아티클픽 65. Deadly stampede in Itaewon

아티클픽 65.

Deadly stampede /stæmˈpiːd/ in Itaewon

As I write this, the body count keeps going up. It's now 154 people confirmed killed and 133 injured in Itaewon where tens of thousands of young revelers /ˈrevələr/ showed up to party on the last Saturday before Halloween. /ˌhæləʊˈiːn/

 

Exact details of what happened are still weeks away, but the rough story is no mystery. Too many people showed up to party in too small a space. There was no crowd control. People were hemmed in, pushed, crushed, and suffocated from the weight of the unthinking crowd that got jammed in at the first bottleneck or fall.

 

In the horrific /həˈrɪfɪk/ videos making rounds on social media, you can see the sheer volume of the crowd surging inexorably /ɪnˈeksərəbli/ forward and peeling people off against the sides of the walls of the storefronts lining the narrow streets. One guy is seen desperately scaling up the wall in order to escape from the madness below.

 

You hear screams of girls who are in pain, perhaps even fallen, interspersed /ˌɪntərˈspɜːrs/ with the sounds of music blaring and excited buzz of the rolling crowd oblivious /əˈblɪviəs/ to the catastrophe unfolding in real time. The scene is so mundane /mʌnˈdeɪn/ and dreadful at the same time that it reminds you that it's not just evil that can be banal /bəˈnɑːl/,; unthinkable tragedies can be as well.

 

As expected in the immediate aftermath of the tragedy, there is plenty of blame being thrown about. Most critics are focused on the young revelers themselves for going out to party on a Saturday night to celebrate a foreign holiday like Halloween suggesting it's their own fault for being mindlessly brain washed by a stupid foreign custom. In a uniquely /juˈniːkli/ Korean expression of jingoistic /ˌdʒɪŋɡəʊˈɪstɪk/ xenophobia, Halloween is the negative foreign cultural influence that Korean youths shouldn't be allowed to celebrate. It's beneath us. Of course, the same critics acclaim the ascendancy /əˈsendənsi/ of Korean pop culture in the world.

 

The truth is that we've all been there before. In fact, the social quotient /ˈkwəʊʃnt/ of an event tends to go up the more crowded the event. Who hasn't boasted that you were at an event or place where the crowd was massive? Crowd size is a badge of social honor. Halloween in Itaewon just happened to be the place to be there on Saturday night, especially considering that this was the first public celebration after the lifting of mandatory mask restrictions. How can you possibly blame people for showing up to party on a weekend?

 

Unfortunately, this isn't the first crowd-related mass casualty event and won't be the last. The potential lethality / liˈθæl ɪ ti / of massive crowds is well-known. Just a year ago, eight people were killed by the surging crowd at a Houston music festival featuring the rapper, Travis Scott. In the last thirty years, there are multiple incidences of people being crushed to death in mass crowd events that occurred in stadiums, whether it be soccer games or concerts. Both in 1990 and 2015, thousands of pilgrims /ˈpɪlɡrɪm/ were killed by the crowd during the Hajj, with 1,426 dying in 1990 and 2,411 dying in 2015.

 

Who's responsible for preventing such accidents when you know that a large crowd will show up in a particular place on a specific time and date? If you ever been to Time Square's ball drop on New Year's Eve or the Thanksgiving Parade in New York City, you know that it's the local police. The New York Police Department (NYPD) has a ubiquitous /juːˈbɪkwɪtəs/ presence from early morning, blocking off streets, setting up checkpoints, directing crowd flow, and doing everything that's needed to implement safety logistics for the crowd to come, which can be as many as one million people.

 

As someone who has made multiple Times Square pilgrimages /ˈpɪlɡrɪmɪdʒ/ (I grew up in NYC after all), police presence wasn't always welcome. If you get there even a little bit late, you end up trying to watch the ball drop from closer to Central Park than Times Square, pushed out and restricted by the manned barriers that the police have put up and watched over by officers on horses. You couldn't sneak by them. NYPD were meticulous in their planning and execution. Once you were placed in a certain section, that's where you would stay until everything was done.

 

Thank God. I never had to experience a crowd density that prevented me from turning around or crowd surges that swept me off my feet. I never felt out of control. I never felt unsafe.

 

I am not trying to engage in Monday morning quarterbacking /ˈkwɔːrtərbæk/, but it's pretty obvious that the Halloween tragedy in Itaewon was a massive failure of public leadership and planning by the local authorities. If they knew that over 100,000 people would show up within a tight window, then they should have known better and implemented some type of crowd control plan. We know that the Korean police force are capable. Large crowds are not uncommon in Korea. Literally, massive numbers of people gather here every week. Let's learn from this and ensure that it doesn't happen again. And may those who lost their lives in the accident rest in peace.

 

Jason Lim (jasonlim@msn.com) is a Washington, D.C.-based expert on innovation, leadership and organizational culture.