If you’re like me (and, as David Letterman says, “I pray to God you’re not), you can’t think about Thanksgiving without thinking about a certain episode of WKRP.
If you’re one of the few people who haven’t ever seen the episode, here’s a snippet:
Source: YouTube WKRP Turkey Excerpts
Now that’s pretty funny (no actual turkeys were harmed in the filming of this episode).
But as happens all too often in life, the happy and the joyful turned sad today on the news that Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede.
It’s not the first time this has happened, in fact, I can remember stories from the past several Black Fridays of people being trampled.
Which reminded me of another episode of WKRP. A much sadder one:
On December 3, 1979 outside the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, Ohio eleven people were killed and dozens were injured in a crush of people trying to get into the arena. Fans were waiting outside for a Who concert scheduled to take place that night.
Thousands of fans (with first-come, first-served festival seating tickets) rished towards the locked doors when they mistook the band’s sound check for the concert having started. People were trampled and crushed before the doors were unlocked. The Who went on to play that night, unaware of the tragedy outside. (Source)
That episode can be currently seen on YouTube, split into 3 parts:
From the same source quoted above:
After the tragedy Cincinnati put a ban on festival or general admission seating. That ban was only lifted once for a 2002 Bruce Springsteen concert and then on August 4, 2004 the ban was lifted totally by city councel, concerned that performers were skipping Cincinnati because they could not have general admission seating.
To prevent any problems, new rules limit the number of tickets (based on square footage of the concert location) and all the doors to the festival seating area will have to be opened two hours before the concert. Ushers and security personnel must be in place before the doors are opened, and a written evacuation plan is required.
I’m not sure what lessons we can learn from this. I’m not sure there are any lessons to be learned from it except the sort of pragmatic ones that Cincinnati figured out.
But we need to do something.
I hope someone, somewhere, who is smarter than me will think of a way to keep this from happening in another 365 days.