Fire!

A famous Supreme Court opinion by Oliver Wendell Holmes once cited the example of falsely shouting “Fire!” in a crowded theater as unprotected free speech, given the well-recognized danger of an unnecessary stampede to the exits [156]. Numerous human stampedes have been documented over the years, some for false alarms, as in his example, and others for a wide variety of causes. Indeed, we've all seen headlines like these:

• Death toll reaches 100 in Station Nightclub fire

• Iroquois Theater fire claims 602 victims

• 251 trampled to death in Hajj crush

• Sixty-three injured in Dutch Remembrance Day event

• Deadly stampede at Yemeni political rally

• 95 crushed to death in Hillsborough stadium disaster

In many historic cases, the collapse of orderly egress or crowd control can be easily understood, such as with the all too common blocking of emergency exits in order to prevent unauthorized access or theft. This was the case, for example, with the Cocoanut Grove nightclub fire in Boston in 1942, which claimed almost 500 lives largely because of emergency exits that had actually been welded shut, as well as other exits that opened inward and became quickly jammed by the crush of the crowd. However, in other cases, adequate physical means for egress or crowd movement may have existed but were not well utilized. For example, in the Station Nightclub fire, there were several available emergency exits, but the panicked crowd members moved toward the doorway through which they had originally entered, which quickly became blocked by the crush.