Look out, bunny! Ryan and Caitlin go crazy at the Lindt Chocolate Museum, Cologne
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Germany. Show all posts
Thursday, July 13, 2017
Saturday, May 6, 2017
The Love Parade disaster
Love Parade disaster
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Date 24 July 2010
Location Duisburg, Germany
Deaths 21
Non-fatal injuries 500
On 24 July 2010, a crowd disaster at the 2010 Love Parade electronic dance music festival in Duisburg, North Rhine-Westphalia, Germany, caused the death of 21 people from suffocation. At least 500 more were injured.
With the slogan "The Art of Love", the event was one of the program elements of RUHR.2010, an effort to highlight cultural events in the Ruhr area, one of 2010's European Capitals of Culture.
The atmosphere was explosive. Many in the crowd seemed to be intoxicated. When people started falling off the stairs and pulling others with them, it became just chaotic. They just couldn't be stopped. It was a living hell.
— Eyewitness police officer
I will never forget the sight. There were all these twisted-up bodies of those who had been crushed. They were lying at the tunnel exit. Their faces had all turned blue.
— Eyewitness woman trapped in tunnel
Bruce Cullen of Parker, Colorado and founder of Trance Elements, a LoveParade artist/performer on float number 7 - "The Ship of Fools", mentioned that he and other performers were concerned before the event that there would be problems, stating "we all said it seems like this is not going to work". Although Cullen did not witness the actual event, he stated: "These guys didn't have this planned out right", "They didn't have enough police at the entrances in that tunnel. I am just really upset because people died. Everybody was there to have fun".
As a consequence of the disaster, the organizer of the festival announced that no further Love Parades would be held and that the festival was permanently cancelled. Criminal charges were brought against ten employees of the city of Duisburg and of the company that organized the event, but eventually rejected by the court due to the prosecutors' failure to establish evidence for the alleged acts of negligence and their causal connection to the deaths.
Assigning the blame
None of the involved organizations or officials took the blame for the disaster by 29 July. Instead, the involved parties issued several statements accusing each other in a circular manner:
On 26 July, Rainer Schaller, organiser of the festival, accused the police of mistakes in crowd control, which he claims led to the disaster.
On 28 July, the interior minister of North Rhine-Westphalia rejected this and assigned all the blame to Schaller, his company Lopavent, their security concept and the festival personnel.
Related Disasters/Phenomena
Hillsborough Disaster
Heysel Stadium disaster
1971 Ibrox disaster
Luzhniki disaster
Burnden Park disaster
Lan Kwai Fong disaster
Roskilde Festival accident
1979 The Who concert disaster
Big Day Out mosh pit death
Herd behaviour
Crowd control
Asphyxia
BLOGGER'S LAMENT: I decided to make this into a sort of gif -based essay, with a little help from Wikipedia. It stuns me how many times people have been trampled to death and even asphyxiated in a standing position from the horrific result of gross overcrowding: a phenomenon known as "crowd crush". This term has largely replaced "stampede" as a more accurate way of describing the horrors that ensue when a densely-packed crowd of human beings implodes.
For decades, this sort of fatal collapse of order was blamed on "hooliganism", particularly at British soccer matches where the outcome of games matters more than life - but also at huge rock concert events where all the spectators are assumed to be drunk, stoned and rowdy. But mere rowdyness is rarely the central, fatal issue. Again and again as I researched this, I read about tremendous numbers of people, even more than a million, being crammed into a venue designed for only 200,000. I heard of exits blocked for police convenience, fences erected in the wrong place for crowd control, tens of thousands being directed into small pedestrian tunnels, and gates carelessly opened to relieve crowd pressure which then allow thousands and thousands more people to flood in. With this sort of atrocious non-planning going on, disaster is nearly inevitable.
A crowd crush is like cement blocks pressing in full-force on every side. Personal space is non-existent, and violent jostling uncontrollable. If the crowd pushes forward, so do you. You have no choice. The mass of humanity becomes a single living organism, an alive thing with a hive mind.
But what makes me quail - what makes my guts creep with squeamishness - are the shock waves that surge through hundreds of thousands of crammed-together human beings. These do not look anything like the innocuous, cheerful "crowd wave" which we used to see across rows of bleachers. It's more like a climate-change-driven monster relentlessly gathering force, a human tsunami which the individual is powerless to resist.
The five gifs above, which I made from a video of an Australian rock concert (though I cannot find any information about it) are an especially hair-raising example. We see huge, stomach-dropping crowd surges, seething motion in every direction, wild arm- flails, and the entire crowd jumping up and down in unison. There is even a chilling "sieg heil" salute that shoots up as if by some secret signal.
This utter uniformity (which reminds me of some other culture/regime, for some reason) makes a kind of sense. Everyone HAS to do what everyone else is doing, or die as a result. It's some sort of definition of fascism.
So what would happen if one - only one person tripped and fell in this scenario? Almost certain death, as the people behind him or her would not be able to stop themselves from falling into the hole. This would lead to ever more tripping and falling until crushed and asphyxiated bodies are stacked up in a deadly pile.
When I look at these gifs and the seasick feeling they give me, and the ineffectual row of security guards standing still at the edge of the stage, I think: what on earth would they do if something went wrong? What if there were a mass panic and a true stampede, with people unable to see or find their way out? You don't need a fire breaking out for the worst to happen.
Some attempts have been made to redesign stadiums and concert halls to prevent these horrors, but many sports officials and impresarios seem to think they're just a necessary risk, collateral damage for important events. The underlying feeling is that the possibility of disaster just adds to the excitement.
The most horrific crowd crush incidents have been in the Third World, usually in massive religious processions involving millions of people, where rickety bridges have collapsed and inadequately small tunnels caved in. Over 800 people died in one of these. I can't even let my mind go there.
Humans are clever enough - aren't they? - to prevent this shit, or at least make it less and less likely. Yet it keeps on happening, being dismissed as the result of "drunken hooligans out of control". I cannot think of anything worse than being crushed to death, because death often comes very slowly. It's worse even than drowning, which many describe as "the worst way to die". Some even end up brain-damaged and vegetative for the rest of their lives. It is too much even to contemplate.
Thursday, September 25, 2014
Enchanted (haunted?) dolls
I have yet to see any really decent video of Siegfried's Museum of Mechanical Musical Instruments in Rudesheim, Germany. It looks like a fascinating place, with over 350 examples of antique self-playing instruments, some going back over 200 years, but all the videos are shot by tourists, raw footage unedited, with priorities that simply baffle me. Most linger for several minutes on a hideous thing that plays six out-of-tune violins at once, and a not-very-old gramophone playing Doris Day singing Que Sera, Sera while everyone sways and sings along with misty eyes. All the items in the videos follow a certain sequence, so obviously this is an organized, preset tour, and only a few instruments are playable; most are probably too frail with age, which is too bad because the wheezy, sometimes off-pitch sound is definitely the best part.
But I'm quiffed at one thing. (Is that a word?) Squicked, too, but that's something I want. The last exhibit is simply spectacular, an automaton orchestrion unlike anything ever made before. And I really can't show it to you unless I post a very lousy video that only shows it from one side. The tourists all seem to wander away from this, uninterested, when it is by far the most fascinating and rare piece in the collection (which is doubtless why they save it 'til last). I don't know how many figures there are in this, but I think it's around 30, and they are each playing a musical instrument in jerky fashion while wheezy, creepy, circus-y music plays in the background. Just my cup of tea! But the fact that nobody seems to realize what a spectacle this is means no one has ever properly video'd it. You get, at best, 30 seconds shot from an extreme angle, or an annoyingly bobbing-up-and-down shot over a lot of bald heads, or the glare of the glass cabinet. I can't edit YouTube videos, and for once a gif just won't do it, so all I can do is. . . oh I don't want to do this!! But here it is. I'll explain later. . .
I wish there were a way to shorten or otherwise edit the boring parts, and take a decent shot panning this amazing, one-of-a-kind work of art character-by-character. As I will show you in the totally-inadequate stills, not all the figures are human, adding an extra dimension of creepiness to the thing.
What amazes me right away is what good shape these are in. They must have been extremely carefully-protected from dust, sunlight, dampness, over-dryness, and anything else that would bleach out colours and shrivel up fabric.
The automaton/orchestrion was created by one Bernhard Dufner, and so far I can't even find a date because there is NEVER any information on YouTube with the videos! This whole subject is thinly-documented, though there are many dry lists and catalogue numbers on lousy old sites that haven't been updated in 10 years, with links that don't work worth a hoot. With no photos or videos, these are obviously meant only for those auction-obsessed collectors who are trying to fill an abyss within.
The cabinet itself is exquisite, as is shown by long shots which seem to dwarf the creepy, crazy, magnificent dolls within. It's a pity we can't see each doll in closeup and even handle it. Come to that, I don't think I'd want to handle a gorilla in a dress. But here is where National Geographic needs to get in there and take extreme closeups of these things, because they are truly remarkable.
And creepy.
Dear God, I hope these are gorillas and not some hideous representation of black people! If it matches the caricatures of the day, it might be, rendering it even more creepy.
A long shot of the cabinet. Can you smell the old wood? Who was this made for? I must at least try to dig out some information. Imagine having this taking up half your living room. And wouldn't it be fascinating (another National Geographic special!) to see the workings of the thing, to take off the back and peer in? Imagine the feat of engineering that brought this into being.
And here he is, Siegfried, master of the House of Creepy Magic, looking just as strange and Gandalf-like as you would expect him to be. He didn't create any of these bizarre instruments, but merely presides over it all. Never mind, watch the video, start it at 2:12 and watch to the end. And try to image what it's really like.
Blogger's P. S.: a big aha, but at the same time a depressingly small one: I found a journal of mechanical instruments, music boxes and stuff, and the list of articles went back to 1978. Obviously I couldn't/wouldn't read the whole thing, but after some sifting I found the name of Bernhard Dufner. He was not at all who I thought he was: an American, for one thing, working in the late 1800s when these contraptions were at their peak of popularity. (Imagine how business must have fallen off with the invention of the phonograph, not to mention photography and motion pictures.)
So his magnificent moving-doll orchestrion was likely built towards the end of the 19th century, though the costumes look baroque. It explains the still-vibrant colors, when fabric dyes had become much brighter and more stable. One wonders if the style of clothing was intentional, a way of "antique-ing" the thing to look more valuable than it really was. And what was he doing in Buffalo, New York, if he did such fine, European-standards work? Or was it some other Buffalo? The article, with its flyspeck type, was in PNG and not reproduceable, so I literally had to print this, scan and crop it. But it looks mighty handsome, doesn't it? Dufner is still pretty obscure, and Google searches netted me exactly nothing. But he did produce one strikingly original piece, still exhibited 150 years later on the other side of the world. The story is so unlikely that it could only be true.
Dear Sir or Madam, will you read my book
It took me years to write, will you take a look
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