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By R.V. Baugus

Henrik Nielsen lived a facility manager’s worst nightmare when nine people died on June 30, 2000, at his Roskilde Festival outside Copenhagen, Denmark. The tragedy happened when fans close to the stage were crushed by a surging crowd during a Pearl Jam concert. So if anyone had special reason to be at the International Crowd Management Conference in San Diego, it was Nielsen.

Almost 18 months after the tragedy occurred, Nielsen says that finding one definitive reason for the deaths may never be found. “It’s been very difficult to find out because it depends on whom you are talking to about it,” he said. “The weather could have been partly to blame, but nobody can explain what the reason was. It’s a lot of small pieces together.”

Indeed, the weather was suspected as the first culprit. The skies threatened to open one day before the tragedy, and came down in full force on that fateful Friday. Initial reports had people slipping on the mud and being trampled from behind. Other considerations ranged from barriers crushing people to drug usage and inadequate security. While portions of all have some merit, none are definitively pinpointed as the sole cause for the deaths.

But whatever the reason, Nielsen and Roskilde found themselves thrust in the kind of spotlight no facility wishes upon itself. Indeed, it took only that one day to take the shine off of a 32-year-old festival that spreads itself over four days and is universally praised by bands, agents and promoters. Patterned after the 1969 Woodstock festival, Roskilde welcomes some 150 bands to six stages with the largest stage outdoors and the remainder in tents. The outdoor “orange” stage, where the deaths took place, can hold up to 65,000 fans, according to Nielsen.

In short, it sadly proved again the adage that disaster can happen anywhere and at any time. Pearl Jam immediately stopped playing, and The Pet Shop Boys and Oasis refused to play afterwards as well, citing lax security.

Nielsen said there was a discussion whether to pay the non-playing bands, and all parties reached a mutual agreement that the funds would go into a Roskilde 2000 Tragedy Fund. The bands also funded a brochure produced by festival organizers entitled “You and the Festival Crowd.” The brochure offers recommended tips before leaving home for a concert, assessing risk, what to do when getting caught in a crowd and how to get help after an incident. The festival’s web site at www.roskilde-festival.dk also shares information about concert safety.

Nielsen said that the festival used “wave breakers,” steel construction barriers that are placed into concrete in the ground. “We have a lot of them in front of the orange stage, but it was not possible for us to control the number of people between the wave breakers,” said Nielsen. “So we have now built a multi-barrier system and have people go outside the barriers immediately after a concert so we can sweep the area and clean it up and then lead people into the barrier system again afterwards.”

Nielsen said that by sweeping after every concert at a multi-band, multi-day festival, fans who would normally arrive two bands early to get to the front of the stage to see their favorite act can no longer do so. He believes this tactic helps remove pressure from the front of the stage.

“Within five to eight minutes the area is completely empty,” he said. “In another five to 10 minutes we have cleaned up and can take people inside again. We have a separate ingress and egress for the procedure, which means when people exit they have to go another way around to queue for the next show. That works very well.

“We’ve done two other things to keep people from getting too close to the stage. We’ve built the stage higher, going from 2.1 meters to 2.7 meters. We’ve also put video screens on both sides of the stage so people will not need to go close to the stage to have a good view of the concert. We also have a big screen on the back of the mixer tower.”

Finally, Roskilde employed ICMS, a security company from Holland, to serve as security advisers at the 2001 festival. Speaking of 2001, the show did indeed go on, and Nielsen, who has worked for the festival organization for 22 years, called it one of the best ever.

“The best thing was the audience did what we asked them to,” he said. “Over the years Roskilde has been a place without very many rules. It’s a place where people could feel free to do what they liked. But now we’re going to put them into boxes and queue them up before a concert and make them go away so we can clean. It’s a new way of doing Roskilde. We were of course a little bit unsure about how the audience would take it, but … everybody knows that we had a very bad accident the year before, and everybody worked very well together to make the last festival successful.”

The tone in Nielsen’s voice concurs that Roskilde Festival 2001 came off as a success, but his face suggests that 2000 will be extremely difficult to ever forget.

“We absolutely learned from the tragedy,” he said. “Before the accident, our documentation was not as good as it could be. We didn’t write everything down, which sometimes made it difficult to explain or show things to the police and the fire brigade. It was okay … the authorities didn’t ask for more and we gave them exactly what they wanted, but for ourselves it was not good enough.”

The lessons continue to be learned.

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© 2002 International Association of Assembly Managers
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