ABSTRACT
The paper presents the results of safety assessment of crowd stampedes at the Experimental Primary School in Puyang, China. A methodology is developed for assessment of campus safety based on the FTA-GAHP method, which combines the advantages of the traditional fault tree analysis technique and a grey analytic hierarchy process approach for accurate estimation of weight coefficients. Our results indicate that the primary cause is insufficient hardware facilities; students’ faulty behaviors are the direct cause; the secondary cause is the lack of safety awareness. Moreover, an imperfect safety management system was the root cause of this accident. These findings are consistent with the actual investigation results of the Puyang County Government, which further proves that the FTA-GAHP method is simple, yet reasonable and effective to assess safety level of crowd stampedes on primary and middle schools. Some precautionary measures have also been identified. Thus, this work affords a decision support for the preparative scheme of campus safety management in China, as well as elsewhere in the world where there are large-scale gatherings.
