Veronika Wild

*I stole this great title from a country song by Alexandra Kay   Not sure if I like the song yet, but perhaps it will grow on me. I do like listening to a bit of country music when I'm on the road.     This post should probably have a Scotch Thistle but its the season of dog roses and hawthorn   I love Tasmania’s winding country roads with their hedgerows and lovely old towns and I've seen much too little of them these last three years. It’s taken over a year to get the van back due to a lack of parts and now we were set to have four days of good weather, something else we haven’t seen much of this year. It snowed again on Tuesday night – Snowvember, our public broadcaster called it, so the timing couldn’t have been better.   Bothwell has more than 50 heritage listed buildings. This is St. Luke's (1830), Australia's second oldest church I call in briefly at Bothwell. Although the official population is around 499, it serves a much larger rural commun...

Spectators at a football match   Making Public Events Safer  In the previous post we talked briefly about safety at concerts and festivals and how even performers can influence the way crowds behave. Good planning is essential. To run any kind of public event in Australia usually requires permission from local authorities and lodgement of detailed plans. For an idea of what is required the NSW Government’s starter guide, developed after a death at a Big Day Out festival in 2001 is a good place to begin.  For a more detailed overview, see also the checklists provided by the Australian Institute for Disaster Resilience for Crowded Places. It also has a comprehensive Safe and Healthy Crowds Handbook intended primarily for event managers, emergency personnel, professionals in the field and so on. This covers everything from crowds encountered   in shopping centres, stadiums, public streets and transport hubs, pubs and clubs, sporting and cultural events, poli...

  Astroworld tragedy: here’s how concert organisers can prevent big crowds turning deadly Alison Hutton , University of Newcastle A fatal crowd surge during a performance by US rapper Travis Scott on Friday night has become one of the deadliest live music incidents in recent years . Crowd crushes during the Houston show, which was part of the Astroworld Music Festival, led to eight deaths and dozens of injuries . The incident is still being investigated, with criminal investigations also underway. How does such catastrophe emerge in a space where people are supposed to be enjoying themselves? I have been working in the area of crowd safety for several years. My expertise focuses on ways of boosting safety at large events such as Schoolies, outdoor music festivals and sporting tournaments. Based on reports, it seems several factors — compounded by mismanagement — led to an environment that was not conducive to what we call “cooperative crowding”. An unsettled...

    - Image by Owantana from Pixabay A Time of Mourning and Reflection I was very sorry to hear about the tragedy in Seoul last week. This comes less than a month after a similar crowd crush event at a football match in Indonesia and less than a year after the one at the Astroworld Festival in Houston. Our condolences to the families, friends and anyone else affected and best wishes for a speedy recovery to those who have been injured. Although investigations are still in progress, in all cases, they highlight the importance of preventing such situations arising in the first place. In Australia, public events are heavily regulated and there has been some excellent work done on this topic which should be more widely known. However, it will take me a little while to put together some of the various strands, so for now I will just leave you with some ways to prevent crowd surges at concerts brought to you with kind permission from The Conversation. There are also m...

Tsunami warnings like this are or should be becoming much more common   As it happens, the 5 th of November is World Tsunami Awareness Day .  Although Tsunamis are among the rarest of natural phenomena, they are also among the most deadly and destructive. While far more frequent in the Pacific they can also happen in other places such as Europe and the eastern seaboard of the USA. An analysis of 290 events between 1992 and 2016 showed that while 77% of them occurred around the margins of the Pacific Ocean, 9% occurred in both the Indian and Atlantic Oceans and 5% along the Mediterranean. Earthquakes from 1992 to 2016 Nor do you have to live on the coast to experience a tsunami. They can also occur in inland waterways and lakes. In 1963, around 2000 people were killed and several towns including Longarone in Northern Italy were completely obliterated by a tsunami which followed a landslide   on an upstream dam. Norway has had no less than 10 tsunamis since 1888, the ...