By Chris Johnston
On paper, music festivals are a recipe for disaster. Thousands of impetuous young people drinking and drugging. A crowd mentality of follow the leader. An atmosphere of "bugger tomorrow". Issues with rubbish, water and injuries. The weather: the site might flood or it might catch fire.
But usually nothing goes too wrong for the punters. Certainly there are hardly ever terrifying stampedes such as the one that played out at the Falls Festival in Lorne on Friday night.
WorkSafe has already blamed bottlenecks at exits and unstable ground. More than 60 people were injured and 19 hospitalised during a human crush as fans left one stage to rush to another to see a headline act.
Whether or not the organisers of the Falls Festival thought through the fact that a huge group of fast-moving, excitable young people would want to get out of one area through small, limited exits and into another, en masse, is unknown, and a good question.
The Lorne site of the Falls Festival this year.Credit: Falls Festival
At big festivals like this (Falls gets about 16,000 people each day) there is always an "overlap" between the bands of different stages. There is always heavy foot traffic. Always.
But Falls is a well-run festival; it is a major player in a massive seasonal industry, has won Victorian tourism awards and has a great reputation. In 2015, when Lorne was threatened by bushfires, organisers quickly and effectively moved the entire festival to safety at Mount Duneed Estate near Geelong.
The concepts of ingress and egress – how to get people in and out of multiple spaces – are well known to them. Putting on a huge music festival is as much an exercise in understanding crowd psychology as it is booking the best bands you can find.
People behave strangely and impulsively in groups. Tightly controlled environments and theories about crowd psychology can go out the window. Momentary things can occur, people can snap, accidents can happen.
The crowd crush occurred as people left the Grand Theatre main tent (pictured) to get to another headline act at the Valley Stage.Credit: Kylie McPax_sillyduffer
In 2001 Jessica Michalik died after being crushed and asphyxiated in a Big Day Out mosh pit, while Limp Bizkit were playing, at the Sydney leg of the event. She was only 16. Her death resulted in a blame-game playing out between promoters, festival security and Limp Bizkit. The band were accused of inciting the crowd, but said they didn't get extra security barriers they requested. A lot has changed since then, and largely because of Jessica's death.
In 2010, 21 people died at a techno festival in Duisberg, Germany, in a crowd crush in a tunnel. More than 500 were injured. Police kept the event, a parade through streets and parkland in the city, open, fearing another stampede.
Festivalgoer Olivia Jones' injured leg as a result of Friday night's crush.
In 2000, nine were killed at a festival in Denmark. Same deal. A crowd surge in a bottleneck, then a crush, then people fall over and are trampled and can't breathe.
What can be done? Organisers have to filter the crowds around and keep them moving somehow. Some festivals do it well, some do it poorly. Mud doesn't help, neither does rain or harsh sun. The rise of the micro-festival, with smaller crowds and one stage, is partly due to big, surging crowds being uncomfortable and unmanageable for so many.
Crowds enjoy the Falls Festival on New Year's Eve. Credit: CarbieWarbie
Think of Woodstock, not the first but the biggest of the 1960s festivals, and the festival that introduced the idea of multiple-day music events into popular culture. It was the summer of '69 near New York. About 400,000 people turned up and three died, over three days. But four babies were born.
Woodstock was huge, even by modern standards. The biggest festival ever held was Toronto Rocks, in 2003. The Rolling Stones and AC/DC played. About 450,000 people paid to congregate at an old airfield for the day. No one died and there were no reports of injuries or harm.
More than 400,000 people attended the Woodstock festival in Bethel, New York, in 1969.Credit: AP
The Falls Festival crush was awful for those involved. Bones were broken. It must have been terrifying stuck in that formless, surging crowd, barricaded within themselves, people in the crowd with others trampling over them because they had no choice.
But festivals are being run better than ever before, there's no doubt about that. The days of the cowboy operators or the fly-by-nighters are largely gone. Festivals are very much a currency of youth and a currency of summer now; they are mainstream, especially an event such as Falls. They are not going to get any bigger in terms of the numbers at an event, but there are going to be more of them, all over the place, something for everyone.
Clearly the organisers must take at least some responsibility for ensuring those they host are safe, and they should consider every contingency however minute and hyper-detailed it may seem. Because humans in large numbers who might be affected by their surroundings or not thinking clearly will always be at least a little bit unpredictable.