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January 2, 2015

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Countdown to tragedy at Bund celebration

SHANGHAI was a city in mourning yesterday after New Year celebrations ended in chaos that saw 36 people dead and 47 injured on the Bund.

Most of the victims were in their 20s and the majority were women. The dead include a Taiwanese and Fudan University sophomore Du Yijun, while among the injured reporting a Malaysian woman and two Taiwanese.

The city government has opened two hotlines — 3376 1004 and 3376 6757 — for families of the injured and deceased and people who still don’t know what had happened to their relatives.

“I saw the news online this morning and began to call her telephone but got no answer. I went to hospitals one by one to look for her and found her picture here, but still having no idea of her condition,” said a woman who refused to give her name while waiting at the Shanghai No. 1 People’s Hospital last night.

Huge crowds gather

The woman’s sister who came to Shanghai to work at a beauty salon went to the Bund with her colleague to celebrate the New Year where a stampede occurred around 11:35pm in Chen Yi Square across from the Peace Hotel, where huge crowds gathered for the countdown to 2015. The colleague had been confirmed dead at Changzheng Hospital.

The celebration was originally planned for an open area in the square but had been made a ticket-only event and moved to the nearby Bund Origin, an enclosed area, due to safety and traffic concerns.

Though the government announced the change days ago, thousands of people still gathered at the square.

Tragedy unfolded as a large number of people tried to move up to the riverfront esplanade as others were trying to move down, witnesses said. When people fell they were trampled on by others in a panic.

American Andrew Shainker, who teaches English in the city, spent New Year’s Eve on a restaurant terrace overlooking the pandemonium.

It “looked from above as if people were getting crushed as more and more people came from all directions,” Shainker wrote on WeChat.

Zhou Miaochen, another witness, told AFP: “There was a large flow of visitors, some trying to reach the viewing deck and some trying to get down. People started crashing into each other.”

Xinhua news agency quoted a woman surnamed Yin saying: “We were caught in the middle and saw some girls falling while screaming. Then people started to fall down, row by row.”

She used her arms to try to protect two children in front of her and her son followed her out, Xinhua said. He was bruised, cut on the neck and bleeding from his nose and mouth.

Some, including foreigners, rushed to pull people to safety and perform emergency resuscitation, Shainker said.

“I witnessed lifeless bodies being carried out of a crowd one by one and dumped on the street. Each body had around four people carrying it,” he wrote on WeChat. “They tried their best to create a ring of protection around the bodies.”

Two ambulances arrived after about 30 minutes but were overwhelmed by the sheer number of dead and injured, he said.

Police said they had not expected so many people. They had arranged 700 extra officers, and measures such as closing certain Metro stations near the Bund as in previous years were not put in place because there was no big countdown gala or commercial show planned for the Bund this time.

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.




 

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