CONCERT SAFETY Mishap in mosh pits

Crowd management company sets safety standards for moshing at concerts.
By RYANNE SCOTT
KNIGHT RIDDER NEWSPAPERS
Some treat it like a badge of honor.
Concert-goers say exhilaration, excitement and chaos are to be found in wading to the front of the audience and throwing themselves into a mosh pit with other fans who love metal and punk music.
The pit thrives on physical contact. Moshers enter jumping and thrashing around, all while slamming into and bouncing off each other to the music. Pits are aggressive but social: It's unwritten law to help people to their feet if they fall; and it's not uncommon for moshers to pat each other on the back or even hug at a song's end as mutual recognition of endurance and toughness.
It makes the bruises, cuts and subsequent scars something they can shrug off -- chalk it up to a battle scar with a story behind it.
But not everyone walks away from a pit unscathed. Some don't walk away at all.
Paul Wertheimer, a nationally recognized concert-safety expert, said fans often equate moshing with a roller-coaster ride: There's a sense of danger, but it isn't real. This false sense of safety gets fans trampled, seriously injured or killed.
"Old-school rock fans just took it," Wertheimer said. "The new school believes they have a right to a great concert that is reasonably safe -- punk, heavy metal, rap, whatever. There has to be a standard of care for rock fans, period. No individual can protect themselves against 10,000 other people."
Startling statistics
Wertheimer's Chicago-based Crowd Management Strategies compiles an annual injuries and deaths survey from news and police reports, lawsuits, industry sources and public-information documents. It's not a complete list because there's no national information clearinghouse, he said.
Sampling last year's most dangerous events, Wertheimer surveyed 31 concerts in eight countries and counted 21 deaths, 4,567 injuries, 2,683 arrests and about $524,000 in property damage.
Still, he asserts mosh-pit culture could be made reasonably safe if the people who plan and manage concerts took common-sense steps to protect fans from those who use the pit's anonymity to injure people or sexually assault women.
Uncertain etiquette
Pits vary in volatility and mood: The crowd at a hard-core metal Slayer show is typically rougher than that at a pop-punk Sum 41 show.
Ideally, pits are a place where a communal etiquette prevails.
But fans can't rely on etiquette.
"It's not like we go to school for mosh etiquette; it's more of a mental state," Wertheimer said. "You might have the etiquette and respect it, and all your friends might respect it. But 20 people might come in and don't respect it. Who controls them?"
Wendy Perelstein, editor and publisher of Colorado Springs, Colo.-based metal magazine Mosh Pit, first saw pits when Metallica played local club DJ's in the mid-'80s. Bouncers and security didn't know how to handle it.
"They would pull people out by their hair, thinking they were fighting. People got hurt that way," Perelstein said.
In the early '90s, pits came into the public eye when such music genres as grunge, metal and punk started reaching mainstream audiences. As the masses entered pits, many left with serious injuries.
Taking note, Wertheimer started asking colleagues if they had looked at pits from a safety aspect.
"No big security bruisers, no promoters, no venue operators -- none of them were going into the pit," he said. "But they are all profiting from it.
So in 1992, at age 42, Wertheimer went into pits at every tough metal, punk and grunge show he could find -- concerts such as Slayer, Pantera, Nirvana, White Zombie, Green Day and Nine Inch Nails. He wanted to find out if there were problems, what fans were doing and how they were being treated. He logged more than 100 hours in pits.
To his surprise, he came out with the opinion that they shouldn't be banned. But he came to believe they could be safer.
Setting new standards
He presented mosher-friendly guidelines at the 1994 International Crowd Management Conference in Seattle. They include separating moshers from nonmoshers, limiting pit capacities, padding the floor and all hard surfaces, not allowing people younger than 18 into pits, banning stage diving and crowd surfing, and banning certain types of clothing and accessories worn by moshers. (Complete guidelines are posted at www.crowdsafe.com.)
He said he thinks promoters and venues should seriously consider enacting all the guidelines. The pivotal point, he said, is to separate moshers from nonmoshers.
"When litigations started going way up in the '90s and people were suing, it wasn't the hard-core moshers in the slam ," Wortheimer said. "It was the cheerleader, the A students and the other people near the stage who had paid their money to hear the music and got hit by a 250-pound crowd surfer from behind. Or they get smacked by people in the slam pit who suddenly came out of nowhere."
Sharing the blame
When fans began suing for their injuries, it told the concert industry that fans no longer would accept blame for their injuries.
Concert medic Mike Hill, who supervises emergency services at Denver-area shows, sees crowd surfing and mosh pit injuries every summer: orthopedic fractures -- mostly wrists, arms and head injuries when people holding up and propelling crowd surfers in pits drop them. Hematomas and lacerations to the face, head or scalp are also common.