Analysis: Managing the flow of thousands of people gathering in one space is a complex situation that requires careful planning
What happens when thousands of people all gather in one place? Whether it's an All-Ireland final, a festival like the Electric Picnic or events like the Ploughing or the Rose of Tralee, where thousands of people are converging on and gathering in one space, managing the flow of crowds is a complex situation that requires careful planning.
This year, the Glastonbury Festival, which attracts more than 200,000 festival goers, reduced ticket numbers to give those attending more space. Organiser Emily Eavis told BBC's Sidetracked podcast they sold "a few thousand less tickets" and adding in The Guardian that crowd management has become "pretty much our biggest priority".
"There's a rule in security, which is things work best if you’ve preplanned them. So generally what you try to do is create controllable zones", says Professor Mark Maguire, expert in security at Maynooth University. "I call it boxology. You can put 100,000 people in a field and not have any issues. But you put a thousand people in a pub and you've got a major problem. The reason for that is essentially just basic physics and biology. It’s constraint, it’s due to the distance between people."
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So what exactly is boxology? "You basically say OK this is a concert venue, it's essentially a square. Is it safe to have it just as a square, where people can kind of do roughly what they want physically? Or should you zone it? And if you zone it, you can zone it with barriers. In other words, you create layers so that somebody 10 people behind can't start pressing forward. If they do, they’re just pressing into a barrier, they're not pressing into everybody and creating a larger movement of people.
"That kind of zoning is what you do basically with risk assessment. You say to yourself, what’s the function of each area here? Should people be able to get right next to a stage? A lot of these things send very powerful signals to people. It’s like the visibility of policing or security - what the place looks like, and the function of the different objects and barriers, is really critically important for controlling people's behaviour. You don't have to make an announcement, people will behave if physically they're forced to behave."
The masters of this are Disney. "Nobody's ever had a riot, that I can remember, in Disneyworld or Disneyland", says Maguire. "Because everything is preplanned and you're always on a route. Hundreds and thousands of people go through these areas and the way they manage that is they just pre-plan the crowd movement, so it never tips over a threshold."
When a group becomes a crowd can be modelled very precisely. But one rule of thumb to follow goes as such: "If you can turn sideways and slide between the people in the crowd then it's just a group of people watching something. If you can't do that then you've crossed the threshold, and the crowd is a crowd."
If something happens, whether it’s a threatening situation or an outright emergency, a group dynamic will often involve people breaking into their friends groups and taking a moment to assess the situation, says Maguire. "But if it's a crowd, the physical body of people almost organically starts to make decisions [as one] and it gets into kind of a spooky area at that point, it’s like, who's actually running the show?"
"When you watch an emergency unfold you actually see a slightly super organic movement. The pressure will go to move in a certain direction and then everybody goes. Or the opposite: people will just stay still because the people around them aren't moving. They won't necessarily respond to an alarm or anything like that."
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When a crowd becomes a crowd, "people will sort of devolve responsibility to something external and that can just be the people around them, and that's where it becomes quite tricky. That’s what the science of emergency management is trying to tap into these days, is how do we recognise when that happens? How do we give clear messages, to get people out and mark things in a particular way so to the crowd has no choice but to do the right thing? That becomes the issue."
Many of us will have had the experience of being in a crowded place, where it can be difficult to move around, whether it’s at the front of a gig or in a packed pub. "I think when it comes to music venues, there's been so many horror stories over the years that there's a kind of a hyper vigilance around this type of thing now."
It's just making sure that the person in charge and everybody else knows their job and does it well
"If your head is screwed on as an event manager, you’re thinking about everything we're having a talk about right now," says Maguire. "You're saying to yourself, OK I don't want too many people in zone A, so maybe I'll put something on the route that distracts people, that breaks the crowd. If you're going to have a main act in one area at a certain time, don’t have another main act right next to it because you’ll double the size of the crowd."
"This is what a school principal will do around timetabling and breaks and things. You don't want all the kids going out at the one time, you stagger the exit with the smaller kids. It’s really quite basic stuff, but it has to be done well and that's the key issue actually. It's just making sure that the person in charge and everybody else knows their job and does it well. We know the consequences of that not happening."
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The views expressed here are those of the author and do not represent or reflect the views of RTÉ
