You raise an interesting point, the closer analogies aren’t the hotel fires, but the outdoor events like Hillsborough or the Ibrox disaster. Or and I realize this will be sensitive.., the hajj stampede/crushing incidents in Saudi Arabia over the last several decades.
The 1990 hajj crush has the most direct parallels in terms of funneling people in and out of the MK. Now granted the entrance/exits are somewhat wide and not the scope as in SA, but natural choke points where large amounts of people could easily become trapped? Throw in the proliferation of ecvs and strollers in the case of MK? I maintain Disney has a large scale incident waiting to happen.
So what to do based on this say for you? I’d never advocate stepping outside of your zone especially in light of having personal knowledge of Riverfront. What you can do is minimize your risks. When everyone else is stampeding to the exit, wait. Or exit early. Avoid the highest capacity days at MK. Etc.
Another interesting part to note is it’s really MK that has this issue. The other three not as much if at all.
Either way if you go have a great time, if you don’t I can completely understand why.
A mass of loose people being funneled- yes, that's the breaking point in almost every scenario I studied.
a conglomeration of people moving towards a fixed sized area is what causes the majority of the issues. I'd just read of a bottlenecking incident at Epcot, and can understand the panic the poster felt. He felt trapped, and as if his child were in danger. The child was in a stroller, which can act as a tripping mechanism and the child could get hurt.
My big takeaway from that particular post is that poster freaked a bit, and wrote that he cleared a four foot area around him. In a crowd, that would create a ripple effect- I'm pretty sure that for that four foot area of space created in the middle of the crowd, a woman the size of me got knocked on her butt ten feet away, where she herself would become a tripping mechanism in a mass exodus away from the 'emergency'.
This was one incident that was written about, but I think this 'panic attack' can happen to anyone at any part of the park. If people further away from perimeter of the one who panicked do not understand the reason behind the mini-crush, they may react as if there is genuine emergency, and panic, themselves, thus causing a crush.
I look at mass crowds as the ebb and flow of water, the mass of people react in waves, some go down, some are lifted up. They don't have much say of their direction in the dense packing, same as molecules of water in the ocean.
I am a very small molecule of water, I'm not going to risk it.
There is one fellow that survived the Station incident by by hugging the wall, and when he went down, he lay sideways, covering his face with his hands.
I can't be guaranteed to be by a wall.
