Stadium disasters in Africa: The case for crowd management

Abstract

Managers of sport and recreation facilities have numerous legal duties. One of these duties is an obligation to take reasonable precautions to ensure safe activity programmes and facilities for all participants, spectators and staff. The responsibility of a facility manager to ensure the safety of patrons is known as premises liability. Considering the large number of fairly recent stadium disasters on the African continent, premises liability could arguably be regarded as ‘Africa's shame'. This paper reviews some of the major stadium disasters of the past decade, and also focuses on crowd management. It discusses some of the most effective principles and techniques of ensuring facility and spectator safety. The chief components that are addressed are facility design, capacity and access, security and emergency procedures, and training. Key Words: Safety, sport facilities, disasters; liability, crowd management AJPHERD Vol.10(2) 2004: 141-153