ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the causes of death and injury in crowd disasters at events, definitions of crowds and theories of crowd behavior. A major cause of injury and death are slips, trips and falls in the crowd hurry that often occurs in multi-venue festivals where programmes conflict, or where desirable attractions quickly follow one another in different venues. A commonly held view of crowd disasters is the panic stampede. People at the back of a crowd or queue are often unaware of what is occurring at the front of the crowd and continue to move into available space while being pushed themselves from behind by people following them into the stoppage. A crowd is not homogeneous, but is comprised of a wide range of diverse individuals, with different wants, needs and expectations. Most crowd management planning is based on police and security contractor control practices, in which crowds are generally perceived as troublesome, problematic and in need of control.
