Researchers are applying fluid dynamics principles to understand crowd behavior, particularly in events like the San Fermin Festival in Spain. Studying movement patterns, physicist Denis Bartolo and his team observed that dense crowds behave similarly to fluids, demonstrating periodic behaviors that can signal potential danger. By monitoring these fluctuations, authorities could intervene before incidents escalate, as evidenced by past tragedies like the Astroworld festival crowd crush. Their findings offer a scientific approach to improving crowd safety management.
Because these spontaneous motions are periodic in time, they are very easy to detect and they are very easy to detect very early on before they become dangerous.
In the past it was thought that crowd movements were random, chaotic. But in this study published Wednesday in the journal Nature, Bartolo and his team were able to break down the physics of the crowd's fluctuations.
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