I’m sure those of you in England and Europe are possibly sick of, or saddened by, all the coverage today on the 20th anniversary of the Hillsborough disaster, but I only noticed the date from a rather emotional Metafilter thread I saw a few hours ago. Wow, 20 years.
If you don’t know what I’m talking about, it was a tragedy at a football (soccer) stadium in Sheffield, England where, due to bad crowd control, 96 people were crushed to death. By the crowd.
The whole story boggles my mind, even now. I remember when it happened, because both my dad and stepdad were football fans and I was often forced to watch matches on Saturday mornings when I really would’ve preferred cartoons. I remember Dad asking me about it, too, the next time I was at his place. And I remember it never really made sense.
While I recall watching video footage of the crowd pushing onto the field, and of a few people being pulled up out of the crush by people hanging over the upper stands, my 11-year-old brain was confused. People die from being hit by other people. Or being shot by other people. Or by falling. They don’t die from being squished, right? Nobody dies of too many people around you.
I’ve always tended to push out of my head things that were beyond my comprehension, and due to the lack of further news coverage at home I compartmentalized the memory to just images from the TV and the connection to Dad’s family (he grew up in Sheffield) and erased the bit about the deaths. I think it was only a few years ago, maybe even when looking it up on Wikipedia, that I relearned the specifics.
What I didn’t know, until today, was about the aftermath, how the Sun newspaper originally blamed Liverpool hooliganism for the deaths, and how much the police screwed up that day but nobody was made accountable (to any satisfying degree) for the tragedy. “Justice for the 96″. After 20 years, you’d think people would’ve been granted closure.
But, going back to the cause of death, I still don’t get it. I do, but I don’t. What an inhuman way to die, by the crush of a crowd of regular people, fellow sports fans, pushing against you, none of them with angry or violent intentions towards you or anyone around you. The SPCA shuts down farms for putting animals in these conditions.
Today is also the start of the Stanley Cup playoffs, so I hope my friends who go to the Canucks games (may there be many) will appreciate that good stadium design and crowd management is helping keep them safe, because otherwise we’d never give it a second thought. Maybe we should.
Just curious, but do you find this more or less tragic than, say, stampedes at during the Hajj ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Incidents_during_the_Hajj ), which have killed over 2000 in the last 20 years?
Sounds like you’re trying to be controversial, Chris. How so entirely unlike you.
With the Hillsborough disaster, at least lessons were learned to prevent similar tragedies from occurring. Given the size and circumstances of the Hajj, I’m not sure how such crowding problems could be avoided without interfering with individuals’ religious rights.
It just seems like an archaic, inhuman, and uncivilized way to die, and just so unexpected to someone such as myself. Then again, so were the deaths from Hurricane Katrina.
On a completely different, non-controversial topic, I was impressed that you actually called it football.
That accident was the straw that broke the camel’s back for standing-only sections of the stands. They’re now largely a thing of the past because of that horrible incident.
No mention of the exciting (but ultimately disappointing for this Liverpool fan) football match that occurred on the 20th anniversary of Hillsborough yesterday.
Jeremy: When writing about soccer/football on my site, I’m always of two minds. On the one hand, I learned the game as soccer but came to appreciate it as football. And most of the world calls it football, or some foreign language equivalent. On the other hand, my audience mostly knows it as soccer. My solution? I waffle.
I don’t know if it adds to G’s bona fides to blog on this matter, but her father, an avid Sheffield Wednesday fan, used to stand with his father, at the front of crowd, just to left of the goal at the Leppings Lane end of the ground, in the exact spot where so many were killed.
The difference was that in my day, prior to soccer violence, there was nothing between me and the hallowed turf but a short wall.
The Bradford City stadium fire from 1985 (I think) is another incredible event that was seen live on TV (the video link I had is dead). In the span of about 1 minute a small fire caused by a cigarette turned into an inferno engulfing the entire wooden structure. People were streaming out onto the pitch, and others ran to the back to the exits, some of which were locked (note to self: in case of fire run onto the field).
There was a lot of heroism, with guys running into the flames to drag people out. Also a few really disturbing scenes of people fully on fire stumbling around.
Afterwards all wooden stands of the type in the country were demolished and rebuilt to be safer.