliest of such incidents passed off in Saudi Arabia when greater than 1,400 pilgrims died in July 1990 inside al-Muaissem tunnel close to the Muslim holy metropolis of Mecca throughout Eid al-Adha, or the Feast of Sacrifice, on the finish of the annual Hajj pilgrimage.
Such occasions could be triggered for various causes. In Indonesia final month, at the least 130 individuals died after police fired tear gasoline in a stadium the place half of the doorways had been locked, inflicting a crush on the exits.
A stampede in contrast implies that folks have area to run. It happens when a bigger group of individuals, which could be frightened or excited, run collectively in an uncontrolled solution to escape from one thing.