Lessons from stampede

We feel deeply sorry for the death of eight students in a stampede on Monday night at a middle school in the city of Xiangxiang, Central China's Hunan province. There is nothing we can do to bring back the lost lives, but there is something we can and must do to prevent similar disasters.

There is, of course, a gnawing feeling of what-ifs: What if the staircase of the school building were built much wider? The building does have three other staircases but the students swarmed through this one simply because it was raining outside and it was the nearest to their dorms. What if teachers had paid enough attention to the safety of students and supervised the evacuation when it was raining hard? What if the students had received enough training for evacuating a building in an emergency?

In the design of school buildings, particular attention must be paid to the safe evacuation of students in an emergency. In the several school stampedes that have taken place in the past couple of years, narrow staircases were seen as the direct culprit. An investigation is needed to find out whether staircases in all school buildings are safe enough for the evacuation of students.