Countdown to tragedy at Bund celebration
0 Comment(s)
Print
E-mail Shanghai Daily, January 2, 2015
Police add manpower
Last year, officials were caught off-guard when nearly 300,000 people turned up for the New Year countdown at the Bund.
Police said the number of people gathered along the Bund by 8:30pm had exceeded last year’s figure. “We started to add manpower since 7pm due to the increase of revelers and added another hundreds of persons after the accident,” said Cai Lixin, a deputy chief commander at the Huangpu branch of the city’s Public Security Bureau.
At 11:32pm, the official microblog account of local police began to suggest people find other places to celebrate New Year. Cai said police then found the situation at the south part of Chen Yi Square to be “unusual” as the crowd was not moving. Police around the square were called to the site and the full extent of the tragedy became evident.
Some survivors said the stampede might have been triggered when people started to throw coupons resembling US banknotes to revelers outside the M18 bar.
Police said yesterday that after an investigation they found that the coupon throwing happened at 11:46pm, later than the stampede so had not triggered the tragedy. No one at M18 was available for comment last night.
According to a man who returned to M18 to pick up his lost phone, some people did throw coupons out of the windows, but some just threw the “banknotes” into the air above their heads when the bar was filled with about 200 people.
The injured were taken to four hospitals for treatment — Changzheng Hospital, Shanghai No. 1 People’s Hospital, Ruijin Hospital and Huangpu District Central Hospital.
Go to Forum >>0 Comment(s)