Thousands of events take place every day around the world, from concerts to parties to book club meetings. In most cases, nothing ever goes wrong, at least from a safety perspective. Yet that feeling that things can’t go wrong just because they haven’t before is a dangerous sentiment—and can lead to oversights that could cost lives.
None of the following events were organised with an expectation that anything would go wrong, and all will have had some form of safety planning. Yet the outcomes demonstrate how thin the line can be between safety and disaster—and how small oversights or complacency can quickly snowball into tragedy.
Astroworld
Rapper Travis Scott organised this annual music festival as a tie-in with the name and branding of his album, which released the year of the first festival in 2018. After the 2020 festival was cancelled due to COVID, poor organisation of event security and management at the 2021 festival led to the main stage viewing area becoming overcrowded, crushing spectators against the barriers in front of the stage.
10 people were killed, all from compression asphyxia, deeply impacting Scott’s brand and leading to both the subsequent day of the festival and future festivals being cancelled. The incident led many other artists to make statements on crowd safety and become more outwardly conscious of crowd safety at gigs, with a number of incidents in the following months of artists pausing gigs to check on members of their audiences.
The Hillsborough Disaster
Just thinking of a famous disaster in the UK is likely to evoke Hillsborough. One of the most famous and tragic event disasters in UK history, Hillsborough is particularly evocative for many because of how it played out on live TV. The disaster occurred during a televised football match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest at Hillsborough Stadium, the traditional home of Sheffield Wednesday. A crush in one of the stands led to the deaths of 97 people, with fans unable to escape onto the pitch due to high metal fencing.
Blame was immediately placed in some quarters on the victims themselves, with the Sun newspaper famously pinning the deaths on crowd trouble. Yet it was subsequently found that poor event management was the primary cause of the disaster, with the stadium design also contributing. Too many people had been allowed into the two central pens to ease congestion around the gates, crushing those people at the front. Onlookers watched as victims were hoisted over the fences and carried away on advertising hoardings or attempted to be resuscitated on the pitch.
The disaster brought a keen focus to bear on the issue of overcrowding and crushes at stadiums and came on the back of the Heysel disaster four years earlier, which had seen British teams banned from Europe after a stand collapsed in a game due to crowd trouble. The result was the banning of standing tickets at UK football matches entirely until 2021—and a long quest for justice against the perpetrators of England’s worst stadium disaster.
Bradford City fire
The 1980s were a terrible decade for football tragedies. Before Heysel and Hillsborough, anyone who saw the fire at Valley Parade in 1985 could scarcely have imagined anything worse. A lit cigarette dropped through a wooden stand in the old stadium caused piles of accumulated litter to ignite, creating a flash fire under the stand. The fire was so intense and spread so rapidly that it quickly consumed the stand, burning not only the seating but the supports and bitumen-felt roofing. Acrid black smoke filled the exit tunnel at the back of the stand, while several people died in a crush at the turnstiles.
The fire completely consumed the stand in just four minutes, and 56 people were ultimately killed. The exact cause of the fire had been predicted a year before the fire, when a letter from the local council speculated that “a carelessly discarded cigarette could give rise to a fire risk.” The stand had already been condemned at the time of the fire and was due to be replaced following the end of the season, but the litter—another risk the club has been alerted to by a prominent football writer—had gone unaddressed. While the match was not broadcast live, it was being filmed, and unedited footage of the fire—including the haunting image of a man on fire on the pitch—was broadcast just an hour after the disaster.
While the fire certainly boosted awareness of the fire risks associated with stadiums and wooden structures, the changes it led to were not rapid or wide-reaching enough. Though the risk of both wooden structures and litter were well-established, this was not enough to avoid the Kings Cross fire just two years later, another instance where a lit cigarette ignited rubbish, this time below a wooden escalator, and led to the deaths of 31 people. These events combined led to an overhaul of ageing infrastructure that finally removed these high-risk wooden structures, and improved vigilance around the role of litter and detritus in causing fires.
Seoul Halloween crush
Crowd crushes may have started to feel like a thing of the past, at least in developed countries. The Seoul Halloween crush disproved this and showed the extreme dangers of crowded events when they are not properly planned or managed. Halloween has become a popular celebration in South Korea among other countries, and a time when many people crowd the bars and clubs in Seoul to party. This led to a sudden and deadly crowd surge in 2022 that ultimately claimed the lives of 159 people.
The crush happened in an alleyway in the popular Itaewon district, known for its bars and restaurants. The 150ft long alleyway has a slight incline and narrows at one point to just 10ft wide. With an estimated 100,000 people in the area at the time, the streets around the area were packed with people, with only 137 police officers to manage them. It isn’t known exactly when or how the crush occurred, but the first reports of dangerous overcrowding were made at 6:34pm, with a further 79 emergency calls by 10pm. Best estimates now put the precise time of the crush around 10:08pm, indicating how the disaster developed.
Emergency responders struggled to reach the scene due to the crowds, as well as the intoxication of some bystanders, who were not aware of what had happened nearby. While thought to have been exacerbated by the end of COVID lockdowns, numerous lessons were taken from the disaster in respect to emergency planning, while investigations were launched into the city police department for failing to respond to the early reports. Experts highlighted the need not just for effective management and substantial numbers of security personnel, but also proper crowd control training to prevent such surges from occurring.
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All these disasters reflect in some shape or form the critical importance of event safety organisation. Even the smallest event has safety considerations, and the largest ones demand scrupulous attention. Seemingly small factors—the rubbish under a stand, the slope of an alley—can become major hazards if not considered and addressed ahead of time.
While these are particularly notable and tragic incidents, event safety principles are the same for events of every size. Whether it’s risk management, crowd management, first aid provision, or fire safety, keeping an event safe and enjoyable for everyone requires careful planning, coordination, and execution—preventing small risks from developing into major disasters.