It seems that a debate is heating up in the media about the possible cause of the Loveparade tragedy in Duisburg, Germany. Recreating the situation might give some insights for researchers or people interested. We were in the tunnels at around 16:00 one hour before the fatal tragedy at 17:00 where 19 people were killed in a stampede in the tunnels.

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Above the Google map of the situation at the Loveparade in Duisburg. Yellow markers indicate bottlenecks in the crowd of people trying to enter the festival terrain, red marker where the stampede took place and blue markers where I saw the police placed. More details if you click on the icons on the map.

Many people outside arrived drunk and were waiting for over 1,5 hour at the first bottleneck. After this bottleneck it was an easier walk through the tunnel street. Until we reached the ramp in the north direction onto the festival area. Here people were standing still on the top part of the ramp watching the trucks drive by, which cause another bottleneck. Also the trucks passing near the top of the ramp were limiting the flow of people onto the terrain. At this ramp location I didn't see any police or security. At 16:00 people threw down a fence to climb on the grass sides of the ramp to watch the music trucks from there. At the top of the ramp there was one point where there was no movement and I had a hard time to get onto the the terrain where there was enough place to stand. I think that specially this second bottleneck has been the cause of the congestion. Also I don't understand how the security control let more people into the tunnels if the people on the ramp where not moving. They seemed to have given up their work already when we walked through the security entrance and they didn't check our bags. There was one helicopter monitoring the terrain, but maybe they did not notice the second bottleneck or it wasn't communicated.

Like I said in my previous post I think the official research will find some security mistakes. As a visitor you expect such a big event to have thinkers and planners who went over possible scenarios, but looking back at what we saw at 16:00 and at what happened at 17:00 it seems someone wasn't doing their job. Not that pointing fingers will change anything, but researchers need to find what went wrong to make sure this will not happen again.