Reading the Room: Fire, Crowds, and the Night You Didn’t Plan For

Lance: Just before midnight on July 12, 2026, a band was playing at a crowded music bar in Bangkok, Thailand when smoke appeared near the stage. The likely cause was an electrical short in a ceiling air conditioner, but what made it deadly was everything the fire found to burn. Acoustic foam, plastic decorations, and a canopy of artificial trees and flowers installed across the ceiling. It ignited almost instantly, and the smoke filled the room with carbon monoxide and cyanide gas. Most of the crowd pushed toward the one exit they knew, the front door they had come in through. Video from the street shows what happened next. A horizontal jet of flame blowing through the entrance and into the road. Others turned toward the exits. Some were by stacked tables and beer crates. One had been bolted shut. That’s where the rescuers found many of the dead, and others never made it out of the bathroom. More than 30 people died. 75 were injured, many of them critically. The bar had passed a safety inspection three months before it burned, but it wasn’t the right inspection. A zoning loophole allowed the venue to bypass stricter safety regulations. Six months earlier, on New Year’s Eve, the ceiling of a bar in the Swiss Ski Resort of Crans-Montana caught fire and killed 41 people. Same flammable foam overhead, same locked secondary exits. A room like that can turn in less time than it takes to decide whether or not the smoke is part of the show, and when it turns, it takes your choices with which means the most useful moment is the one before. Before the lights go down, while you can still look around and ask what kind of room you’ve walked into, and whether the people running it have any idea of what they’re doing. For a good stretch of my professional life, I produced large-scale live events. Big rooms, big crowds, where the decisions that keep everyone safe get made quietly, weeks earlier, by people the audience will never see. I ran one event for a crowd that was politically loud, culturally mixed, and let’s say, emotionally variable. I wanted magnetometers at every entrance. Someone else wanted to save money. Metal detectors are expensive, they slow the line, and they make the front door feel like an airport. And I said no, and I remember exactly how I argued it. Imagine how that’s going to look on the news. It often comes down to one person, somewhere in the chain, making a call that seems small at the time. A precaution added, a precaution dropped, a disaster averted, or chaos allowed through. A room that is genuinely safe, and a room that is one bad minute away from the news, can look exactly the same. If you can’t see the decisions, you need tells. Which brings me to the smartest version of that idea the business has ever produced. Someone figured out how to make one of those invisible decisions visible. It came from a rock band, and it came down to a single piece of candy. No one is coming. Reading the room. Act One. The Brown M&M’s. If you were alive in the early 1980s, you know Van Halen. If you weren’t, here’s what you missed. David Lee Roth, Eddie Van Halen, Spandex, hair that required more hair spray than a back pageant winner, a guitar sound that genuinely redefined the genre, and a larger-than-life frontman. Their live show was something else entirely. This wasn’t four guys on a stage with some lights. Van Halen built environments, massive rigging systems, custom lighting rigs, pyrotechnics that would make a film crew nervous, and at the center of it, David Lee Roth. Suspended on a wire, launched over the crowd, completely in his element. Van Halen wanted to take it everywhere. Venues that had never seen anything like what was about to roll through the loading dock. Nine 18-wheelers of gear into places built for three. Floors that couldn’t take the weight of the stage itself. And electrical systems that would fail under the load. The contract rider was 53 pages long. Amperage specs, load-bearing requirements, voltage sockets. The kind of document that only worked if someone actually read it. David Lee Roth needed a way to know the moment he walked backstage whether the people running the venue had read all 53 pages. So he buried a test in the middle of them. So in the middle of a huge contract rider, keeping in mind that most rock and roll bands

David Lee Roth: had a contract rider was like a pamphlet. We had one that was like the Chinese phone book. It was huge. And in the very middle of it, I had them place a clause that just out of the middle of nowhere, it would say, for example, there will be 12 amper high voltage sockets placed at 15 foot intervals, not to exceed the load bearing, et cetera, et cetera. And then just there will be no brown M&Ms in the backstage area or the promoter will forfeit the show at full price. What was the point? If I came backstage, having been one of the architects of this lighting and staging design and I saw brown M&Ms on the catering table, then guaranteed the promoter had not read the contract rider and we had to do a serious line because frequently we had danger issues. Visible sloppiness that exposed the invisible.

Lance: That’s a tell. And once you understand the idea, you start noticing tells everywhere. Daniel Farren has spent years inspecting concerts and special events for the Phoenix Fire Department. His job is to look at a production plan and find the detail that told him whether the people behind it were serious. Sometimes they told him themselves. But I’ll give you one more example of that that set me off. As soon as I walk,

Dan Farren: I’m working. We’re going to show at a large outdoor arena or amphitheater. And I walk up and immediately the pyrotechnics guy meets me on the dock before we even make it up to the stage. And he gets there. He’s like, Hey, tour manager wants to move pyrotechnics. So it’s give your set distances from approximate audience. Minimum is 15 feet approximate audience. Anything closer than that. You’re risking someone getting injured or losing limb, getting burned, death, whatever it is. So it’s very strict. First thing he says to me is, hey, they want to know if they can put the pyro at 10 feet instead of 15 feet so they can add more people in the pit. And I said, absolutely not. And he says to me, he goes, well, I had to ask. I said, so you asked this in every single city you go to. And he’s like, yeah, I said, you’re just running the numbers, rolling the dice. Hopefully you’ll run into a city where the fire marshal doesn’t know the rules. And he’s like, pretty much. And he goes, it’s not for me. And I said, no, you brought it to my attention. He said, it’s the tour manager. They want to add more people in. So they’re completely disregarding safety to make more money. The request was the tell. And Dan had seen others. A venue without

Lance: the second exit required for the number of people inside it. What I run into is people like

Dan Farren: to put up, to control the crowd is put up signage that says not an exit. So they put up a sign that says not an exit. And right above that is an exit sign. So what that does is, hey, there’s an emergency. You’re going to that exit. As soon as you get to that exit, read not an exit. You don’t know what’s on the other side. So you’re immediately like, it says not an exit. I can’t go out there. Because you know, like, is there a pit of crocodiles on the other side? Putting not an exit, it’s weird how your brain works like that. Because you see exit and then you read not an exit. So I piece out, yeah, I’ll make that food for crocodiles. We’ll get that done. Sometimes the tell is already the failure.

Lance: A locked secondary exit isn’t a warning that the safety system might be weak. One of its basic protections is already gone. Put that besides combustible foam and open flame, and now the room is carrying more than one known hazard. The deck is being stacked against people who have no idea any of those decisions were made. Act two, we’ve seen this fire before. Acoustic foam is cheap, light and easy to install. Clubs use it to control echo, keep music from bleeding into the neighborhood and head off complaints that can shut down a venue. But when the foam is untreated polyurethane, it can spark into a fast moving fire and turn the air into a toxic gaseous soup of cyanide and carbon monoxide. Over the past 26 years, acoustic foam has been implicated in around 40 major venue fires, killing more than a thousand people worldwide. The station was a single story wooden roadhouse that had been a gin mill, a restaurant and finally a nightclub. On February 20th, 2003, 462 people packed in to see Great White, a band a couple of decades past its arena years, now playing rooms small enough to reach out and touch the crowd. What happened over the few minutes became one of the most studied disasters in American fire safety, because a camera inside the club recorded exactly how fast a room like this can kill. Almost everything that made it lethal had been decided long before the doors opened. Behind the stage, acoustic foam covered the walls and ceiling. It had been installed after neighbors complained about noise. It was not fire retardant. At 1107 p.m., the band began its first song. A tour manager at the back of the stage activated four pyrotechnic devices. They ignited the foam almost immediately. At first, some people kept watching, unaware of what they were seeing. At 30 seconds, the band stopped playing and most of the crowd began trying to leave. Within about a minute, the stage area reached flash over, the point when accumulated heat causes exposed material across a room to ignite almost simultaneously. The room itself was burning. Before 90 seconds had passed, smoke had banked down through the room and people converging on the main entrance had become trapped in the narrow vestibule. 90 seconds. That was the time between people still deciding whether the fire was part of the The station had four exits, but most of the people inside moved toward the one they knew, the entrance they had used only minutes earlier. A secondary exit near the stage led through the band’s backstage area. Security initially prevented patrons from using it. That rule protected the performers during an ordinary show. Once the room was burning, it became another decision working against the people inside. 100 people died. When you look at like the station fire, right, that’s got to be at the top of one of the worst nightclub fires in the history of this country, right? Do you guys learn that when you go through

Dan Farren: training? So I’ve actually done classes on that for, for like, so the Phoenix Suns, like the Suns arena, get for them for where the chase field with diamondbacks play. I did classes on this, not so they’re going to learn everything they need to know, because that’s not going to happen for their staff, but it’s more to emphasize how important, how serious this is. Things that you don’t think are serious, like keeping, you know, your back corridors, keeping them the minimum width, keeping them clear, not having road cases stacked up or blocking. Those things are important, even though you’re like, you don’t think about it, because if things go sideways, that’s where that’s how people are going to get out. That’s the same. We have to make these paths clear so they can get Great seconds matter. Absolutely. Yeah, it was extremely fast. And you think about this, you know, if you’ve watched the video on there, absolutely brutal.

Lance: Once by the time the ceiling caught fire at the Constellation club in Crans-Montana, and then again in Bangkok six months later. This was not an obscure risk or an unforeseeable combination of circumstances. It was a known sequence with a body count. Not one of those club owners wanted this to happen. They wanted cheaper soundproofing and a door no one could through. Neither decisions felt like life or death. Fire usually announces itself. There’s smoke, heat, flame, something visible to move away from. But not every dangerous room gives you that kind of warning. Some hazards build quietly out of the simple fact that thousands of people are sharing the same space. Crowd pressure can lethal while the room still looks like a good time. On April 15, 1989, thousands of football supporters arrived at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, for an FA Cup semi-final between Liverpool and Nottingham Forest. Outside the stadium, a dangerous bottleneck was forming as kickoff approached. Police opened a large exit gate to relieve the pressure. But the route beyond it led through a tunnel and directly into two standing pens behind the goal that were already dangerously full. No one closed the tunnel or redirected the arriving supporters into the less crowded pens on either side. People at the front were crushed against perimeter fencing while those arriving behind them could not see what was happening ahead. Many of the injured were still upright. Minutes after kickoff, a barrier inside the pen gave way. By the time the match was stopped, people had already been suffocating. 97 people died. At some point, the people inside a crowd stop being individuals who can decide where to go. The crowd dynamics begin making decisions for them. The Hillsborough incident changed stadium design and helped the modern field of crowd science. Dr. Keith Still is one of the world’s leading experts on crowd safety, crowd dynamics, and a pioneer in the science of it all. He has spent more than 30 years studying how crowds move through stadiums, festivals, and public spaces. The first thing Keith wants people to understand is that you don’t need tens of thousands of people for crowd pressure to become lethal. How quickly crowd density, that’s the number of people per square meter or per

G. Keith Still: yard, how quickly that can become life-threatening. Also, the perception is, well, it’s only huge crowds that have problems. But no, I’m in a crowd of 600 people, a case that I’m dealing with just now, three kids suffocated, a compressive of six here, in just a queue of 600. So it’s understanding how pressure builds up and why in that type of environment, none of the individuals want to give up their place in the queue. And therefore, slow and gradual pressure can build up and before you realize it, people are no longer able to breathe. I mean, it’s a challenge handy, I think of the phrase called boiling frogs. You know, you put some frogs in a pan of hot water and they’ll jump out, but you raise the temperature slowly and before they realize it, they’re boiling, you know, they’re dead. At high density, bodies are pressed so tightly together that the chest can no longer expand.

Lance: A person can remain upright and still suffocate from compressive asphyxia. The force may not come from anyone immediately besides them. Pressure enters the crowd somewhere else and travels through it. People can be carried, turned or pinned by movement they did not choose and cannot resist. A venue may be within its legal capacity while one entrance, barrier or section near the stage becomes dangerously dense. The total number of people in the building does not tell you what’s happening inside of one small part of it. What’s interesting is that crowd risks are dynamic in nature, they’re constantly changing. You know, the crowd’s constantly moving around. You know, you’ve got three fundamental phases of crowd movement to any event. Ingress, getting in circulation, moving around and then egress, leaving it. There’s three different behaviors. A doorway that works while people arrive gradually may fail when everyone tries to leave at once. A crowd near a stage can become dangerously compressed while there’s still plenty of open space a few feet away. Professionals are supposed to spot those changes before the crowd does. Where the movement is slowing, pressure is building or people are still arriving into a space that has stopped moving. The people inside generally cannot see any of that. The unfortunate thing is if you go to a concert there’s a sort of assumption that somebody’s planned it and that you know if you’ve got a ticket for a specific area then somebody’s

G. Keith Still: actually done the calculations and you should be safe. Most members of the public have no

Lance: idea of the potential risks because it’s part of what the venue should be organizing. You bought a ticket to see a band not to calculate flow rates through a doorway. You should not need to know how many people per square meter can safely stand in front of a stage, whether a barrier has enough exits or what cameras in the control room are showing. Unfortunately most people when they’re in that situation when it’s high density then can’t move, can’t get out of it. So situational awareness before you go into those spaces. Fire takes away time. A crush takes away movement and choices. The point of knowing what to look for is not to spend the night waiting for disaster. It’s to make a few decisions before the room becomes the worst possible place to try to make them. Because in an emergency knowledge can buy you time and time can save your life. Knowing what crowd pressure does to the body is useful but only while you can still make a choice. That leaves a different problem. Recognizing the moment when an ordinary night may be turning into something else. Dr. Kayley Estes studies how people make sense of danger while it is still unfolding. Her work focuses on collective trauma, risk perception, and the complicated stretch of time before people know exactly what they are seeing.

Kayley Estes: So you want to gather more information, right? Almost no emergency starts with a very clear unambiguous cue. And for the most part you have to kind of gather more information, you kind of pause and understand, but you don’t ignore that cue either. You try, you don’t say, oh okay, that’s probably nothing. You have to gather the information, see if other people are reacting, see if eventually especially like event staff are reacting, and then go from there.

Lance: The problem is is that the evidence available to you often comes from other people who are trying to answer the same question. In 1968, social psychologists Bibb Latané and John Darley

Kayley Estes: ran a series of experiments testing how social cues shape our response to danger. Latané and Darley’s experiment where they just slowly fill the room with smoke to see if people would report it. And when people were alone, the large majority reported the smoke. But when others are present who were not reacting, so they’re kind of told to stay calm. That dropped to barely anybody was reporting it. So this is something called pluralistic ignorance, which is very hard for me to say. And basically in ambiguous situations, we look to others to gauge how they reacted. Like everyone else is calm is evidence that there’s nothing to worry about. So with this pluralistic ignorance, it can cause people to publicly conform to a perceived majority. So if everyone else is calm, okay, nothing’s wrong, I’m also calm, right? And breaking that perceived majority is socially costly in ways that may feel very immediate. So the threshold to be willing to act first, to potentially look foolish, to disrupt the shared calm environment, that threshold is genuinely different for different people. But the cost of acting is immediate and very public and it might be on fine forever, especially if the person acting misread the situation. And all of this is

Lance: happening in a room designed to make you pay attention to everything else. Steve Adelman is the head of Adelman Law Group and director of event safety for the International Festivals and Events Association. He also co-founded the Event Safety Alliance, one of the field’s best known safety organizations. He served as an expert in several noteworthy cases, including the Indiana State Fair stage collapse and the Astroworld crowd crush, which is why he asking an audience to remain continuously alert misses something fundamental about what a live event is for. Entertainment events are precisely set up to soak up our attention. It’s supposed

Steven A. Adelman: to be different. It’s supposed to make us feel different. It’s supposed to change our attention. Everything that is the most fun about going to events makes it hard for us to be good first responders. That is simply the reality. I’ll be just like everyone else. And what that reminds me is normal people going to events have the deck enormously stacked against them if we expect them to very quickly see something and then say something. We don’t. We don’t see something and consequently we don’t say something. When people do notice something, they actually don’t

Lance: become the screaming or rational mob that appears in disaster movies. More often, they remain where they are while still trying to work out what happened, where the danger is, and which direction might actually be safer. It’s called milling. They mill around in a circle because

Steven A. Adelman: they don’t know what they’re dealing with. They will move when they’re given clear instruction and so that puts a real emphasis just like this entire discussion on there being just enough trained staff who won’t be absorbed in all the pretty lights and fun noise and the lighting effects and you know all the other attractions because they’ll be the grown-up in

Lance: the room. That need for clear information matters because the evidence suggests people are far more capable in emergencies than the myth of panic gives them credit for. Dr. Baruch Fischoff is one of the foundational figures in the science of how people understand risk and make decisions under uncertainty. He is a university professor at Carnegie Mellon and has spent decades advising institutions on how to communicate risk when the stakes are high and the answers are incomplete. The sociologists who study behavior in emergency situations find that panic is very rare. Feeling panicky is probably very common but for people to be panicky in the sense of doing things that are completely irrational or

Baruch Fischhoff: abandoning loved ones in a difficult situation it rarely happens. The evacuation from the World Trade Center under unimaginable conditions exceeded theoretical limits. There was just less friction under those situations. People were just more cooperative and people did the best they could under a horrible situation. In situations that are ambiguous we naturally look to other people for social cues and the social cues in a dangerous situation could be is this really a dangerous situation and then what do I do. It helps a lot if there happens to be somebody in the situation who’s trained and can both say this is dangerous and we have to do something. If you know what to do you you know you’re more likely to be in a position to be able to act on it and to not have a feeling of helplessness.

Lance: That matters because stories about disaster tend to focus on failures. The spectacular mistake becomes the story and those countless ordinary decisions through which people cooperate adapt and muddled through mostly disappear. People will hesitate. They will look to one another. They may wait for answers that never come. That’s not a flaw a safety plan gets to complain about afterward. A competent system does not require the audience to diagnose the emergency. It puts trained people in position to act early give clear instructions and starts moving people before the lack of clarity becomes part of the danger. A crowd may be far more capable than the myth of panic suggests. The question is whether the people responsible for all of it have built a system worthy of that capability. Act five the duty of care. When someone sells you a ticket they take responsibility for the safety of the

G. Keith Still: room. You should still know where the exits are but it’s their job to make sure you can reach them. I’m there to enjoy myself. I’m there to enjoy the concept. You know I don’t understand what else is going on. I’m assuming that you know you’ve created a safe environment. Why? Because I bought a ticket. The professionals need to be taught about it in order to keep the environment safe because the public will not understand. So it’s very difficult to communicate to the public what that risk is but it’s very easy to train professionals to do it. Can we make the public more aware of those risks? No that’s not where the liability should lie. It should be down to the professional standards, the venue design, the performers understanding things and it’s their duty of care to keep that environment safe. If I understand what can go wrong in a crowd I know what to look for but if I’ve never had that training then the first time I’ll realize there’s a major incident is after be hot or worse. I have pretty strong views about personal responsibility.

Lance: Steve Adelman sees the balance a little differently. As just a regular civilian trying

Steven A. Adelman: to go out and have a good time you can’t you can’t surrender that much of your agency anymore like you just can’t it’s unwise. So those are two different statements you you can’t and it’s unwise. Let’s unpack those. You can. I mean people do. They will. Literally before we started recording I was working on a case involving an electronic dance music festival. At EDM festivals there are people who are on hallucinogens who are out of their minds. Their ability to attend to their own safety is virtually zero. They can do that. That is a choice that they make willingly and they do so foreseeably. What that means is the organizers of in this case EDM festivals have a heightened duty of care because in exchange for taking the money of people who would go to EDM festivals they have to provide safety that is commensurate. With that demographic if you know that people are going to be on whatever hallucinogen they prefer you have to provide an environment which is safe for people on that hallucinogen. That’s the trade-off and if you you know if an event organizer is not up for that trade-off don’t take the money don’t hold the event. It’s really that simple. Organizers know the event they’re producing

Lance: and the behavior that comes with it. Duty of care means planning for that not blaming the audience afterward. The Electric Daisy Carnival is a three-night electronic dance music festival held at the Las Vegas Motor Speedway. Each night roughly 165,000 people move through enormous stages, carnival rides, fireworks, and enough light to make the Las Vegas Strip seem restrained. Martin Casillas has spent 25 years as a fire inspector with the Clark County Fire Department which means his territory includes the Las Vegas Strip. In Vegas spectacle is the business model. Martin’s job is to make sure the spectacle does not outrun the safety plan and that includes the EDC. We start meetings almost a year before the events start so we can start discussing what the fire techniques are going to be or the stage locations

Martin Casillas: permitting it to get. So there’s meetings that are being held way in advance and they have to submit a permit to Clark County to be able to do fire techniques. Our plan is to use the fire techniques and the inspector then goes back into plans that have been approved and confirms that fire techniques are being approved and used and then we’re there. The fire company wants to use 300 comments but due to the size of the venue or the fact that we don’t have the fallout zone comments we have to reduce it to 150. The negotiation that made it safe stays invisible so does the repetition behind it, the walkthroughs, the corrections, the practice that makes the right response automatic. So I have events and I do a quarterly walkthrough with the nightclubs and the lounges and explain what the exit that tray or that part where it needs to go because it’s too late when something occurs and the alarms are going off and you have to exit. You can’t move that part out. You’ve got thousands of people going out to speak. So I think it’s just practice right? That’s the most important thing to do. The Cosmo had a fire. Marquis Hall was occupying the top. I did quarterly inspections or training with them every quarter so we could practice their exiting the public. I talked to the security director at the Marquis and they called me and said everybody’s out of the Marquis day club. We’re downstairs in our safe zone within eight minutes from eight stores. So they communicate to the fire chief who was in charge of the scene. Don’t have to worry about telling him to get to Marquis. Marquis is empty. Why is that?

Lance: Because they practice right? If you get practice and practice it gets boring but it’s become

Martin Casillas: second nature. That’s what competent safety work protects. The freedom to lose yourself in the night while someone else keeps track of the weather, the crowd, the pyrotechnics, and the ways out. Most unsafe decisions don’t produce an immediate disaster. An exit is blocked and no one needs it. A crowd becomes compressed and then disperses. Or a production operates without enough staff and everyone still goes home. When that happens often enough the absence of consequences can begin to feel like evidence that the decisions were safe. So we’ve also got two key elements to stick on the psychology. One is what’s called conditional bias. Because I’ve never come to harm in doing xyz it feels safe. And that happens both from the professional perspective. I’ve run a thousand events. Nobody’s died. I must be good at my job. And also from the public’s perspective I’ve been a thousand concerts. I’ve been squished up at different bruises. I’ve never died therefore it’s safe. And I’ll take aviation as an example. Imagine you’re flying an aircraft you’ve got a near miss. That gets reported. A team of investigators come in. A team of pilots come in. They understand what went wrong and a new procedure is out and that goes out globally. In live events a close call can disappear into loadout. The show finished. Nobody died. On to the next city. So the normalization of deviance in the context of Challenger falling out of the sky had to do with the o-rings which were insulators. And the gist of it is NASA was well aware that the o-rings had failed repeatedly in tests and in prior flights of the shuttle. But nothing bad ever happened. Nothing ever fell out of the sky before. And so NASA figured out that the deviance, meaning the o-rings repeated failure to meet specifications, that was the deviance from standards, the deviance didn’t matter. And so NASA normalized the deviance by saying well you know this o-ring failed but the test is good. They became tolerant of that failure because nothing bad ever really happened. Obviously until it did and then seven people died. It creates a risk and the whole point of risk is that’s a clue that something is wrong and we should try to mitigate the risk. That’s what one does with risk is you try to mitigate it because if you don’t nothing will happen. Nothing will happen. Nothing will happen until something happens.

Lance: This is how the gap opens between the duty of care on paper and the room you actually walk into. People cut corners. They get tired, understaffed, over budget. A shortcut works once then twice then often enough to stop feeling like a shortcut at all. The people running the event still have the responsibility but having the responsibility does not mean they will get it right. Act seven. While you still have a choice, none of that transfers the duty of care to you. If a venue overcrowds a room or ignores a known hazard that failure belongs to them. But responsibility and consequence are not the same thing. The venue can be entirely at fault and you can still be the person standing in the room when the consequences arrive which is why knowing what to look for still matters. A brown M&M is not proof that catastrophe is coming. It’s a reason to look more closely and before the room absorbs your attention give yourself another way out. You know with all of these couple of decades worth of training and experience which is so impressive. When you’re out with friends and family how has this changed you being out at a venue? So it’s ruined me in a good way. So I don’t care where I’m going. If it’s an event I can go to the grocery store whatever it is. First thing I’m doing is making a mental note of where all the exits are. It’s every single building I go into you’ll make a mental note and then forget about it that’s it. But you planted the seed so now it’s in the back of your mind you’re not thinking about it. I’m not going to think about it again but I do know if things go sideways and I need to leave I’ve already clocked where they are. You want lots of options.

Dan Farren: Donna Starkes is a deputy fire marshal with the Clark County Fire Department’s Fire Prevention Bureau. She’s spent more than three decades in fire prevention after starting her career as a teacher and still approaches the job as much through education and service as through enforcement. There has to be more than one that sucks because most people most incidents when there is an emergency they all they know is to go back down the same way they came in. But that isn’t always the best way and not only that you can’t exit everybody in a venue out that same place. One of the things I really take the heart in my job is that if I’m doing my job correctly and maybe two people are educated and the code is enforced then that’s a protection for the firefighters. But when they come systems are working like they’re supposed to and it protects them and so part of my job is

Lance: is protecting not only the community but my the firefighters. And what you notice matters

Donna Starkes: more before there is an actual emergency. If you see an exit chain shut, a corridor blocked with equipment or acoustic foam covering a wall or ceiling say something. And if the venue doesn’t fix it, the local fire prevention office wants to know about it. The decisions behind the disasters in this episode often seem small when they were made. So can the decisions that breaks that chain. If you see everybody heading in the same direction and you see the density ahead of you is getting getting worse, consider is that something you want to step into or step away from. The other thing is listen to the crowd hive noise. If people are in distress you’ll hear it before you’ll be able to see it. You know you’re at high level eye level with the rest of the crowd but you can hear much further than you might be able to

Lance: see. So listen for that cries of distress. If the density ahead is worsening and movement is still easy, step away from it. If there is fire or smoke, leave immediately. Use the available exit and stay low beneath the smoke. Leave your belongings. Once outside, stay outside and call 911. If crowd pressure has already taken control of your movement, protect the space in front of your chest and arms. Keep your feet under you and don’t try to overpower the crowd. Move with it until the pressure eases then work diagonally toward the edge. It’s a little like being caught in a strong current in the ocean. Don’t exhaust yourself by fighting directly against it. You move across it working towards the edges where the force is weaker. None of that makes a fully developed fire or crush manageable. It gives you something to do while the choices around you are narrowing and sometimes what reaches you first is not a conclusion. It’s a sense that something has shifted. You’re allowed to listen to that too. If you have that feeling something’s off,

Donna Starkes: go with the breath feeling first. If you see things occurring that are not normal to you, then don’t go and try to find out what’s going on. Separate yourself and you know what? Maybe end the night early because that may be the better food. You’ll always want it. And that’s one of the models that our department has. We all go, was that extra five minutes of me trying to figure out what’s going on with it? No, it wasn’t. So you missed something. So you missed something. Oh well. But you still had a great night and we got to go home and you have another chance to do it again.

Lance: You may not know exactly what’s happening. If something feels off, you’re allowed to leave. That’s the balance. Enough awareness to notice when the night changes

Kayley Estes: without spending the night waiting for it. Hey, most likely nothing’s going to happen tonight. I know where my exits are and maybe I don’t stand right in the center of the crowd, but I’m also, I’m just like aware of my surroundings, but I can still have a great time. And realistically it’s not nearly as dangerous as social media makes it feel like it is. And so I can kind of counteract those feelings and those thoughts and still

Lance: go enjoy myself and go to a concert. The accommodation mindset is simple. Pay attention to the night you’re actually having, not the one you plan to have. Notice when something shifts and move while movement is still a choice. Okay, I know what you’re thinking. So now I have to become Batman. Actually, yes. If Batman walks into a room, finds the exits, clocks the staff,

Steven A. Adelman: looks at the ceiling and then has a great night. You’re the people’s Batman. Most of the time, the vast, vast majority of the time, what actually is the end of an event is people leaving, turning to their friends and saying, that was cool. I want to do it again. And the reason both of those things can be true is some place in the chain of event production and operations, almost all the time, someone does their job well enough to break the chain of causation. And then nobody finds out that somebody earlier in the line made a bad decision because nothing bad happens. And a crowd of next ticket. That’s how it should work. You should not need a background in crowd science to

Lance: go dancing. You can notice the room. You can pay attention when something changes and leave while leaving is still easy. None of that is a guarantee. It is an advantage. Most nights, the music stops, everyone finds their friends, and the night ends exactly as it was supposed to. And if it doesn’t, you’ve already done some of the work. No one is coming, but you’ve given yourself options.

OUT