Park service: 1.8M attended ceremony

WASHINGTON (AP) — The National Park Service says it will rely on a media report that says 1.8 million people attended President Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Park service spokesman David Barna said the agency did not conduct its own count. Instead, it will use a Washington Post account that said 1.8 million people gathered on the U.S. Capitol grounds, National Mall and parade route, he said.

“It is a record,” Barna said. “We believe it is the largest event held in Washington, D.C., ever.”

The Post reported the figure in Wednesday’s paper, citing an unidentified senior security official, who had access to internal estimates from many agencies.

Barna said the park service will not contest the source’s number.

“As far as we’re concerned, we’re going to say 1.8 million people attended this event,” he said.

The Post also said it used satellite images, grids, square footage and crowd density formulas to come up with an estimate of about 1 million people spanning from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial, but not including the parade route. The Associated Press had an estimate of more than 1 million people packing the National Mall and parade route, based on crowd photographs and comparisons with past events.

Experts using satellite photos and other advanced methods also have released estimates for the event.

Stephen Doig, an Arizona State University journalism professor, has estimated there were 800,000 people from the Capitol to the Lincoln Memorial. Doig did crowd estimates for the Miami Herald, where he worked for 20 years.

“There always will be different estimates,” he said. “That’s sort of the game of crowd-counting.”

Meanwhile, Carl Holmberg of Mechanicsville, Md., a retired assistant chief of the U.S. Park Police who spent a decade estimating crowds for the force, said he estimated 1.2 million people were at the Capitol, Mall and parade route.

Holmberg, who served as a consultant for the Post during the inauguration, said he does not know who provided the paper with the 1.8 million figure.

“I think it’s a little inflated,” he said. “But you know, crowd counting is not an exact science by any stretch of the imagination.”

Still, Holmberg said he questions how that number was determined.

“I would hope our history is written a little more accurately than based on an unnamed source,” he said.

Determining crowd sizes has long been controversial. The park service says Congress ordered it to stop doing crowd counts in 1997 after the agency was accused of underestimating numbers for the 1995 Million Man March.