The Crowd Is Surging at a Single Entrance

Two thousand people are pressed against one entrance twenty minutes before doors. The front rows can no longer move their arms and someone has fallen.

Setting: General-admission conference keynote, 2,000 attendees, single-door hall entrance, pre-opening. Category: Safety & First Response. Pressure level: Critical.

This page is the individual, citable address for this one situation: https://gatheringarchitecture.com/crisis-sim/scenario/crowd-crush

The situation

Your door supervisor radios: 'They're solid at the front, I can't get the barrier back and someone's down.' Registration wants everyone scanned before entry. The hall is empty behind the doors.

First moves and what each one costs

• Open all doors now, scan inside, and get staff to pull people forward out of the press — Pressure drops within ninety seconds. The person who fell is helped up by staff, not trampled. Registration is unhappy and irrelevant.
• Hold the doors and add more scanners at the front — Adding process at the choke point increases dwell time at maximum density. The crowd surges again and two more people go down.
• Have security push the crowd back to reset the queue — You are compressing a crowd against itself from the front. This is how crushes become fatal.

Preparation notes for this situation

• Crushes are caused by density and geometry, not by bad crowds — count people per square metre, not headcount
• Opening doors early is almost always the correct pressure release; ticket scanning can happen inside
• Never push a crowd back into itself; relieve from the front and open lateral space
• Give a crowd information every two minutes; silence at a door is what produces surges

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