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Message: [QUOTE="SWC75, post: 1031296, member: 289"] [url]http://syracusefan.com/threads/hillsborough-disaster-25th-anniversary.74258/[/url] I remember shortly after Hillsborough I attended the 114/23/89 West Virginia football game, (a last minute 17-24 loss). I walked from the Dome to College Place to Pick up the shuttle bus to Manley, the guides were telling people that the Manley buses were to the left and Skytop to the right- the opposite of the normal set-up up. I went left into the concrete culvert in front of the School of Architecture. The guides then realized they had made a mistake and directed Manley people to the right and Skytop to the left. In that narrow culvert, people were entering form both ways and those of us in the middle were getting sandwiched together. It was impossible not to think of Hillsborough. i realized that if anybody panicked, people might fall and get hurt. By the side of the culvert there was a single chain fence. I wedged my way out and ducked under it, (almost getting run over by a bus. But I got back to where I needed to be. The psychology of crowds and the proper design of public places is an interesting topic that needs to be thoroughly studied. As I said in the linked thread, it's amazing that the horrendous Bradford City fire four years earlier resulted in 56 deaths and the Hillsborough tragedy, which is just people moving forward to see a sporting event, (not panicked people running away from something), killed 96 people. I agree that poor design and official incompetence certainly played a role but it's till amazing that a crowd would mindlessly surge forward in such a way that anybody would be killed, much less 96 people. It is worth noting that in the Bradford City clip you see people climibing over the wall to escape the fire, something they could not have done at Hillsborough. The Bradford City fire also was due to official incompetence. It was a wooden structure with open stands. People had a habit of letting refuse fall from under their seat to the open area below the stands, (or even tossing it there). The people in charge of the arena had been ordered to pick up the pile of trash under the stands but it had not been done, in part because the entire place was being rebuilt with steel and concrete- this was the last game in front of the old wooden stand and the materials for building the replacement were sitting outside the arena. Somebody dropped a cigarette butt or a used match below the stands. The trash caught fire and the whole thing went up in flames within a few minutes. If they'd cleaned the place out regularly, nothing would have happened and 56 people would have gone home that night. [/QUOTE]

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