Look at the people in yellow vests and what do you see? With the exception of one individual in the foreground walking towards others, all the rest are bunching up. This is a natural reflex, and you see it not only among lesser trained event staff but among more seasoned public servants. In times of distress and confusion, even those trained to know better tend to stick together, sharing information, perhaps jointly working out triage and crowd control priorities in the absence of clear direction or working communications. Indeed, social attachment theory proponents could argue that this clustering is to be expected especally in disasters, when people seek the proximity of familiar persons and places (per Anthony R. Mawson, Psychiatry (68)2 Summer 2005, "Understanding mass panic and other collective responses to threat and disaster").
Only in the most disciplined units of combat-hardened troops do we find people with the capacity to resist the clustering impulse and to position themselves sufficiently away from each other to avoid making an easy target. As an old military sergeant once used to spout at unexpected intervals, "Don't bunch up. One grenade will get you all."
If there is a little good news to take away from all this, one bit is certainly that whoever was behind the bombing at the marathon's finish line did not carry out the kind of secondary strike that succeeded in targeting first responders. Otherwise, the death toll would have assuredly been higher.
-- Nick Catrantzos
