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Those responsible for public safety must learn from similar tragedies in the past, including the Hillsborough Disaster

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The Houston Astroworld music festival tragedy where 10 concertgoers died is a grim reminder of the vital importance of crowd control.

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It is crucial for those responsible for public safety at such events to learn from similar tragedies in the past, the definitive one being the Hillsborough Disaster on April 15, 1989 in Sheffield, England during a soccer match, which claimed the lives of 96 people.

It is seldom one mistake that causes these tragedies. It is a series of blunders that leads to them.

Here is what happened in the Hillsborough Disaster.

First, there was a prior warning that was ignored.

In 1981, eight years before the event, some fans were hospitalized with bruised ribs due to crowd rushing.

Police at the time allowed fans to sit on the perimeter of the soccer field to watch the game in order to alleviate overcrowding.

When the police indicated that had they not done so there would have been deaths, the response from the football club was that this was nonsense and no one would have died.

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The disaster in 1989 occurred during a semi-final match between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest.

Three weeks prior to the event, the police superintendent who had extensive experience in crowd control at these events, was replaced by a new superintendent who had none.

Police briefings for the event focused on how to monitor, discipline and police the crowd for offences, not crowd safety.

The open seating areas in the stadium were essentially pens with six-foot-high spiked fences separating them to prevent fans from moving between them.

The front fences were significantly higher, with spiked overhangs preventing people from getting onto the field and interrupting the game.

The command centre was the only location where those in charge of the event could see what was happening and co-ordinate with officers on the site.

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The incoming crowd was not distributed among the various entry gates as well as had been done in the past.

The standing area known as Leppings Lane was unmonitored and left open, with fans proceeding through it without any direction.

As it became increasingly crowded, police observing what was happening radioed in their concern that people were being crushed as they entered through the turnstiles.

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One officer frantically warned, for (explicative) sakes if you dont open these gates people are going to die, a reference to opening the exit gates to allow more people inside by alleviating the crush of those coming in from outside the stadium.

At eight minutes prior to kickoff an order was given for the exit gates to be opened, allowing the crowd to enter to an open, central gateway where they could see the field.

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But the authorities didnt delay the kickoff, which would normally happen in a situation like this, as people in the back of the line still trying to get into the stadium kept pushing forward, not knowing the dire situation at the front of the crowd.

They were being told to just get in.

The match proceeded as scheduled. Six minutes later it was halted by the referee, although no emergency was declared, even though many people were essentially trapped in a spiked cage with no exits.

Instead, the police were ordered to form a line halfway down the field to prevent Nottingham Forest fans from rushing the field, as they expected people would interpret the Liverpool fans doing so as hooliganism.

A pathology report would later conclude that the delayed response and the lack of an emergency declaration resulted in 41 of the 96 deaths.

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For over two decades, the public perception of what had happened, fed by the government and the media, was that the primary cause of the tragedy was drunken hooliganism by the Liverpool fans, including claims of individuals urinating on police attempting to perform CPR on those who had been crushed in the overcrowding.

But a series of subsequent investigations culminating in a high court inquest conducted from 2014 to 2016 concluded that what had actually happened was not an accident caused by the behaviour of the crowd, but an unlawful killing of 96 people caused by the negligence of those in charge of crowd control, exacerbated by the design of the stadium.

The lesson being that when people are crushed to death in a crowd, it is not always the crowds fault.

Alex Vezina is the CEO of Prepared Canada Corp. and has a graduate degree in Disaster and Emergency Management. He can be reached at info@prepared.ca

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VEZINA: The Astroworld tragedy and the importance of crowd control - Toronto Sun