Crowd management for outdoor music festivals

Outdoor music festivals (OMFs) are increasingly common events on the summer entertainment landscape for youth in Australia. Attending these OMFs is associated with an increased risk of injury and, in extreme cases, death. Although there have been a number of incidents and fatalities internationally, in Australia there has been only one fatality at a live music event and, as a result, significant attention is now being paid to crowd safety and security issues, as well as infrastructure and production safety issues. The crowd incident model developed by Fruin and its derivative guidelines outlined in this article show that many crowd disasters could have been avoided with appropriate advance planning and management techniques. Reliable real-time communication between those responsible for crowd management and authoritative communication with the crowd are also critical elements in defusing a potentially lethal crowd incident.