Lack of good crowd control, poor planning and large numbers of over-exicted illiterate country bumpkins are a deadly mix.

On the KSA side, better crowd control intervention and perhaps obligatory "how to behave among crowds you semi-literate smelly backwoods Hajji you" would be useful.

They did actually spend quite a lot of money on remodelling since 2004. They hired a British consultancy called Crowd Dynamics who has done a lot of work on crowd control and they changed the shape of the three pillars so that they're more like three walls now.

There were no incidents in the 2005 hajj, after the work was completed.

So it's not like they didn't try to do something about it - it's just that what they tried didn't work. It may be that after the 2005 hajj went without incident they got complacent.

www.crowddynamics.com

Thanks for the infos, waterboy (coming back with posts anytime mate?).

It strikes me a fundamental problem is large numbers of the Hujaaj are from rather basic backgrounds and not socialised to deal with large crowds (again I recall my Haajaat I ran into at the airport who did not even understand the idea of passport control and tried to bum rush border control. Most amusing as they were all grannies). Push and shove semi-urban culture gets dangerous.

More draconian controls are likely needed. How knows, might actually send the Hujaaj back with some better crowd manners.

It's the fifth stampeding tragedy in the last 15 years, and Mina has been a large part of the problem. Looking at that Crowd Dynamics, it's a tough problem; one of the diagrams shows how the pilgrims converge from several paths to one. My first though was *numerous* traffic lights/control for pedestrians throughout the city, stretching back to where the pilgrims start to control flow at the source. But who would stop? How much enforcement of the traffic rules would be necessary, and how much is even acceptable at a pilgrimage like this? Another idea would be alternate paths to the stoning site, instead of what looks like converging on one path. But they all have to converge onto one spot in the end anyways.

How packed is it anyways on that route? Is it even possible to stop later on in the route, with two million people pushing you? Maybe all that's needed is, once a problem is spotted, to be able to communicate to the entire length of the crowd (speakers, unarmed police communicating with radios, whatever, if allowed) to tell them to stop, immediately. Possibly starting with the back, to reduce the likelihood of pushing. The problem is whether that would be fast enough, but it might help.