Table 2 Timeline according to the organizers of the Love Parade
From: Crowd disasters as systemic failures: analysis of the Love Parade disaster
12:02 | The festival area is opened. Visitors can enter the area via the access control points from East and West via the tunnel. |
13:00 | The inflow is reduced by closing 10 of 16 isolating devices, both on the East and West entrance towards the tunnel. |
13:45-14:15 | No important disturbances or queues of visitor flows occur in the entry area. |
Around 14:00 | Official start of the Love Parade. |
14:15-14:30 | The concentration of visitors increases at the end of the entrance ramp towards the festival area (due to obstructions by ‘floats’, i.e. moving music trucks). |
14:30-15:15 | The crowd manager tries to order support by the police. The organizer states that the person responsible for connecting to the police (the ‘liaison officer’) did not have a working walkie talkie or mobile phone. |
14:30-15:06 | The visitor flow on the ramp and from the West increases. |
Around 15:00 | Reduction of the visitor flow by closing as many isolating devices as possible. |
15:12-15:34 | Change of police shifts.63 5 police cars drive into the ramp area. |
15:31 | Visitors ignore the fence on the side of the main ramp, following police forces, who have temporarily opened it. Shortly later, visitors overcome fences also on the other side of the ramp, which should prevent them from taking the steep slope up to the festival area. |
15:50 | A first chain of police forces (police cordon) is formed in front of the side ramp, blocking in- and outflows in the West (see cordon 1a in Figure 1).64 |
15:50-15:57 | A second police cordon closes the tunnel to the East (see cordon 2 in Figure 1). |
Around 16:02 | There is a sudden strong visitor flow towards the festival area from the West. The first police cordon is moved behind the side ramp (see cordon 1b in Figure 1). |
From 16:02 | Police forces start to control the flows to (and from) the festival area in the middle of the ramp (where the ramp is narrowest due to some fences).65 Queues start to form on both sides of the resulting bottleneck.66 |
Around 16:06 | There are just a few visitors between the three police cordons. |
Around 16:07 | A jam of visitors forms in the West part of the tunnel. |
Around 16:09 | A jam of visitors forms above the chain of police forces on the ramp, when trying to exit the festival area. |
16:12-16:28 | The third police cordon is completed (see cordon 3 in Figure 1). It stops the in- and outflows completely, where the fences narrow down the ramp. |
Around 16:13 | The small ramp is opened as entrance to the festival area. Visitors climb over fences. |
Around 16:14 | The second police cordon in the East opens up, and visitors enter the area of the big ramp from below.67 |
Around 16:17 | First visitors try to enter the festival area via a narrow staircase connecting the lower part of the ramp with the festival area on top.68 Afterwards, the staircase is blocked by two security people.69 |
Around 16:21 | The first police cordon in the West dissolves.19,70 The previously waiting visitors move towards the ramp and encounter there the dense flow of visitors coming from the East. |
16:22 | First people climb the pole.19,71 |
16:22-16:24 | The third police cordon still keeps the ramp closed, while the pressure increases from both sides (i.e. inflow and outflow). |
16:24-16:28 | The third police cordon is dissolved.72 |
Around 16:27 | The narrow staircase is used by people to get up to the festival area.73 Someone climbs on top of a traffic sign.74 |
16:31-16:37 | A fourth police cordon is formed in the upper area of the ramp.75 At the same time, the density in the lower area of the ramp increases steadily. |
After 16:40 | The situation gets out of control. More and more visitors try to get up to the festival area via the small staircase, the pole and a container (used by the crowd management, located at the lower end of the ramp in the South). |