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Love Parade brought to an end after nineteen die
By CMU Editorial | Published on Monday 26 July 2010
The founder of Love Parade has announced he is bringing the German techno festival to an end after nineteen people were killed when overcrowding led to a stampede at this weekend’s event.
An investigation is already underway to find out what caused the crowd surge, though most people believe the decision to have just one public access point to the festival site, which required passing through a tunnel, was to blame.
Speaking at a press conference yesterday, Love Parade founder Rainer Schaller told reporters: “The Love Parade has always been a joyful and peaceful party, but in future would always be overshadowed by yesterday’s events. Out of respect for the victims, their families and friends, we are going to discontinue the event in the future, and that means the end of the Love Parade”.
Although originally Berlin-based, the parade and its spin-off festival – both free events – have toured different German cities since 2007 after organisers ran into problems with licensing officials in the capital. This year’s event took place in Duisberg, a city on the west side of Germany. Because it’s free, it is hard to know accurate attendance figures for the Parade, though it is thought it often tops a million and, this year, may have reached 1.4 million people.
The fatal crowd surge occurred on Saturday as thousands of festival-goers made their way onto the old railway works site where the event was staged. Entering the site involved moving along a relatively narrow road way cut into the ground and then passing through a tunnel.
This area quickly became dangerously overcrowded, though there are claims things came to ahead because police on the festival side of the tunnel ruled that the whole site was too full and started turning people away, meaning that people were pushing in both directions through the runnel and ramp.
Either way, we know that as the tunnel and ramps in and out of it became over-crowded some festival-goers climbed up the steep walls of the ramps to free themselves from the over-crowding. Some claim that one of these people possibly fell back onto the crowd causing the panic that led to the surge and fatalities, most of which seemed to occur outside the actual tunnel. Though the specifics of what actually happened remain unclear.
The festival continued despite the deaths because both organisers and police representatives felt to suddenly stop the event might result in additional unrest.
Some festival-goers said they tried to warn police and officials that the number of people around the tunnel entrance was getting out of control shortly before the surge, and there are reports that some police officers tried, unsuccessfully, to close the tunnel about half an hour before the fatalities.
Meanwhile, the boss of a German police union told the Bild newspaper that his organisation had told the Duisburg authorities as early as last year that the site they were using for the event simply wasn’t big enough. But the Mayor of Duisburg, Adolf Sauerland, said at the press conference on Sunday that dishing out blame at this stage, ahead of a proper investigation, was “out of order”. A criminal investigation has now been launched into the incident.
Originally established in 1989 as the Cold War reached its conclusion and the Berlin Wall looked likely to be opened up for the first time since being built, Love Parade – although always a major dance music event – initially had political objectives too.
While the “peace, man” ethos never went away, the Parade became more of a commercial operation over the years, resulting in the Berlin government – who had picked up the tab for policing the event because it was classified as a political protest – going to court to have it formally labelled as a commercial festival, thus removing some of their financial obligations to it.
While audience sizes did decrease at the start of the last decade, it remained one of the world’s biggest dance music events, and was one of the few times DJs could play to an audience in the region of a million people.
