Wilts Wanderer
Established Member
- Joined
- 21 Nov 2016
- Messages
- 3,199
This reminds me of two things:
1. The experience of Liverpool fans in Paris for the CL Final, where seemingly the authorities did not know how to cope with the expected volume of supporters and there was (incorrect) intel that tickets were not valid - so the response of the authorities was seemingly to close gates and block all fans from entering the venue to avoid a crush inside, thereby creating several dangerous experiences outside, very Hillsborough-esque (with added muggings / thievery due to some of the locals)
2. An experience I personally had in Lisbon after a Foo Fighters concert in 2017, where the venue was adjacent to a smallish railway station from which a frequent service was laid on back to the city from about 1hr before the end of the event until about 2hrs afterward… which almost nobody managed to travel on because a) nobody was leaving early, and b) the station rear entrance could not cope with an influx of 40,000 people at once, so the police created a long (2-3 mile) circuitous route over nearby road flyovers which meant, by the time we’d traversed it, all the extra trains had gone empty. So thousands of pax crammed into the station for several hours overnight and swamped the morning commuter services instead, including a crush that pretty-much dislocated my arm and left my wife and others extremely distressed. So a good example of providing the required capacity but then taking decisions that prevented customers from using it, and creating a far more dangerous situation overall.
1. The experience of Liverpool fans in Paris for the CL Final, where seemingly the authorities did not know how to cope with the expected volume of supporters and there was (incorrect) intel that tickets were not valid - so the response of the authorities was seemingly to close gates and block all fans from entering the venue to avoid a crush inside, thereby creating several dangerous experiences outside, very Hillsborough-esque (with added muggings / thievery due to some of the locals)
2. An experience I personally had in Lisbon after a Foo Fighters concert in 2017, where the venue was adjacent to a smallish railway station from which a frequent service was laid on back to the city from about 1hr before the end of the event until about 2hrs afterward… which almost nobody managed to travel on because a) nobody was leaving early, and b) the station rear entrance could not cope with an influx of 40,000 people at once, so the police created a long (2-3 mile) circuitous route over nearby road flyovers which meant, by the time we’d traversed it, all the extra trains had gone empty. So thousands of pax crammed into the station for several hours overnight and swamped the morning commuter services instead, including a crush that pretty-much dislocated my arm and left my wife and others extremely distressed. So a good example of providing the required capacity but then taking decisions that prevented customers from using it, and creating a far more dangerous situation overall.
