re: #70 lawhawk

The site has not been engineered in the slightest. It was a disaster waiting to happen with the right series of circumstances, and officials knew that there were risks here.

In so many ways, it’s not unlike the periodic stampedes and deaths that occurred in places like Mecca/Medina during the Haj or other religious festivals where people come together in close quarters and some precipitating action results in a stampede.

The Saudis completely reconfigured both the Grand Mosque and the stoning of the devil locations multiple times to make them safer for people, but crowds are unpredictable, so you have to build that in as well.

I remember a similar thing happened at an AC/DC concert in Salt Lake City thirty years ago. Three teenagers died as a result of the rush to the stage during the first song and this pretty much spelled the end of general admissions and no assigned seating at concert venues here in the USA. That’s not to say the problem has gone away; in 2003, 100 people were killed in the Station nightclub fire. That was a combination of incendiary devices used in a closed environment with not enough exits when the fire started.