Hajj stampede: Saudi king orders safety review

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Saudi Arabia's King Salman has ordered a safety review for the Hajj pilgrimage after at least 717 people died in a stampede near the holy city of Mecca.

Another 863 people were injured in the incident at Mina, which occurred as two million pilgrims were taking part in the Hajj's last major rite.

It is the deadliest incident to occur during the pilgrimage in 25 years.

The king said there was a need "to improve the level of organisation and management of movement" of pilgrims.

Rest of the article can be found here

[Broomstick]

So long as Muslims insist on funneling literal millions through relatively small chokepoints once a year there is no way to completely eliminate such crowd disasters.

[Simon_Jester]

They're actually working quite hard at this.

It's highly impractical for them to "expand" the infrastructure of the Kaaba itself, while the population of Muslims that desire to make the trip keeps increasing. The result is a massive crowding problem that the Saudis have been trying to ameliorate for years- this isn't the first time they've hired experts to help them channel the crowds and avoid disasters like this.

It's a very hard problem, and a unique one in the modern world because so far as I know there is no other site in all the world which is the dream-destination for a billion people who all earnestly desire to go there and ritually walk around a medium-sized building in circles for the good of their souls.

[Grumman]

This crush occurred a kilometer away and three hours before one of the major chokepoints of the pilgrimage, so it's not even the same problem that killed 300 people in 2004 and in 2006. Here it was simply two crowds of people trying to pass through a T-junction street at the same time.

If it was possible to declare a fatwa that made using physical force on a fellow pilgrim "despised" - an act of last resort - that would be ideal, as it would force the pilgrims to move in less dense crowds to avoid breaking that rule, and would create a clear understanding of who has right of way that would prevent the sort of pressure waves from the back that can cause a crush once it hits a bottleneck. But I am not a Muslim, so maybe making "No shoving" religious law is not as simple as that.

[salm]

This crush occurred a kilometer away and three hours before one of the major chokepoints of the pilgrimage, so it's not even the same problem that killed 300 people in 2004 and in 2006. Here it was simply two crowds of people trying to pass through a T-junction street at the same time.

If it was possible to declare a fatwa that made using physical force on a fellow pilgrim "despised" - an act of last resort - that would be ideal, as it would force the pilgrims to move in less dense crowds to avoid breaking that rule, and would create a clear understanding of who has right of way that would prevent the sort of pressure waves from the back that can cause a crush once it hits a bottleneck. But I am not a Muslim, so maybe making "No shoving" religious law is not as simple as that.

This was one group of pligrims on their way to the Jamerat "bridge" in Mina (it´s more like multi-story mega complex than a bridge) where they stone the devil meeting another group that was returning from there.
The way I read the reports the officials fucked up somehow and coordinated these groups in a wrong way. Pilgrims are not allowed to go to the bridge on their own. They are put into a group and get time slots. These two groups should never have met.
That bridge has been a death trap for ever. They rebuilt it in 2006 and at least the bridge itself is better now.

[Thanas]

Not sure if this is an Iranian plant or the truth.

The presence of the convoy of the son of the Saudi King Salman bin Abdulaziz Al Saud in central Mina prompted the stampede that killed hundreds of pilgrims on the outskirts of the holy city of Mecca, a report says.

The Arabic-language daily al-Diyar said in a report on Thursday that the convoy of Prince Mohammad bin Salman Al Saud played a central role in the deadly crush on the third day of the annual Hajj pilgrimage earlier in the day.

The report said that Salman, who had sought to attend the huge gathering of pilgrims in Mina, a large valley about five kilometers (three miles) from Mecca, arrived at the site early on Thursday accompanied by a huge entourage.

The report said 200 army forces and 150 police officers escorted the prince.

The report said the presence of the prince in the middle of the population prompted a change in the direction of the movement of the pilgrims and a stampede.

The Lebanese daily further said that Salman and his entourage swiftly abandoned the scene, adding that the Saudi authorities seek to hush up the entire story and impose a media blackout on Salman’s presence in the area.

However, officials in Saudi Arabia have denied the report, calling it "incorrect." The Saudi health minister has blamed the pilgrims for the tragedy. "If the pilgrims had followed instructions, this type of accident could have been avoided," Khaled al-Falih said.

According to Iran's Hajj and Pilgrimage Organization more than 1,300 people, including 125 Iranians, were killed in the crush. This as Saudi officials put the death toll at 717 and the number of injured at 863.

[Grumman]

Slow clap for the Saudi royal family if that's true. It takes a special type of dumbass to take a display of solidarity between Muslims and equality before God and turn it into a bloodbath because princes are more important than everyone else.

[K. A. Pital]

And so the Saudi king gets his own Khodynka. Hope he follows on with this coincidence, turning it into a string, and by 2017 finds himself deposed to the status of an ordinary citizen, or perhaps even executed.

[Simon_Jester]

The way I read the reports the officials fucked up somehow and coordinated these groups in a wrong way. Pilgrims are not allowed to go to the bridge on their own. They are put into a group and get time slots. These two groups should never have met.
That bridge has been a death trap for ever. They rebuilt it in 2006 and at least the bridge itself is better now.

So it was basically like a collision on a railroad caused by signals getting mixed up and two trains going down the same track in opposite directions, only with giant blobs of people instead of locomotives?

And so the Saudi king gets his own Khodynka. Hope he follows on with this coincidence, turning it into a string, and by 2017 finds himself deposed to the status of an ordinary citizen, or perhaps even executed.

If the Saudi monarchy is overthrown the country will be completely and formally taken over by Islamic fundamentalists; this is unlikely to be an improvement.

[K. A. Pital]

Saudi monarchy is financing fundamentalism all over the Middle East. Their collapse may not actually bring about much improvement, but it will certainly make Saudi sheikhs more preoccupied with internal affairs and stop their Wahhabite imperialism for a certain time simply due to the collapse itself.

[Broomstick]

The way I read the reports the officials fucked up somehow and coordinated these groups in a wrong way. Pilgrims are not allowed to go to the bridge on their own. They are put into a group and get time slots. These two groups should never have met.
That bridge has been a death trap for ever. They rebuilt it in 2006 and at least the bridge itself is better now.

So it was basically like a collision on a railroad caused by signals getting mixed up and two trains going down the same track in opposite directions, only with giant blobs of people instead of locomotives?

Yep, more or less.

Probably wrong to characterize this sort of accident as a "stampede", which implies some speed on the part of the participants. This sort of thing can actually happen at a very slow speed, it's the build up of pressure as people are compressed against each other and objects like walls that typically cause most of the fatalities. Very few are actually "trampled" or stepped on, though by the end of it all there are probably a few instances of that, too.

Also probably wrong to blame the crowd, at least in whole, because once you get a crowd that dense options for people to act are sharply limited. There are probably several factors at work: crowd density, failure of crowd control measures, probably some communication issues.

A "no pushing/shoving" rule will not work. By the time you get to a crowd-crush it is physically impossible for a person to resist the physical forces at work. We have old threads on the topic which discuss this in more detail.

[Grumman]

A "no pushing/shoving" rule will not work. By the time you get to a crowd-crush it is physically impossible for a person to resist the physical forces at work.

There are no physical forces until people start pushing. The point of a no pushing rule isn't to make a crowd crush survivable, it's to make the crowd avoid becoming so densely packed that a crowd crush is even possible.

[Broomstick]

According to the latest research I've read you only need 7 people per square meter to cause a density sufficient for a crowd crush. About what you might find on a typical elevator ride. It's not nearly as dense as you might think necessary.

Once you reach such a density you do not, in fact, need a shove. A stumble, several people spontaneously turning at the same time, or other small action can be sufficient to start a wave that builds into a deadly force because as it propagates through the crowd it gathers more and more force. Usually the small waves are random enough to counter-act each other when they're small or just starting, but if that doesn't happen you get a crush. Which is why it all seems so damn random - you get a lot of crowds where nothing bad ever occurs, then suddenly you have a disaster. The human tendency is to seek an individual or small group to blame but in fact there almost never is such a discrete source.

If you have a situation where a crowd crush can happen, if that situation repeats, you will, eventually, have a disaster. You can do a lot to mitigate it - crowd control is a science and many advances have been made in understanding the conglomeration of individuals and how they move, reducing choke points, guiding the crowd so forces are more likely to disperse than build, in places like Mecca they keep people in controlled groups and on a timetable - but sooner or later something goes wrong, or just not right enough, and you have a tragedy on your hands. In fact, the Saudis have incorporated a lot of time and effort and the latest understanding of crowd control to try to keep the situation on the haj under control. It's not enough. It's too many people in too small a space to completely prevent all danger.

The people in the back of the crowd have no way to know what's happening up ahead. They just keep moving, unaware that those in front can't move until it's too late to do anything about it. Unlike a flock of starlings, a nest of ants, or a school of fish we don't have instinctive mechanisms to guide a swarm of humans. We never needed to evolve that until recently, our ancestors as recently as 15,000 years ago were never in large enough groups for this sort of thing to happen, people were too dispersed across the landscape for it to be a problem. This sort of crowding is not natural for our species and we don't cope with it well.

Absolutely we should do what we can to minimize the danger but attempting to blame the mob or find a scapegoat will not fix the problem. Yes, yes, of course tell people that shoving is wrong, but don't think discreet shoving is really the problem here.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

The people in the back of the crowd have no way to know what's happening up ahead. They just keep moving, unaware that those in front can't move until it's too late to do anything about it. Unlike a flock of starlings, a nest of ants, or a school of fish we don't have instinctive mechanisms to guide a swarm of humans. We never needed to evolve that until recently, our ancestors as recently as 15,000 years ago were never in large enough groups for this sort of thing to happen, people were too dispersed across the landscape for it to be a problem. This sort of crowding is not natural for our species and we don't cope with it well.

The main difference when you see flocks of birds and schools of fish seemingly moving as one is that they have the ability to move in 3 dimensions, and since humans lack such ability it surely must limit the effectiveness of any such evolution.

[Elheru Aran]

The main difference when you see flocks of birds and schools of fish seemingly moving as one is that they have the ability to move in 3 dimensions, and since humans lack such ability it surely must limit the effectiveness of any such evolution.

Humans do have the ability to move in 3D too, but it's strictly a learned behavior. Like any land mammal our minds normally work in only four basic directions-- forward, back, right and left. On a crowded street, there's not many other ways to go.

Now I'm visualizing the Arabs building a web of gantries and elevated walkways running all over the Mecca region...

[Darmalus]

Humans do have the ability to move in 3D too, but it's strictly a learned behavior.

In a crowd, sure I can move in 3D, roughly 5-6 feet depending on the person I'm standing on. I don't think that would help the whole "people getting crushed" thing.

Are you a space alien? Do people have wings where you live?

[Elheru Aran]

Humans do have the ability to move in 3D too, but it's strictly a learned behavior.

In a crowd, sure I can move in 3D, roughly 5-6 feet depending on the person I'm standing on. I don't think that would help the whole "people getting crushed" thing.

Are you a space alien? Do people have wings where you live?

Context matters. I'm obviously not saying people can fly. Think planes or submarines, neither of which are typically available to the general pedestrian. Don't be a pedantic fuckstick.

[Broomstick]

Now I'm visualizing the Arabs building a web of gantries and elevated walkways running all over the Mecca region...

If I recall, the Saudis did build multi-level walkways by the three pillars featured in the stoning of the devil event because there was no other way to increase capacity at that chokepoint (it's the point with the highest rate of fatalities, even if it wasn't directly involved in this event). So maybe you intended that in jest but it really has been put into practice.

[salm]

Yeah, it´s a behemoth. It is almost as ugly as the Al Bait towers in Mecca
It´s impressive how the Saudis have remodelled the most important muslim place into an aesthetic desaster of epic proportions.
The thing looks like someone took a design for a parkade ran it through a "make ugly" and filter told the construction workers to start building.

Image

[LaCroix]

are the three pillars even in there, or is it just a bridge(thingy?)

I wonder if they also put a mall in there, did they? would make sense if you consider what else they did to the hajj, so far.

[salm]

are the three pillars even in there, or is it just a bridge(thingy?)

I wonder if they also put a mall in there, did they? would make sense if you consider what else they did to the hajj, so far.

Yes. In every "bubble" thing of the bridge there is one pillar like the one in this image. They have to throw, I think, seven stones (they are small and only pebble sized) at each of the three pillars. The thing around the pillar in the image is a funnel that makes the thrown stones fall into the basement bellow the bridge where the stones are then moved away.

[EnterpriseSovereign]

Well according to ITV the Saudis had spent some £60bn putting all that infrastructure into place, I can't remember if they said it was all at once or in stages.

[salm]

AFAIK there´s no mall or anything else in there. The place is completely crowded during the hadj and there´s no place for such a thing.
The smallish round buildings on the sides of the bridge contain stair cases and elevators for additional access. Some of them have heli pads on their tops which the royals use for better access.

[Broomstick]

Yeah, all that construction was put in place solely to funnel people more efficiently on the haj and reduce the death toll. Bare-bones practical, and they still have incidents resulting in hundreds of deaths.