Fire in a crowded theater: from wet blanket to sprinkler system

The New Neo Posted on by

Yelling ‘fire’ in a crowded theater.

It’s become a cliche for inciting panic–although, actually, it seems that the original phrase in the Oliver Wendell Holmes decision is “shouting” rather than “yelling.” It is forbidden to do so because of the possibility of inciting a deadly stampede.

But even more deadly and dangerous is the panic that sets in when there is a real fire inside an actual theater. The metaphor originates in the knowledge of the reality. In such a situation, the panic is compounded with the fire itself to cause a lethal mix in which people are killed by a combination of burns, smoke inhalation, and trampling. And, tragically, that is exactly what seems to have happened on September 5 in a theater near Cairo, Egypt. Twenty-nine people died.

Just a few days ago I wrote a post about the phenomenon of stampedes. It was occasioned by the terrible stampede deaths on an Iraqi bridge during a Shi’ite religious festival. In my research for that post, I discovered that

there are three main categories of venues that would appear to favor stampedes: the soccer stadium (or other large sporting event); the crowded nightclub in which a fire breaks out; and the religious pilgrimage.

Tragically, just a few days later, the Egyptian theater fire has occurred, almost identical to situation number two–fire in a crowded nightclub. It’s unclear as yet how many deaths were due in this case to the fire and how many to the stampede, but what is clear is how incredibly criminally negligent the theater company was.

Here’s a description of the stage and how it was set up:

The play was set in a zoo, and the stage was done up like a cave inside one of the animal cages: The ceiling, floor and walls were covered with paper bags painted to resemble stone, and in the middle of the stage was a “mountain” also made of paper. There were candles set up all over the set, survivors said.

In the final scene, one of the actors was shaking another character to wake him up, and the movement knocked over one of the candles….

Yassin said there were only two exit doors from the theater, but one of them was covered in the same paper as the set and was in flames. So the crowd rushed for the other. As they streamed out, a piece of wood fell, partially blocking it. He and some others managed to climb around it, but it slowed the escape, he said.

So we have a stage wreathed in paper, live candle flames being used “all over,” and inadequate exits. A recipe for disaster, and disaster is exactly what happened.

Over time, we in this country and others have managed to compile a host of tedious regulations concerning, for example, the number of working exits required in a theater or nightclub, prohibitions on open flames in theaters, and the need for flame-retardant sets (see here for a typical list of theater rules, particularly numbers 8 and 9). I wonder whether Egypt has similar rules. Perhaps they do, but if so, there certainly was no enforcement in this case.

Even in this country, regulations do not necessarily prevent such tragedies from happening, especially if the regulations are not followed. After all, there were a bunch of regulations in place in West Warwick, Rhode Island, but it didn’t stop the Station Nightclub from burning down when the rules were apparently violated, killing ninety-seven people (see here for details of this and another nightclub stampede, this time in Chicago. In the latter case the panic was sparked by pepper spray and rumors of a terrorist attack, and therefore somewhat resembled the Iraqi bridge stampede).

Laws about what is allowed and not allowed at public assemblies and theaters may seem picayune and needlessly restrictive at times. But they are the result of bitter experience with what can happen in such venues, and are necessary to protect the public. In Rhode Island, there was no requirement for a sprinkler system. But the following (from the same article) is a case of how important such a system can be, especially when working in combination with well-trained staff and adequate exits:

In yet another incident on February 17th, The Fine Line Music Cafe in the downtown Minneapolis warehouse district sustained an estimated $1.5 million in damage when Seattle band The Jet City Fix set off pyrotechnics during their encore and ignited the club’s ceiling. Admirably avoiding a tragedy, the staff quickly evacuated the 120 patrons without incident or injury, and the fire was extinguished within 15 minutes. The Fine Line had a sprinkler system, which activated during the fire – something the Rhode Island club was not required to have.

We’ve come a long way from the days when theaters were lit by candles or gas jet, and being burned alive was part of the risk a performer took. As an ex-dancer and theater reviewer, I’ve long been aware of the tragic story of Emma Livry, up-and-coming young ballet star of the Paris Opera in mid-19th century, who died in 1863 at the age of twenty-one (I’ve corrected some spelling errors in the following that occurred in the original):

Livry refused to have her costume flame-retarded because it caused the material to turn yellow and stiff. She was required to sign a release stating she was willing to take the chance. As she danced her tulle skirt came into contact with the gas jet and caught fire. Two male dancers tried to extinguish the flames, but unsuccessfully. She suffered severe burns and died eight months later from complications. From that time until the advent of electric stage lighting, blankets soaked in water were kept ready on both sides of the stage. Hence, “wet blanket.”

So even then there were attempts to protect the performers: flame-retardant costumes and wet blankets. And sometimes, as still happens today, performers intent on creating a spectacular effect tried to circumvent the rules. It would be one thing if the performers were knowingly risking only their own lives, but the rules are in place so that they don’t take their audiences with them–even if the rules can sometimes throw a metaphorical wet blanket over the proceedings.

From sheep to sheepdog

The New Neo Posted on by

There are all types of bloggers. I’m a practitioner of the long essay form, for example.

And Bill Whittle is a practitioner of the LONG esssay form.

When you write LONG, as Bill does, you have to be very very good to get anyone to stick with you and follow your essay to its conclusion. Bill is very very good. He not only has intelligent and original things to say, but he says them in a uniquely conversational voice that manages to carry the reader along almost effortlessly through his LONG pieces (did I mention that they were long?).

So when Bill puts a new essay up, it’s time to take notice. His latest is no exception. It’s an infinitesimal bit rougher around the edges than his usual polished product, but that’s because he wrote this one quickly, with a sense of pressing urgency. It’s well worth reading, as always.

The part that caught my interest most, though, was not written by Whittle himself (sorry, Bill!); it’s a passage from something called The Bulletproof Mind, written by a Lt. Colonel Dave Grossman (a digression: from looking at Grossman’s biographical webpage, I learned that he’s written some things I should take a look at–a psychologist by training as well as a military man, he has been doing some exceptionally interesting work on the psychology of killing). In Whittle’s excerpt, Grossman uses a metaphor of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs, and divides humanity into three groups based on this idea:

If you have no capacity for violence then you are a healthy productive citizen: a sheep. If you have a capacity for violence and no empathy for your fellow citizens, then you have defined an aggressive sociopath–a wolf. But what if you have a capacity for violence, and a deep love for your fellow citizens? Then you are a sheepdog, a warrior, someone who is walking the hero’s path….

Let me expand on this old soldier’s excellent model of the sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs. We know that the sheep live in denial; that is what makes them sheep. They do not want to believe that there is evil in the world. They can accept the fact that fires can happen, which is why they want fire extinguishers, fire sprinklers, fire alarms and fire exits throughout their kids’ schools. But many of them are outraged at the idea of putting an armed police officer in their kid’s school. Our children are dozens of times more likely to be killed, and thousands of times more likely to be seriously injured, by school violence than by school fires, but the sheep’s only response to the possibility of violence is denial. The idea of someone coming to kill or harm their children is just too hard, so they choose the path of denial.

The sheep generally do not like the sheepdog. He looks a lot like the wolf. He has fangs and the capacity for violence. The difference, though, is that the sheepdog must not, cannot and will not ever harm the sheep. Any sheepdog that intentionally harms the lowliest little lamb will be punished and removed. The world cannot work any other way, at least not in a representative democracy or a republic such as ours.

Still, the sheepdog disturbs the sheep. He is a constant reminder that there are wolves in the land…

This is a vivid way of describing something I’ve wrestled with quite often on this blog, most recently in this post, and in this one.

Reading Whittle’s essay and his description of what he imagines he himself might have done had he been a passenger on one of the 9/11 flights, I was reminded of a thought I had on 9/12. It had already become clear just what had happened on all the flights, and that only the passengers on Flight 93 had known about the others, and that this had emboldened them to take heroic action against the terrorists. The thought that struck me at that time was quite simple: well, that’s the last hijacking we’ll ever see. Hijackings are finished as of now.

This wasn’t because I thought that security would be so wonderfully different after 9/11, or that terrorists would just give up. No. It was just that knowledge of what had transpired on 9/11 meant that no one would consider a hijacking to be a survivable event any more.

Never again could a hijacker say, “Just do what we say, and no one will get hurt,” and have anyone believe them. Never again could a hijacker count on anyone, even a wimpish sort like me, to cooperate when the hijacker issued an order, assuming that complying would allow that person to survive. No, that innocence (that sheepish innocence, you might say) was lost for all time. Whether or not a flight also carried official sheepdogs (armed pilots or air marshalls) to protect the passengers, from now on, there are no sheep on an airplane.

When I was a child I loved the movie “High Noon” (and if there is anyone within the sound of my voice who hasn’t seen it yet, please do me a favor and do so immediately). I loved “High Noon” for a lot of reasons. Gary Cooper’s expressively stoic (no, that’s not an oxymoron) face was one of them. The compressed time frame was another. The music—oh, how I loved that music! Katy Jurado was fascinating; she looked a lot like me, or like someone who could be my older sister, which was very odd because I was not a Mexican actress and I don’t have a sister. Grace Kelly was impossibly lovely and way too young for Cooper, but she was wonderful, too.

But it was the plot that made me love the picture the most. I didn’t really understand it in a way that I could explain at the time—but, intuitively, I sensed that it was telling some sort of essential truth. I was a pacifist, like Grace Kelly’s character Amy—or, rather, I wanted to be. I wanted everyone to love one another and hold hands and never use guns and never fight.

But even my rather short life so far had told me otherwise. I’d already encountered violence and meanness and, if not evil, then cruelty. And I already knew, from my own life, that you couldn’t appease it or wish it away.

(Warning to those who haven’t seen the movie yet: spoiler coming!)

So at the end of the movie when Grace Kelly, the Quaker pacifist, shot the gunman who was stalking and about to kill her husband, I knew something important and dramatic had happened. Until now I didn’t have a phrase to describe what it was. But now I do: the sheep had turned into a sheepdog.

Placing blame: thoughts on the first anniversary of Beslan

The New Neo Posted on by

Next weekend is the fourth anniversary of 9/11. No doubt many will commemorate that solemn day; whether in ceremonies, private meditation and thought, donations and other acts of remembrance, or by writing about it.

But this past weekend was the first anniversary of a different day of infamy and the deliberate slaughter of the most innocent of innocents, the Beslan school massacre.

It was fairly quiet here on the Beslan anniversary, although Russia itself had an official remembrance. A number of newspapers covered it; here, for example, is a heartrending article from the LA Times about the searing, almost unimaginable grief the families felt–and still feel, a full year later.

As I previously noted, the great graphic artist Kathe Kollwitz, who lost a son and grandson in war (see this article of mine on grieving parents of children), wrote: There is in our lives a wound which will never heal. Nor should it. The same is true, I’m afraid, for the families of the Beslan dead.

The following photo of grieving grandparents at the grave of their grandson killed at Beslan appeared in this Boston Globe article on the Beslan anniversary, reminding me of those Kollwitz statues of grieving parents (see this post for a photo of the Kollwitz statues).

But if you read the Globe AP article carefully, you’ll note something very strange. If ever people had earned the right to be called “terrorists” (and much worse), the Beslan perpetrators had fully earned that right. And yet the AP seems, once again, to bend over backwards to avoid the word. Sure, the word “terrorists” appears five times in the article, but most of these are quotes from Putin’s speech. He, at least, doesn’t pull his punches; he uses the word four times in two sentences.

Mike Eckel, author of the AP article that appeared in the Globe, only uses the word “terrorist” once himself to describe the Beslan attackers. And even then the word is only used in a very general way to say that this is “the anniversary of one of Russia’s deadliest terrorist attacks” (by the way, was it not the deadliest terrorist attack in Russia, not just the less dramatic “one of” them?). When action verbs are used, then Eckel and the AP back off and call them “militants” (twice) and “rebels” (once), as in “militants attacked.”

The focus of media coverage in general was focused on two elements: the grieving families, and the incompetence and negligence of the Russian authorities. Both, of course, are suitable subject matter; it’s the lack of balancing attention paid to the perpetrators, and the inability to call them what they most undoubtedly were, that struck me as odd.

The stories about the grieving families of the dead children could rip your heart out, and rightly so. Here are some excerpts from the previously mentioned LA Times article:

“She never leaves my mind. She’s constantly there,” Kargiyeva said of Zarina, who had sat beside her for three days as a hostage in the school gym, then died in the explosion while Kargiyeva and her 9-year-old son Alan survived. “The last time I saw her, when I looked at her, she looked so tired, as if she had lost all hope. And her eyes were so, so big. Day and night, that’s what I see.”…

Women shrieking with despair and raising their hands to the sky had to be helped along by friends and family. “My dear little girl, why did you abandon me?” screamed Marina Pukhayeva, whose 13-year-old died in the siege. “Who killed you? Who tore you to pieces?”…

In a sort of empathic re-enactment, an attempt to endure some approximation of the suffering their dead children had undergone in the long hard days before the shootout, some of the mothers tried to recreate for themselves certain elements of the hostages’ fate:

Several mothers had kept vigil for three days and nights in the gymnasium, sitting without food or water, as the hostages had been forced to endure, from the hour when a reported 32 militants calling for Russian withdrawal from Chechnya first captured the school at 9 a.m. on Sept. 1. More than 300 hostages and police died two days later in an explosion and firefight.

As the crowd diminished and the school grew silent in the midnight hours, “We tried to imagine what our children were doing on a night like this,” said Zalina Guburova, 42, who lost her 67-year-old mother and her 8-year-old son.

“Of course, we will never feel the pain our relatives and our children felt here, no matter how much time we spent here,” she said. “But we decided to try.”

I read a selection of articles about the Beslan anniversary from around the globe in preparation for this post. Most of them were in line with the AP article in using euphemisms for the attackers and in focusing very little on the original event (this somewhat murkily-written Pravda article is the one exception I encountered).

I’m not asking that we dwell endlessly on acts such as this. But surely the Beslan massacre was one of the most vicious and coldblooded killings in recent memory, and one in which children were purposely targeted for suffering and death rather than their deaths being caused unintentionally, as collateral damage. Surely it’s important to mention those facts.

The truth is that the Beslan killings were murders perpetrated by Chechen terrorists hoping, by committing the vilest of atrocities, to strike fear into the heart of Russians everywhere, and to cause political concessions to be made. But you could read a host of articles on the anniversary without hardly learning a thing about what was behind the Beslan attack, except perhaps that it was perpetrated by Chechen separatists. And even in those rare articles that did go into more detail, there was hardly even a whisper of the fact that Chechnya is a Moslem area, and that the faction of the separatists and militants who become terrorists (as opposed to true militants and separatists only) tend to be Islamicists as well.

There’s even more that’s interesting about the Beslan articles. It seems as though Russia and the US are not so different after all, these days, in people’s tendency to focus on the actions (or inactions) of their own governments. A close reading of this article is fascinating for the parallels it demonstrates: the emphasis on the blaming of the authorities for their failure to protect rather than of the terrorists for the murders themselves, the vociferous demands of the victims’ families for a confrontation with Putin, and the callous and opportunistic use the terrorists make of the controversy to score their own propaganda points through the clever manipulation of public opinion to deflect all accusations even further in the direction of the government.

It’s mystifying to me why this particular act, so unequivocally evil (yes, I’ll use the word), seems sometimes to have been transmuted into just another opportunity to blame the government. As with many things–9/11, the Katrina disaster–there is no doubt plenty of blame to go around, and many errors that were made by the authorities. But these errors are more in the nature of contributory negligence at worst, and inevitable and unavoidable human failings at best.

The true perpetrators here must not be forgotten: cold-blooded and manipulative terrorists who were out to murder the largest possible number of children in the most painful way possible, making them suffer first for several unspeakable days. It’s almost as though the truth of Beslan is so horrific that people feel they must close their eyes to it or go mad. It’s an example of that tried and true defense mechanism, displacement. How much safer to rage against the imperfect and seemingly impotent governments than at the perfectly malignant and all-too-active terrorists.

Separated at birth? (if you close your eyes, anyway)

The New Neo Posted on by

The death of Chief Justice Rehnquist had just been announced on the TV in the den. I wasn’t watching it, though–just listening from the kitchen, where I was cleaning out the fridge.

People who had known him were telling anecdotes about him, and then I heard a familiar voice. Carol Channing.

What could Carol Channing possibly have to say about Justice Rehnquist? I thought, puzzled. What commentary could she possibly give; whatever are they interviewing her for?

The voice went on and on, up and down and all around, mostly scratchy and gravelly but occasionally squeaky. I couldn’t hear many of the words, so I started to walk into the den to get a better notion of what Channing’s connection to Rehnquist could possibly have been.

And then it struck me: it was Susan Estrich I was hearing, not Channing at all. But without the visuals, they sound positively identical.

How could there possibly be two of that voice?

Separated at birth? Nah, couldn’t be. Or could it?

Apologies to all on my blogroll (but Blogrolling.com should really apologize to me)

The New Neo Posted on by

When you’ve got a blog, it does seem sometimes that you’ve put all your eggs in one basket. You feel uniquely vulnerable (at least I do) and dependent on the tender mercies of Blogger.com, for instance, not to screw your blog up. And, so far (knock wood) it hasn’t.

Blogrolling.com, responsible for my blogroll, has always seemed a piece of cake. Blogrolling is one of those small housekeeping chores that are important, at least to other bloggers, and I had developed a modestly lengthy one, complete with pithy descriptions of each blog to which I’d linked (note the past tense, by the way).

Last night I was trying to add a new blog, as I’ve done so many times before with nary a hitch, when the screen suddenly read “fatal error,” a phrase I absolutely detest. Why such needlessly hysterical rhetoric on the part of a computer? I always think when I see that. Can’t you calm down?

I figured something had gone wrong with the addition of this particular link for some unknown computerish reason, some sort of little glitch. I thought I’d just come back today and fix it.

Well, lo and behold, when I returned this morning I discovered that my entire blogroll has been deleted. Gone, gonzo, zip, nada, finished, finito. The word “fatal” doesn’t seem to have been hyperbole this time, at least from the viewpoint of the blogroll itself.

I have no idea whether this blogroll assassination was due to some slip of my own fingers (I don’t think so; to delete a blogroll requires two moves, including receiving an alert that this is about to happen, and I remember seeing nothing of the sort), or whether my computer has committed an act of revenge. Probably something in between.

But apologies to all on my blogroll. This may take some days to fix.

[ADDENDUM: Wonders never cease.]

His Honor the Mayor, Edi Rama

The New Neo Posted on by

Whenever I begin to wonder whether it’s time to hang up my New Yorker subscription, they publish something that’s so good I realize we may just be wedded for life, like some squabbling couple who can’t live together but can’t quite live apart, either.

A June 27, 2005 article that redeemed the New Yorker for me once again was by Jane Kramer, entitled “Painting the Town.” It’s a portrait of a man I’d never heard of, in a country I know next to nothing about (although now I know considerably more, after reading Kramer’s article): Edi Rama, His Honor the Mayor of Tirana, Albania.

Albania was famous when I was growing up for being one of those countries Americans weren’t allowed to visit, behind an Iron Curtain so solid that it was practically a black hole. But lately Albania is starting to become more–well, more colorful, as the title of the article suggests:

Rama is a Balkan original, and maybe the most original thing about him is that he isn’t really a politician. He is an artist who, you might say, took Tirana for his canvas.

Rama has been in office for nearly five years (he was elected in 2000, at the age of thirty-six, and reelected three years later), and the first thing he did as mayor was to order paint. He blasted the facades of Tirana’s gray Stalinist apartment blocks with color–riotous, Caribbean color–turning buildings into patchworks of blues, greens, oranges, purples, yellows, and reds, and the city itself into something close to a modern-masters sampler.

Within a few years, Rama had managed to clear the choked, riverine city center of two thousand illegal kiosks and bars and cafes and shops and whorehouses and sleeping barracks and traffickers’ storeroom “motels”–the detritus of a decade of post-Communist freedom frenzy on city property…He dredged Ritan’s Lana River, seeded thirty-six acres of public parks, relaid old boulevards, and planted four thousand trees. He lit the city–literally, since only seventy-eight street lights worked when he took it over. He cajoled the money for this transformation out of the World Bank and the European Union and the United Nations Development Program and George Soros and the scores of foundations and aid agencies and N.G.O.s that had set up shop in Albania in the nineties. And he cajoled the work out of local contractors: anybody who wanted to build anything in the capital had to “contribute.” People enjoy Tirana now. They stroll and shop on the shady streets of what used to be their Politburo’s version of a gated neighborhood. They read the paper and drink espresso under the white umbrellas of cheerful, sprawling cafes. There is nothing remotely like Tirana in the rest of Albania.

By now you must be getting the idea that Edi Rama is quite an unusual fellow. And you would be right. Originally an artist and a leftist, from a family that was part of what passed for an elite in Albania, he moved to Paris in his twenties and lived the Bohemian leftist intellectual life there with a girlfriend and no real thoughts of returning to gloomy Albania. How he got back there is a story in itself, but you’ll have to read the article for that.

The reason I’m going on at some length about Rama, though, is not just that he sounds like the sort of person every developing country and every depressed city ought to have, and usually never gets–after all, there’s only one Edi Rama. Something else about Rama intrigued me, and that was the political and attitudinal changes he’s gone through.

One key to Rama is that he was raised in a society so repressive and so life-denying that, paradoxically, he valued things that the rest of us take for granted, and hungered for them. Here, for example, is Rama’s reaction to the saxophone and Cubist art:

Saxophones were banned in Albania, which may be why the day a school friend whispered, “Want to see a saxophone?” is as memorable to him as the day he saw his first nude drawings. He says that the sound of that saxophone–a few notes, played in his friend’s attic, with lookouts posted on the stairs–was “like a strange amplification of the miraculous,” and started him wondering “why all these beautiful things were bad.”…He started hanging around the National Library, staying late to help the maids clean; his pay was five minutes alone with a banned book of Georges Braque’s paintings. “A spiritual sandwich, ” he calls it.

Rama also learned the value of religion in similar way:

His grandmother was a Catholic (most Albanian Christians are Orthodox), and he says that, for him, she was a glimpse into a forbidden world. He remembers her during the Mao years, when religion was a constitutional offense, whispering her rosary at night in the nursery…”After lights out, I would hear that low voice, making her prayers. She was my night music.” He says that she planted the seeds of “an alternative way of thinking in me, an alternative to what the Communist ideology meant by ‘love’ and ‘values.'”

Things that are forbidden take on an extra luster for those who are starved for them. The seeds Rama’s grandmother planted bore fruit much later in his ability to cast off, not only Communist ideology, but whatever didn’t make sense to him or enthrall him–to think outside the box, to think outside all boxes.

So Rama, the radical leftist in his twenties, has evolved in his thirties into Rama, the pragmatic and eclectic can-do man:

He said that the experience of running Tirana had convinced him that there was “nothing left or right in the way I deal with the world,” that the real divisions in Albania had less to do with politics than with honest and corrupt, peaceful and violent, and especially, the “hard-working people and the people who don’t respect work.” Right now, this is his only politics. “If I lived in Germany or France or England, no doubt I’d be totally with the left wing,” he told me. “But there is a huge difference in the situation there. At the end of the day, the ideology we need to embrace is the ideology of work. Right and left are only a question of how you distribute. For us, the key is to have something to distribute.”

According to the article, Rama has recently been reading up on economics. My guess is that, if he continues, he may end up applying his formulation about the ideology of work to western Europe as well as Albania.

Rama’s forays into economic readings have not all been on the left, either:

“I’m reading about economy all the time,” Rama says. Todd Buchholz, Thomas Sowell, Hernando de Soto’s “The Other Path” and “The Mystery of Capital.” Hardly a left-wing list, but Rama, somewhat to his surprise, has become not only a law-and-order politician but an eager disciple of a group of unconventionally conservative economists…

This is Rama’s prescription for Tirana….people who have lived through Communism, where everything belonged to the state, want to take back possession of their own lives–their land, their businesses, their homes. Some Tirana intellectuals call this a fetish of private property, but Rama points out that those intellectuals are not running a city with more than a million people building illegally on its periphery.

Rama is a good example, I think, not only of a man unafraid to change his mind, but of the ways in which experience grounded in reality–with things or with people, or with both–tends to trump the ideas generated when one is thinking only abstractly and theoretically. There were a number of excellent comments on that very point in the recent thread on therapy and liberalism: see this, this, this, and this.

The military response: rescuers

The New Neo Posted on by

This morning I watched some cable television coverage of the rescue efforts now finally underway in the Gulf. It’s a wonderful and long-awaited sight: the helicopters swooping down to fill up with people and carry them to relative safety, the elderly and frail being pushed in their wheelchairs by the young and strong, a tiny girl carried on the shoulders of large man in uniform.

Geraldo Rivera–not ordinarily my favorite–was very good at conveying the emotion of gratefulness to the military. He was positively gushing, and rightly so. Listening to him, I thought of this post of a few days ago, and its discussion about perceptions of the military as rescuers and protectors.

Today in New Orleans and the rest of the devastated area, we see that rescue function in its full and pure form. It’s a stupendous sight to see, and a clear demonstration of why rescue efforts are called “relief.” I can only imagine the emotions those suffering people who have been in the overburdened and undersupplied stadiums for so long feel at the sight of those uniforms and those helicopters. Relief, indeed!

Preparing(?) for disaster in the Big Easy

The New Neo Posted on by

The horrific situation in New Orleans has spawned the usual accusations: Bush’s fault, the city government is to blame, and what about the state–why didn’t it do more? In this case, I’m sure there’s plenty of blame to go around. But the blame game is, to a certain extent, an ex-post-facto no-brainer that anyone can play, and the old truth is that hindsight is always 20/20.

That said, this particular horror does seem to feature an entire host of spectacularly bad decisions all coming together to create the nightmare that is now New Orleans. There were apparent errors of planning, particularly on the local and state level (or, seemingly, an almost total lack thereof), errors of evacuation timing, errors of rescue effort timing, inadequate funding for repairs (some of this on the federal level and some more local), rampant city corruption, city and state bureaucracy of an unusually Byzantine nature, poorly-controlled crime (even preceding the hurricane)–but even better planning would only have gone so far.

There is no doubt that evacuation planning could, and should, have been much more extensive. But there are limits to what can be done. Can a city of this size be evacuated in two days, even with planning beforehand and the absolute knowledge that a disaster will happen? I used to live near a nuclear power plant in New Hampshire, an area far less populated than New Orleans, and I remember reading that, were an accident to happen and the area evacuated, bottlenecks would almost immediately occur and the roads would become impassable, trapping us all (this problem is, strangely enough, somewhat in line with certain facts about crowd flow in my stampede article of yesterday).

Nowadays we imagine we can plan for everything and that we should be protected against everything, even though we don’t (and really can’t) spend the money to do everything that would actually be needed. And then, when something happens, we say “Oh, of course, that’s the very thing that should have been funded above all the others that compete for our attention.”. But all of this involves cost-benefit ratios and predictions that are partly based on science and partly, quite frankly, a crapshoot.

Another truth seems to be that people never prepare on that enormous and costly scale for something that is merely theoretical–it always seems to take a great disaster to make them realize what should have been done. Such a huge output of funds and energy doesn’t ordinarily seem justified for something that’s only a projection and prediction–we can’t prepare for all exigencies that might happen, and the billion-dollar question is: how to pick and choose among all the competing doomsday scenarios?

And then there’s the issue, not of governmental and community preparedness, but of individual and aggregate human response. Scientists are so fond of predicting disaster that people have learned, for the most part, to tune them out. After all, so many predicted disasters never happen, or are far less disastrous than expected. Remember the Millienium Bug? The Jupiter Effect? Comet Kohoutek? The Swine Flu? Not to mention all the predicted storms and blizzards and hurricanes that ultimately fizzled out, after the big predictions made everyone rush to the grocery to stock up?

So it’s no surprise that, although New Orleans has been described for a number of years as uniquely and catastrophically vulnerable to a category 4 or 5 hurricane, many people stayed put, either through inability to leave, or because they thought the threat was overhyped. But tragically, this is one of those times that the scientists’ predictions have come eerily true, even in some of the smallest details.

Going back in time and reading old articles that talk about what could happen if a large hurricane ever hit New Orleans is a strange experience. While reading pieces that are a few years old, I kept checking the tenses and the dates–surely these weren’t written in the future tense; surely they are describing the events of the last few days, written after the fact? But no, they were predictions that came almost exactly true.

This one, for example, is three years old (via Michael Totten), but it describes what happened in New Orleans a few days ago almost as though reading from a script. This series of articles is similar in its haunting prescience.

In addition to this human predilection to discount dire predictions, there are other reasons New Orleans was ill-prepared: to have protected the city against a Category 5 hurricane would undoubtedly have cost many billions of dollars (estimates differ, but that it would have been in the billions is not in dispute), and the best ways to go about doing so were unclear–as the aforementioned articles, as well as this one and this one, attest. I’ve already alluded briefly to these facts, but New Orleans–the Big Easy–is famous for graft and corruption in city government. The comments in this thread from Chicagoboyz discuss this at some length. This City Journal article (via Ed Driscoll), as well, talks about the sad state of civic affairs in New Orleans even prior to Katrina, and why it will make it doubly hard to rebuild and recover. And this comment on LGF makes some excellent points about “levee boards” and why it may not have mattered even if more federal funds had been given in advance.

This lethal stew of prohibitive cost, corruption, competing ideas about what was necessary, and denial that something so dreadful was likely enough to justify all that expense, proved to be a deadly mixture that led to the shocking lack of preparedness. As blogger “Laurel,” who fled the New Orleans area with her family just before the hurricane hit writes, it was “The day I thought would never come.” And if a day will never come, why spend billions of dollars in a very poor state to prepare against that day?

Laurel describes her own skepticism at the early storm reports, based on prior experience with false alarms:

There are storms in the Gulf all the time and they always get everyone excited around here, especially the media. You’d think the fricking sky was falling every other week. People have pretty much gotten used to their hysteria and don’t pay too much attention to it…

I went to bed that night mad that our fun camping trip had been cut short, and upset that we had to listen to hysterical media sensationalists again. It just seems like they are always crying wolf and it gets a little old.

This is a very understandable mindset. But, fortunately, this time something cut into Laurel’s skepticism, and she got going. As she writes:

But, I guess they were finally right this time. By morning the storm was a category 5 storm and we got a phone call from the St. Tammany Parish president that had a recorded message telling us to evacuate immediately.

“They were finally right this time.” So at least “they” get to say, “I told you so.” But that won’t help the people of New Orleans right now. Maybe later–maybe, if and when the city is rebuilt–but not now.

[NOTE: My post focuses on preparedness. But for an excellent discussion of what may have gone wrong, and why, in the response, see this post by Aziz Poonawalla along with its comments. Found at Dean Esmay’s. And the Anchoress sums it all up with her usual combination of eloquence and strength, and says what needs to be said about the Bush-blamers.]

[NOTE II: Just found another post that goes into helpful and informative detail on why building an adequate system of physical protection against a hurricane of such magnitude would take so very long and be such a complex task. See this by Tigerhawk, who also links to this excellent post from Belmont Club, on the same topic.]

Stampede

The New Neo Posted on by

As if the deaths from hurricane Katrina were not enough, yesterday brought the news that up to one thousand people, predominately women and children and the elderly, had died in a stampede while taking part in a Shi’ite religious pilgrimage in Iraq. Another horror of nearly unimaginable proportions.

It became clear almost immediately that, although terrorists were not directly to blame, they were an indirect cause, since the stampede was apparently sparked by a rumor of a bomber in the crowd. Such a rumor was given credence by the crowd’s knowledge of previous suicide attacks on Shi’ites at similar religious pilgrimages. So, ironically, a rumor of terrorism has caused more innocent deaths than any single terrorist attack has done so far in Iraq. The terrorists must be extremely pleased to have achieved such a goal with so little effort on their part.

It’s not surprising that the smaller and weaker–women and children and the elderly–would be the most likely to be overwhelmed by the force of the crowd and crushed, and were therefore overrepresented among the dead. I would guess (though I haven’t been able to find information to document it) that most stampedes involve a similar grim statistic, if they occur in crowds that feature any women and children or elderly people.

I hold a vivid memory of being caught in a rush hour crush in a New York subway some years back. Although, fortunately, the situation never reached stampede level, it was terrifying to me because I was holding the hand of my 3-year-old son, who promptly disappeared, thoroughly engulfed in the crowd. I still recall the feel of his small and delicate fingers in mine, and the panic that engulfed me as the force of the crowd started to carry him away. Fortunately, all was well, but ever afterwards it has taken very little imagination for me to realize the dangers small children and mothers face in adult crowds.

Yesterday’s stampede was very big news mostly because it occurred in Iraq. But it turns out that stampede deaths are a regular occurrence around the world, and not just in third world countries, either, although in general they seem to cause higher death tolls there. This website has an exhaustive list of such stampede events, which can be found by clicking on “disasters” in the left-hand sidebar.

On analysis, it turns out there are three main categories of venues that would appear to favor stampedes: the soccer stadium (or other large sporting event); the crowded nightclub in which a fire breaks out; and the religious pilgrimage. They all share the characteristics of having very large and moving groups of people packed into a restricted space. But panic, such as apparently occurred on the Iraqi bridge, is, surprisingly, not a required element to start such stampedes, although it inevitably happens as the stampede begins to take shape, and makes them that much worse. Stampedes can sometimes be sparked in the absence of any panic, when chance events block the flow of traffic in an overcrowded and spacially restricted situation.

The situation, as far as I can determine, is a bit analogous to the elements that go into a tsunami, strangely enough. That is, a huge and extremely powerful force (in the case of crowds, the moving people; in the case of tsunamis, the moving water) is initially spread out horizontally. Then, some sort of blockage impedes that horizontal movement and converts it, at least partially, into a vertical one. I haven’t found a website that explains this too clearly, so I’m not linking to any source for it, but it appears that, in the case of a stampede, people become stacked up and those on the bottom are the ones who are crushed by the force of those above. Of course, in yesterday’s Iraq tragedy, some also went off the bridge and were drowned.

It’s no accident, either, that the Iraqi stampede occurred on a bridge. Any sort of bottleneck or narrow passage through which the crowd must funnel itself represents a grave danger, because it potentially impedes that flow of horizontal movement.

That’s not all that contributed, in this case. Here is a particularly telling description of the Iraqi stampede, from the previously linked Globe article:

General Rawad Rumediam, a military commander at the bridge, said that 3-foot-high concrete barriers put in place to prevent car bombs from entering probably contributed to the crush. Saddoun Dulaymi, Iraq’s defense minister, said the checkpoints at the bridge meant to search pedestrians for explosive devices may have slowed the flow of the crowd across the bridge and contributed to the disaster.

So it seems that terrorists helped the disaster to occur in two ways: by giving credence to the rumor of a suicide bomber, and by causing security considerations to override the implementation of basic crowd control safety measures.

We don’t usually think much about it, but any time there is a large public gathering, the science of crowd control comes into play. The police study crowd control, and there are also other scientists who try to improve on current knowledge and apply it to future situations. This website, on which I found the list of stampedes, is an example of a firm that specializes in such research, consulting with groups around the world to prevent similar disasters. For example, they were hired by the Saudis to supervise this year’s Haj (in particular, they redesigned a certain bridge over which the crowd needed to pass). They seem to have been successful because, unlike some earlier Hajs, this one apparently went off without a hitch.

Crowd control is designed to minimize the possibilities that things will get out of hand. But, sadly, there are no guarantees that they won’t, despite the best of precautions. And often, especially in third-world countries, the expertise and the money to implement the best of precautions are not in place (here, for example, is a description of how a lack of preparedness and resources helped create the conditions for a stampede in India during a religious pilgrimage).

What follows is a description of a stampede which, as far as I can tell, could not have been prevented by any method, other than total redesign of the area. Occurring in an urban setting in a developed country, it was started by a series of chance happenings. It’s another example–as if we needed reminding–of the limits of human control over events. (This passage appears at the same Crowd Dynamics website, but it has no separate URL. It can found there by clicking on “disasters”):

1999 (May 31) Minsk, Belarus. 53 dead, 150 injured, 78 hospitalized when a crowd of 2,500 rushed to get out of the rain at the railway station. From The Daily Telegraph, June 1, 1999. An unprecedented tragedy happened on May 30 in the centre of the Belarusian capital. Over 50 people died and some 300 were wounded in a crush at the entrance to the underground station…The tragedy was caused by heavy rain that started at about 8 p.m….A few thousand Minsk residents, mostly young people, had gathered …The first thunders and rain drops made people rush to find shelter in the underground crossing…Somebody fell down on the concrete floor and the first blood was shed. People were slipping over and trampling those lying on the floor…People were falling at the feet of the crowd. Over two thousand people poured into the 10-metre wide underground crossing thus creating a dense moving jam…there were people literally smeared against the walls, pressed into the floor, …Meanwhile, screams of those who were unable to escape on their own, kept echoing from this hellish meat grinder…”We are soccer fans, so we know what to do in a crowd–cover your head with hands and make your way to the exit.”…”People kept arriving until there was almost no space and then the whole mess started. There was no escape. The people surging in from behind just left the others lying and walked over them,” one of the survivors told Russian television..”About 300 people were lying here, one layer on top of another,” a policeman said “We were carrying out the top layer of people and they were still alive. Those in the bottom layer were either dead or injured.” Two policemen were caught in the crush and also died as they tried to rescue those who had fallen…More than 150 people were taken to 10 hospitals in Minsk as doctors battled through the night to save the lives of the victims in the tragedy. In his speech president Lukashenko said “There is nobody to blame, there is no one to make a claim to, it happened because it happened, even if there was anybody responsible it was the rain that caused the disaster.”

Katrina relief

The New Neo Posted on by

I’ve not posted on the tragedy that is post-Katrina New Orleans because so many others are already doing the job so well. But I don’t want to ignore it, either. The grief and fear the city and its survivors–both rescued and as-yet unrescued–are enduring right now is horrific, the heroism of the relief workers admirable. I hope, as I think all do, that everyone is evacuated safely who needs to be, and that the death toll does not rise any more.

If any of you don’t have a favorite blog or other source of information for Katrina updates, I suggest Michelle Malkin, who is doing an excellent and very thorough job.

Instapundit is organizing a blogburst today, in which each blogger chooses a charity to recommend for Katrina relief donations. All of the charities on Instapundit’s list are worthy, but I’ll suggest the tried and true Salvation Army. They’ve been doing good deeds for over a hundred years now, and one of their smallest and least important recent good deeds was to quietly and efficiently send a truck to my home last time I moved and take a whole load of goods away, to be recycled to help others. Their webpage offers a variety of easy ways to donate to Katrina relief.