UTMC

Right, this has been festering since Saturday.

On Saturday, there was a big music festival in a neighboring city, the so-called Loveparade. Basically an uncontrollable mass of people gyrating to the most horrible electronic dance music. It's over-marketed, over-hyped and not the sort of thing I go to.

In 2009, it was supposed to be held in my city. The mayor said "NO" on account of there not being a large enough space for a safe event of this scale. She got in quite hot water over it.

This year, it was in Duisburg, a city immortalized recently in song as being so utterly fucking boring.
The Mayor was proud as punch and all over the press about how this was great for the city. Hype all over the place.
The festival area was large enough to accommodate, according to the LAW, 250,000 people. Attendance had been expected to be around a million. City officials gave special permissions. While the party was going on, the organizers announced 1,4 million people had come. Police announced yesterday the official count as 1,6 million.
All entrance and exit to the festival ground, an old goods depot, was through a tunnel about 60 feet wide, and then up a ramp with steep walls on either side. There were no crush barriers, no seperate entrance and exit lanes, nothing.
When the last acts of the day got on, people started to leave.

This is what happened:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R5Gn_MX1 ... verified=1
No embedding. You will have to sign in to youtube to watch it. Don't watch it if you are sensitive at all.

20 people dead. Over 500 people injured.
Officially, because of misbehavior that could not have been foreseen and is all the attendees fault.

The police, before the bodies were even cold, announced that they had opposed the safety concept from the start and were against everything. Of course, they also signed the permissions.
The federal police reacted swiftly, by deleting all documents and communications relating to the event from their computers before the state attorney could snoop around.
The mayor publicly and officially denied having had anything to the with the planning, organizing or permissions for the event.

Every single law on the books to ensure public safety at large events has been ignored, broken or officially dispensed for the event.

A friend of mine actually went there. Because all the buses and trains were running hours late, he only got there when the cops started to cordon off the access. Another friend of mine is addicted to all kinds of music festivals. Even though I had taken the time to calculate the odds, I was worried sick till I managed to reach him last night, turns out he has gone to Vladivostok.

I need to vent about these arseholes.
Every last fucker who decided this event had to come to town needs to be dragged through all the punishments available, and all those our constitutions has taken great care to outlaw.
All the fuckers who signed off on stuff because of pressure from above need to get it, also. When human lives are at stake, careers are no excuse.

The single person in this whole affair who showed any kind of concern for the festival goers was the Duisburg police chief. When initial planning began, he voiced grave concerns about the festival site's suitability, saying he doubted the city had any site big enough. He was sent into early retirement at the urging of the mayor as he had "publicly damaged the image of the city".

At least some of the police aren't joining the green wall of silence on this one (with many cases of police brutality and other misbehavior, the wall has been pretty tall this last year). While the state attorney is still investigating against "persons unknown", the police chief from my city is pressing direct charges against the Duisburg mayor and all city officials involved.

I'm so fucking angry, any time I think about it, I want to punch somebody, and I was just thinking about it again. Ranting helps, thank's for your time.

I'm glad it never came to your town.

I don't really know what to say, Golgo. I read what you wrote and I feel your frustration and anger. Poor bastards that were caught in the middle of that mess. All for what seems to be political grandstanding...

Life is too short.

And here I thought Europeans did things smarter...

Golgo, I'm feelin for ya brother.

You'd think there's enough examples of how things go horribly wrong, so that people in charge of making decisions at that level would be able to foresee the obvious and plan accordingly.

And to make things even worse, they died for fucking techno...

So, you going to Wacken?

Drift wrote:So, you going to Wacken?

No, I'm not a festival going person.

So, just looked around some online news, and a letter has turned up, regarding a planning meeting.
The head of the city planning department berated everyone about the escape routes. The organizer complained that such an amount of escape routes had never been demanded of them and is totally unnecessary, in any case.
Someone pointed out that the mayor absolutely wanted the event to go ahead and that "a solution" had to be found. The head of the planning department wrote to the mayor that he would not have anything more to do with the approvals process or carry the responsibility.
The mayor signed off on that. Escape routes for a third of the number officially expected were declared to be sufficient.
A safety audit by the fire department, standard procedure for large events, was deemed unnecessary and not carried out.

The organizers applied for an event for 500,000 people. The official planning permission was for an event for 250,000 people. No officials, and especially not the police, bothered to limit access to the grounds until the crush had already begun.

This is exactly the kind of negligent bullshit that the law and the authorities are supposed to stop. But they'd rather score political points and make business happy.

And the mayor has announced that he sees no reason to resign.

I always thought the Berlin festival looked crazy, but at least there you didn't have the same kind of bottlenecks.

Stupid, stupid, stupid. Deadly stupid.

guitargeek wrote:And here I thought Europeans did things smarter...

--Jaeger

DerGolgo wrote:.

So, just looked around some online news, and a letter has turned up, regarding a planning meeting.
The head of the city planning department berated everyone about the escape routes. The organizer complained that such an amount of escape routes had never been demanded of them and is totally unnecessary, in any case.
Someone pointed out that the mayor absolutely wanted the event to go ahead and that "a solution" had to be found. The head of the planning department wrote to the mayor that he would not have anything more to do with the approvals process or carry the responsibility.
The mayor signed off on that. Escape routes for a third of the number officially expected were declared to be sufficient.
A safety audit by the fire department, standard procedure for large events, was deemed unnecessary and not carried out.

The organizers applied for an event for 500,000 people. The official planning permission was for an event for 250,000 people. No officials, and especially not the police, bothered to limit access to the grounds until the crush had already begun.

This is exactly the kind of negligent bullshit that the law and the authorities are supposed to stop. But they'd rather score political points and make business happy.

And the mayor has announced that he sees no reason to resign.

Fuck that.
The mayor should be fired, have charges filed against them and then stoned. The new police chief should be fired with charges. The fire chief should be fired with charges. The organizer should be stoned. The other city officials should be fired with charges pressed against them and stoned.

This is a wonderful example of how horrible local government can be.
It reminds me of what would have happened if woodstock was in a small confined space.
... Seriously fucking retarded people.

You have every reason to be pissed if this is going on in your backyard.

Man, this is a terrible tragedy, I feel your anger, I'm sure they will get to the bottom of it, this is to big to be swept under the carpet and politicians involved are not of Kennedy caliber to have this buried.

I stopped for gas in Duisburg a couple times.


I hope karma does it's job....