Crowd Evacuation During Fire at the Gdańsk Shipyard Arena in 1994: An Event Study and Extended Analysis

The article presents a case study of an event that occurred in Gdańsk, Poland, in 1994. During a rock concert at the old Gdańsk Shipyard Arena, a fire started. The audience was evacuated in a state of emotional agitation. This event resulted in the death of seven people and left many people injured, some of which had permanent injuries. This article presents the technical characteristics of the building where the event occurred and the event course. Based on the analysis of many source materials, the fire course as well as rescue and firefighting operations are described. The fire course was accurately recreated using computer simulations. Analyses conducted immediately after the event 30 years ago primarily concluded that all emergency exits being open would have been sufficient for the evacuation of the crowd in the building. A total of nine evacuation scenarios were simulated, the first of which was the recreation of the real event. In the other scenarios, the conditions were modified to investigate the impacts of the number of people and availability of emergency exits on the outcomes. As a result of the conducted research, the hypothesis regarding the recognition of blocked emergency doors as the main cause of death and injuries of the participants of the analysed event was questioned. The second issue that should be considered innovative was the description of the blocking pile phenomenon. An attempt was made to identify similar situations reported in the literature and elucidate this phenomenon.