Yesterday was the best football game I’ve ever been to. This is the story, from a year ago today, of the worst.
The streets of Knoxville are older
than the state of Tennessee,
so it comes as little surprise that
they are rather too narrow for the
crowds thronging them today.
Middle Drive, twenty feet across
at its widest and narrowing as it goes,
is choked with a fair fraction
of the hundred and two thousand,
four hundred and fifty-five
who are here to see the Volunteers and
boo lustily when they catch sight
of Lane Kiffin, who left Tennessee
a decade ago on terms that were...
let’s say, less than amicable.
I am one of them, taking in the sight of them,
a little uneasy, but I always am
around crowds. I lose touch with
my father for a few paces, pedestrians press in
and something rings in the back of my mind.
I was up late a night or two ago,
morbid curiosity driving me down
a macabre rabbit hole on Wikipedia.
Recountings of grim human disasters
hare through my head unbidden—
Crowd collapses and crushes
are catastrophic incidents
that can occur when a
body of people becomes
dangerously overcrowded.
...the pressure on each individual
can cause the crowd to collapse
in on itself, or become so densely
packed that the individuals are
crushed and asphyxiated.
—my eyes turn up as I run up against
somebody else in the crowd,
muttering an apology and stepping
back into the present, slipping
through to find my father again.
We walk a while in silence
and the roar of the horde around us,
then wait accompanied by small talk
in a Sisyphean line that never ever ends even
as the clock ticks closer to game time.
Finally we scan our tickets and
pass through the gates of hell
to meet another mob, impatiently
trying to fit ten or twelve abreast into
a vomitorium only six or seven feet wide.
Sirens sang those thoughts to me, I’m sure,
for certainly there is no real danger here,
it must be safe, though my heart is beating
in my ears and every shout in the stadium
makes those stuck here press harder—
If a person then falls, the support
to those around is lost, while
the pressure from those further out
still remains, causing people
to fall into the void.
—I do not see my father anymore.
I see light and my pulse rings with noise
and I run up against people on every side
involuntarily, wishing I could curl up and wait
for this Elysian madness to die down.
The only way is forward, I think in my audacity,
and I let the mass of mankind push me onward,
inching forward a step at a time, catching only
tantalizing glimpses of freedom, and I
wonder if I am getting anywhere at all,
and then I see it, a gap in the crowd growing
where it pressed in on a row of standing fans
who have fallen and are trapped beneath the
madding crowd, perhaps blind to their own plight,
perhaps too far gone now to stand firm.
The void presses towards me inexorably
and I feel suddenly all the weight of those behind
who have not yet realized the danger that
befalls them, on the brink of the abyss,
and trying desperately to throw themselves in—
Keith Still of the Fire Safety Engineering Group,
University of Greenwich, said,
‘Be aware of your surroundings. Look ahead.
Listen to the crowd noise. If you start
finding yourself in a crowd surge,
wait for the surge to come,
go with it, and move sideways.
Keep moving
with it and sideways,
with it and sideways.’
—and the last person in front of me falls forward
and flees towards the safety of a row of seats
and for half a second my racing heart stops
and I stumble and somehow set my stance
and I search for the strength to stand
and I stand fast there
for what feels like an eternity
(I figure afterwards it might be five minutes)
before a timeout comes and the stadium
begins to die down and I offer a prayer
and turn, now pressing backwards,
my small stature helping me now,
letting me sidle through disgruntled fans
who have relaxed ever so slightly for a moment,
until finally I ascend to the land of the living
and limp to a wall where I lean
for a long while, surprised to find
myself in one piece. I wonder, as
I will very often in the coming days,
how much danger I was truly in.
(A security guard plunges out of
the same fray, a woman clinging to
his back, breathing laboriously.)
And I wonder also at the fact that
of all the things to lie awake reading about
I happened to find myself
enraptured by those accounts of
those human tragedies, seeming
so easily untaught, so easy not to
know what to do when you must do it—
While reports often talk of ‘panic’,
research has found that mass panic
is rare; on the contrary, people
continue to help each other
at the risk of their lives.
Quotes in italics were selected from the Wikipedia articles ‘Crowd collapses and crushes’ (stanzas 6-7, 12, and 17-18) and ‘Stampede’ (stanza 25).