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The devastating Mecca stampede is a reminder of the power of human crowds

haj hajj mecca
Muslim pilgrims and rescuers gather around people who were crushed by overcrowding in Mina, Saudi Arabia, during the annual Hajj, Thursday, September 24. Associated Press

More than 700 people died September 24 in Mina, Saudi Arabia, in a stampede of Muslim pilgrims on their way to Mecca, The New York Times reported. Hundreds more were injured.

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In 1990, the deadliest-ever Hajj stampede killed 1,426 people in a tunnel between Mina and Mecca.

Such tragedies are not products of the Muslim pilgrimage to Mecca in particular, though. They're markers of a common, largely underestimated danger: crowds.

The force of seven people is enough to bend steel, Edbert Hsu, a Johns Hopkins professor who has studied crowd-related deaths, explained to Johns Hopkins Magazine. Imagine the terrifying power of hundreds, thousands, or — in the case of the Hajj — millions of people assembled in one place, moving in one direction.

While many imagine that crowd deaths are the result of trampling, they're often the result of suffocation, as people are caught in between the force of so many others on every side. And they're not rare.

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haj hajj mecca
Muslim pilgrims pray around the Kaaba at the Grand Mosque ahead of the annual Hajj in Mecca, September 22. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

A study by Hsu and collaborators identified 215 "human stampede events" between 1980 and 2007, which together resulted in at least 7,069 deaths.

"Human stampedes are a recurring phenomenon that can trigger mass casualties ranging into the thousands," Hsu wrote.

It's remarkable the large crowds that generate them don't inspire more fear.

In "Crush Point," a wide-ranging New Yorker story on the dangerous power of crowds, John Seabrook explains the chilling subtlety with which a place packed with people — be it a Black Friday sale, a religious pilgrimage, a soccer game, or a concert — can ever-so-subtly shift from a jostling celebration to a death trap:

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The transition from fraternal smooshing to suffocating pressure — a "crowd crush" — often occurs almost imperceptibly; one doesn't realize what's happening until it's too late to escape ... At a certain point, you feel pressure on all sides of your body, and realize that you can't raise your arms. You are pulled off your feet, and welded into a block of people. The crowd force squeezes the air out of your lungs, and you struggle to take another breath.

haj hajj mecca
Muslim pilgrims perform prayers in Arafat during the annual Hajj outside Mecca, September 23. REUTERS/Ahmad Masood

While it's unclear exactly what spurred Thursday's disaster, The New York Times noted that the tragedy "is likely to intensify fears that [Saudi Arabia] does not have the transportation and public safety infrastructure to channel and protect what is the world's largest regular human migration."

But part of the problem is that while Saudi Arabia has tried to make improvements to better accommodate crowds after repeated Hajj-related casualties, no one really knows exactly what works. Worse still, as Seabrook wrote in 2011, "human stampedes have more than doubled in each of the past two decades."

haj hajj mecca
A aerial view of the Grand Mosque during the haj pilgrimage is seen in Mecca, December 31, 2006. More than 2 million Muslim pilgrims pelted stones at symbols of the devil in the third day of a sacred ritual on Sunday amid tight security to avert stampedes during the haj pilgrimage. REUTERS/Ali Jarekji

Hsu argues, in the Johns Hopkins Magazine story, that "international health organizations have to recognize that this is an important type of disaster" and devote appropriate resources to preventing it.

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Yet there are larger, more troubling questions that remain: Can massive, dense gatherings of people ever be truly safe? Or will people in such crowds have to learn to accept the risk that one wrong move can ripple with terrifying, sometimes deadly speed?

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