badcrowd

Last night at Sundown in the City on Market Square, I had a terrible crowd experience. My two youngest children and I tried to get closer to the stage, so we waded into the crowd. Within 30 seconds, we were crushed into a crowd of people so tightly that the children were literally having trouble breathing. It was the first time I have ever really understood how these terrible crowd trampling deaths happen at concerts and stuff.

I pushed and yelled and argued our way out of the crowd, but it took fifteen minutes to move twenty or thirty feet. My children, who are short, and thus were below the fresh air at adult level, were crying and shaking by the time we got out. Other smaller people, including this elderly lady about 5 feet tall, were crying and begging to be let out of the crush.

I have NEVER been smashed up into a crowd of people like that, and I've been to hundreds of concerts. It was unquestionably a dangerous situation. If anything had happened that had required people to move out of Market Square quickly, someone would have been killed. It was that bad.

I think the problem is that Market Square is so narrow that the crowd can only move back and forth, not side to side. After we got out, I found a fireman and told him, but he didn't seem that concerned.