Slashdot Mirror
Rhode Island Comic Con Oversold, Overcrowded
New submitter RobertJ1729 writes The Rhode Island Comic Con (RICC) is in the middle of a complete meltdown as hundreds are turned away at the door or denied reentry due to the event organizers selling far more tickets than the venue can accomodate. The Providence Journal reports that "According to Providence Fire Chief David Soscia, too many people were being let in at a time and the organizers were not correctly counting them. That led to over-congested areas in the building which has a maximum capacity of 17,000 people." Meanwhile the Rhode Island Comic Con Facebook page is being flooded with comments from angry attendees describing chaos both inside and out of the convention center. RICC initially posted, "Hello RICC fans! WE ARE NOT OVERSOLD!," and promised to honor tomorrow tickets sold for today. That post generated several hundred angry comments before eventually being deleted (though it survives in part on RICC's twitter feed). Commenters are alleging that RICC is deleting negative Facebook comments. Users are tweeting at #ricomicconfail2014 to vent their frustration.
I went to the Maker Faire last year and it was insanely crowded. It was the most crowded place I had ever been, hour long waits to get food or do just about anything. I have been to healh and wellness conferences where they charge $1500 for three days and they were extremely well attended. It seems like any bad art or artisinal toothpick festival with beer and parking will be mobbed.
The peak of insanity for all this was the San Francisco Ramen Festival. People stood in line for multiple hours to eat a freakin' bowl of ramen. Just check out this ridiculous reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/2b5z1a/at_japantowns_ramen_festival/
Seriously, I've just given up trying to go to events. If it's advertised and doesn't have a huge entrance fee and/or absurdly niche audience it will be a madhouse.
There are counties of some states that are larger than Rhode Island.
San Bernardino County is bigger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined. You could squeeze in Delaware as well.
That could well actually have been the CORRECT thing to do.....
Don't forget that the fire marshalls job is NOT to be concerned about the paticular event, he is being paid to be constantly asking himself "what if a fire breaks out in the next 5 minutes", can we evacuate in time? Separated people and unavailable car keys rate some way down his priorities!
Large buildings (Like convention centers) have a multi tiered structure of occupancy limits, it is in no way as simple as saying the capacity is 20,000 or whatever.
Typically what you find is that the ground floor has direct escape routes and thus can support a lot of bodies, but that there is a rather tighter limit on total occupancy for floors above ground because these are limited (Sometimes severely) by the available exit stair capacity.
Each floor then has a capacity, and each room has a capacity.
Now the kicker is that it is NOT a case that the number within the room is within capacity makes everything ok, but that ALL of the numbers leading to that room have to be ok.
Add to this that the fire marshall will have seen the Station Nightclub / Great White video nasty, and may well even have been involved in pulling the bodies out, and that he is looking at a conference cente with an uncommon fuel load in it, and I can see a fairly hard line being taken.
My guess is that he saw the numbers on the upper floors well above the available exit capacity from the upper floors even while total building occupancy was below the limit and got the numbers back to a safe level the reasonably fast way, not IMHO unreasonable, and no reason to stop more attendes arriving, as long as they stay on the ground floor (And as long as the ground floor is within capacity limits itself).
Sounds to me like blame probably lies with whoever was running the stewards who should have stopped people heading upstairs once the upper floors number was reached (Any, yes, I know stewarding these things is a pain in the arse), and on whoever did the planning for crowd capacity and occupancy failing to take the upper floor numbers into account.
Were there clearly defined show stop and area clearence procedures in place?
Regards, Dan (Who used to do major events professionally (In europe not the US so the terminology probably varies a bit, but the principles are pretty much universal).
Mike Ferreira describes some of the chaos on the Anime Herald:
Some people on Facebook describe the conditions inside the convention center as unsafe. RICC has responded to some of the comments, saying, "There was no mess up. This happens a lot at large events. It is very difficult to predict the turnover flow of patrons. Sometimes, for the safety of all, we need to halt entry to let the crowd thin out." RICC Organizer Steven Perry of Altered Reality Entertainment has been unreachable by media and disgruntled fans.
People are being very supportive of the Fire Marshals who handled the mess. One Facebook user writes, "Fire marshal #9 guarding the Omni North Garage was awesome. Delt with an angry mob through the whole 4 hours." I personally witnessed that marshal do a really great job with a really bad situation. Rhode Island is the site of the worst nightclub fire in US history, and Rhode Islanders understand that the Fire Marshal was acting with restraint and responsibly.
I have not heard about the conditions at the convention center today. They have apparently already sold to capacity but are still selling tickets online.