The Accra Stadium Disaster of 2001 | Episode 79 - Doomsday: History's Most Dangerous Podcast

Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
If you're like me, when it comes to sporting events,
the only thing coming out of the stands should be
cheers and chants, and the only thing leaving the field
should be the occasional ball or a T shirt fired
from a cannon. Remember I send that Hello and welcome

(00:27):
to Doomsday, History's most dangerous podcast. Together, we are going
to rediscover some of the most traumatic, bizarre, and onspiring
but largely unheard of or forgotten disasters from throughout human
history and around the world. On today's episode, you'll find
out which sports fans try to kill Santa Claus, We'll

(00:49):
find out what stadium security personnel and a corn cop
have in common, and we'll meet the very first person
to ever come back to life after dying. On the show,
And if you were listening to this on Patreon, you'd
hear about the theater of human pain that is professional
soccer injuries. You learn about the single worst fanover reaction

(01:09):
to the loss of a game in sports history. You'd
take a listen through the incestuous and genital laden world
of European sports chants, and you would learn why urine
works better on tear gas than jellyfish things. This is
not the show, you play around kids, or while eating,
or even in mixed company. But as long as you
find yourself a little more historically engaged and learn something

(01:32):
that can potentially save your life, our work is done.
So with all that said, shoot the kids out of
the room, put on your headphones and safety glasses, and
let's begin. Ranking the worst sports fans in the world
is not an easy task. I mean, there are just
so many to choose from. I asked my wife and

(01:54):
she said, geez, that's like trying to pick your favorite
Rob Schneider movie. And I'm no expert, as I have
to ask, are there any any worse sports fans anywhere
in the world than the Philadelphia Eagles fans? Okay, well, relax,
just own it. Wait is that a Molotov cocktail? Who

(02:14):
even let you in here with that? Anyways? Listen, if
you doubt me, let me ask you this. Does your
local sports team have an on site prison? And I'm
gonna guess pretty much all of you are like no,
But all of you Philly listeners are all fun? Yeah?
And why well, let me take you back to December

(02:37):
the fifteenth, nineteen sixty eight. It all began during the
halftime show. See, the Minnesota Vikings had been handing Philly
their ass all first half, and the game was right
before Christmas. And who better to turn all those grumpy,
drunken frowns upside down than good old Saint Nick. Santa

(02:58):
Claus took to the field alongside a fifty piece band
and cheerleaders dressed as elves, all to bring joy and
good cheer to one and all. What Sannah didn't take
into account was the Eagles two and eleven season and
how bitter and resentful and drunk a determined fan base
can get. Also, actual Sannah got stuck in a snowstorm,

(03:21):
so they sent out their equipment manager or something in
what reporters and fans agreed was the worst Santa costume
in the history of American stadium sports. And the fans
didn't want second rate Christmas cheer, they wanted a better
wide receiver. Fast forward four minutes and Santa's corpse was

(03:42):
unceremoniously dragged from the field after being mercilessly pelted with
snowballs and beer bottles and cheese steak, and his last words,
You're not getting anything for Christmas. And from this we
have Eagles jail the Easter Bunny tried to make an
appearance in the nineteen seventies. He tried arriving in a

(04:03):
hot air balloon, which crashed and the crowd reaction was
strong enough to leave the Bunny running from the field
in tears. During the eighties and nineties, fans spent most
of their time throwing deer bottles and urinating on each other,
with a number of people getting cuffed and carted away
after every game. It became clear that they needed a

(04:23):
way to speed up the justice system here. During games
there was an actual judge in a courtroom outside the
prison who would hear your charges and pass sentence immediately.
On October tenth, nineteen ninety nine, in a game between
them and the Dallas Cowboys, Michael Irvin suffered a career

(04:46):
ending spinal injury after being tackled awkwardly on fake turf
to a person. All of the Eagles fans put their
hands or their hats over their hearts and quietly prayed,
offering a plot. As Irvin was removed from the field.
I'm just kidding, of course, they cheered their asses off,

(05:08):
and they threw stuff at him while he was still
laying on the field paralyzed unevile to even roll over
onto his face to protect himself. And I am sure
that more than a few of those bottles contained urine.
I can't tell you how many stories I've heard of
Eagles fans urinating and literally anywhere but the bathroom. So

(05:29):
what could be worse than urinating on a spinal injury? Well,
later in that same season, the Cowboys returned to Philadelphia,
and the Philadelphia fans got pissed about the game, well
the season really, and decided on mass to pull batteries
from their radios and whip them at the field. You
have any idea how much damage a C or a

(05:49):
d CEL battery can do. They call them whippables. They
became famous for it, and if you feel like god,
that's a lot. While there is very little that they
won't do. In twenty ten, there was a news report
about a fan who made himself purposely vomit all over
a visitor and his young daughter. They overturned cars, they

(06:10):
climb lampposts, They break store windows. They beat up fans
of opposing teams. In twenty eighteen, one fan punched out
a police horse, and in twenty twenty three they mercilessly
berated and mocked a very young cancer pation in attendance,
and all because she was there rooting for the other team.

(06:31):
Notice how I did not tell you to pack your
d cels, your Hogi cannon, and some bail money. It's
because we are not spending our time in Philadelphia today
and what we actually will see today is going to
be so much worse. So pack your giant foam hands,
your favorite cantake cloth seat pillow, and maybe a bottle
of supplementary oxygen. Today we are flying off to Ghana.

(06:55):
Ghana sits on the Atlantic coast of western Africa, squeezed
right between Togo and the Ivory Coast, with Burkina Faso
sitting to the north. If you think of Africa as
looking a little like a rhino lowering its head to
boop the island of Madagascar with its snowt Ghana sits
right about the middle of its neck. And we've been
to Africa before, and we have pointed out that it

(07:16):
is literally the cradle of civilization and thus the oldest
inhabited lands anywhere on the planet are found here. But
Ghana itself is not an old country. Before it was Ghana.
The general area was home to all kinds of states
and empires like the Ashanti. And if you recognize a name,
it is because they were the first Sub Saharan African

(07:38):
nation to crawl out from under Britain's thumb. Whether you're
drawn to the golden beaches of the Cape Coast, the
lush forests of the Volta region, or the lively streets
of Acra, the capital, Ghana is a diverse land of
vibrant cultures and stunning landscapes. Now, we're a pretty diverse
group here, but we're still going to stand out like

(07:58):
a sore thumb parade. But don't worry because Ghanians are
known for their warmth and hospitality. They can make you
feel like family from the moment you arrive, So get
ready to hear people yelling Aquaba everywhere we go. It
means welcome, but it feels like we love you. They've
got over fifty ethnic groups across Ghana, each with their

(08:19):
own customs and languages. But again, don't sweat it because
the official language here is English. And yeah, we're going
to be staying in Akra, the capital. Obviously for us,
it's exotic as hell and it's colorful, and it's busy.
It's a tropical city, and there's music and laughter and
delicious aromas on the breeze. It's got parks and shops

(08:41):
and restaurants and museums and popular beaches and colorful bazaars
and energetic nightclubs. It's basically Acra's a kind of city
that's gone at all. Just be careful about that street food.
This is just me, but I always think when I'm
learning about a new culture, I'll like to start with
the food. And one of the most popular and icy
is Kelliwilly. It's spicy fried plantains, keyword being spicy. When

(09:05):
I started this, I myself tried an entire dinner for
four of dishes at a Ganian restaurant here in Toronto,
and it really wasn't that spicy, which means they were
either trying to spare me or it was not an
authentic experience. You pick up a snack on Oxford Street
in Okra, and here's the thing. Some places they pride
themselves on making you sweat out a piece of your soul.

(09:28):
They have running challenges just to see if anyone can
finish an entire order without running into traffic and dying.
So we're not here for some food related disaster sode.
We're here for a football game. And let me clarify
for my North American listeners, non American football soccer. If
you're like me and you're from North America, you probably

(09:49):
played it in school and then just never thought about
it again. Most of the world calls it football, and
in South America they call it football. A lot of
people think of soccer as an America term, but it
actually originated in England. It fell out of favor and
got picked up here because here in America there already
was a quote football. Now for reference, American football counts

(10:12):
about four hundred million fans around the planet, which technically
makes it the largest sports property in the world. The
Alabama Crimson Tide have over three million fans by themselves
go Red Tide. But discounting people in comas and children
too young to know what their hands do, and North
Americans in any one of the other one hundred and

(10:33):
ninety four countries recognized by the United Nations, Soccer is king.
Soccer counts one in two as fans, I mean one
in every two people on Earth, regardless of any other
medical or demographic considerations, it's effectively more popular than porn,
and it's about time we attended a game together. But first,

(10:54):
as a quick tangent, may I present to you the
complete history of human sports in sixty seconds or less,
more or less, probably more. We have known for a
long time that basically as soon as proto human hominids
could stand upright, they manhandled each other. There are cave
paintings in southern Europe depicting dudes slap grappling each other

(11:16):
into submission twenty thousand years ago, and as such, mankind's
oldest and most basic form of recreational combat or sport
is wrestling. The second oldest is running. And I did
try to compile a list of human sports based on
their age, and soccer or footed ballplay comes in forty third,

(11:38):
after things like falconry and shot put, and horseback ar
tree and stick fighting. The Chinese used to kick leather
balls in the nets during the Han dynasty about twenty
three hundred years ago, and they called it kuju. Mayans
and Aztecs and Greeks and Romans all had their own
versions of the game too, But the game as we
recognize it came from eighteen hundreds England between now and then.

(12:02):
There have been versions that use your hands, or your feet,
or your hips or even your butt. There have been
versions where you kick balls made of hair or rocks
or animal bladders. Yep. My personal favorite version of soccer
comes from medieval Europe, which didn't have a lot of rules,
but did involve entire villages of people kicking an inflated

(12:22):
animal organ across a field. Now, I don't know how
you kept score when the entire village is kicking a lung,
and frankly, it sounds more like rugby. The rules as
we better understood them were codified in eighteen sixty three,
and because Britain loved boating around and being all ding dong,
we live here now, the sport moved around the world,

(12:44):
and by the twentieth century soccer had grown into the
world's most popular sport. National leagues and international competitions popped
up worldwide. You got your English Premier League, La Liga
from Spain, Italy's got Series A and more recently Major
League Soccer in North America. Americans will list a million

(13:07):
reasons why American football is vastly superior to soccer, and
Indians do the same for a cricket. Ozzies do it
for rugby, we Canadians do it for hockey. But most
Americans will tell you they would rather watch paint dry.
Just a bunch of running and passing for ninety minutes,
no strategy, no skill, no drama. So and so passes

(13:30):
to so and so. Now back to so and so,
and now back to so and so, and now it's
going the other way now. As an aside, the ninety
minute thing is my favorite part about football. They run
the clock no matter what, so there's no calling into
work the next day saying I only went to sleep
forty minutes ago because the game went into quadruple overtime,

(13:51):
like you get with a lot of American sports. Also,
they did this study recently where they said that in
a two plus hour American football game, between all the
whistles and the commercial breaks and the replays, there's only
about twelve minutes of actual play. Fans of soccer will
argue to their dying breaths that soccer is nothing but

(14:12):
strategy and elegance and unpredictability. They also point to the
fact that these people run up and down a field
the length of an airport runway back and forth for
ninety minutes, which is a feat that would have any
player in Major League Baseball wretching their cuts out. Sociologists
will tell you that soccer's appeal is deeply rooted in
the universal desire for play and teamwork and competition. They say,

(14:36):
at its core, soccer is about people coming together with
nothing more than a ball and some open space. It
transcends language, class, our background. If you want to play hockey,
your parents have to set up a GoFundMe to cover
all of the gear and the permits and the ice
time and your bail money, which is not for the kids,
that is for the parents. I never had to do

(14:57):
this with any of my children, but as far as
I can tell ani totally from talking to all my
friends who do, there is a sixty to eighty percent
chance that anyone in attendance could suddenly turn into a fuming,
raging pole that you call the cops on for punching
out some other parent. But soccer, on the other hand,
as sports go, soccer transcends cultures and boundaries. Like we said,

(15:19):
it literally brings entire nations together. There's nothing petty or
immature about it unless you're counting fake injuries. I don't
know if people in Tajikistan or Burkina Fasso or Albania
get into arguments comparing fake soccer injuries to fake pro
wrestling injuries, but the fake injuries in professional soccer are

(15:40):
trey manifik. Soccer doesn't require expensive equipment or complex rules,
whether playing for glory in front of billions at the
World Cup or with just a group of kids playing
in a dirt patch between two partially collapsed buildings, Soccer
unites people from every corner of the earth, and it
was exactly the simplicity that allowed it to become the

(16:01):
world's game. There are plenty of people who think of
it as a way of life, and hands down soccer
is the most popular sport in Ghana. And today we're
heading with about forty thousand other people to the Akra
Sports Stadium. It's home turf for Ghana's oldest surviving football club,
the Hearts of Oak or just Hearts if you're local.

(16:25):
They've been kicking balls and taken names since nineteen eleven.
They're not just one of the oldest existing teams in
the Ghana Premier League, they're also holders of the ghania
FA Cup, the CIF Championships League, the CIF Super Cup
and the CIF Confederation Cup, which makes them basically one
of the most iconic teams in Western Africa. And we

(16:47):
are here to watch the Hearts of Oak versus the
Asante Katoko. That club was created back in nineteen thirty
five by the then King of the Ashanti Kingdom, Asanta
Hena Nana ser Osei agib i'm on prempe. The second
Katoko means porcupine, so people call them the Porcupine Warriors
and they have won more than twenty league titles themselves.

(17:11):
These are two of Ghana's most successful and popular football
teams and today they are going head to head and
we got tickets and the date on those tickets is
May the ninth, two thousand and one. Welcome to the
Acres Sports Stadium. Crowds of supporters for both teams arrived
playing early to secure good seats because they were going

(17:32):
to go fast. The game drew a massive crowd. Even
the news was on board, happy to talk about the
history of beef between these two teams. Hearts of Oak
and Katoko were rivals going way back. They had a
long history of clashes, and fans believe that this rivalry
was good for the game. It creates more passion, and

(17:53):
of course, the flip side of that coin is how
bad things can get when someone finally loses. If you
ask me about my dad, I can still become pretty
emotional about losing him. But as much difficulty as I
have had with my emotions, my feelings are nothing compared
to the bottomless sorrow felt by soccer fans when their

(18:14):
team is losing. Of the forty thousand people who showed
up this day, half were going to leave in a
bad way. But we're not going to let a little
unruly fan behavior wreck our day. By six pm, the
stadium was pretty much filled to capacity with about forty
thousand fans in attendance, and that is about fifty seven
hundred Dodge caravans full of fans. And the thing about

(18:37):
today's game is that the stadium was really kind of
showing its age. It was built back in nineteen sixty two,
and it was pretty common to hear people complain about it.
The stadium was built close enough to the ocean for
the salt water on the breeze to really take the
place apart. The seats were plastic and uncomfortable. There weren't
enough stairwells, there weren't enough entrances or exits, and tunnels

(19:00):
were claustrophobically small. There were no turnstiles, just cages with gates,
and the whole thing had just become a little ugly
and outdated. There was plenty of security on hand, but
it still took forever for everyone to funnel inside. As
the game began, the stadium buzzed with energy. Every time

(19:20):
a player touched the ball, it sent waves of anticipation
through the stands, and every time the ball nears a net,
the roar of the crowd swells and then crescendos as
it falls. Both teams are aggressively protective and playing hard
to keep the ball out of their nets, and it
is an intense match. The fans are loud and passionate

(19:41):
and emotionally invested, and during the first half things are
under control. I mean, you've got some fans exchanging chance,
but nothing too bad. You not all familiar with soccer
chants In North America, people sit in the stands, they
wave their hands and they chant things like you're not
the better team, or we believe that you are unlikely

(20:02):
to win, but in other parts of the world they
chant things like your mom is your dad's sister and
we're gonna gonna murder you. In the parking lot, you
could feel the tension rising with every misshot as the
back and forth grew. As the first half drew to
a close, Hearts of oak took a one point lead,

(20:22):
and tensions remained high. Emotions were actually beginning to spill over,
which was beginning to worry both the less emotional inattendance
and security. Security had anticipated trouble, and they seemed like
they'd been waiting for it, like they were on high alert,
like they almost couldn't wait for it. A sports reporter

(20:42):
claimed there was a growing sense of unease in the stadium,
but it was brushed off as just typical for these
high stakes matches. In the second half, Hearts of Oakland
took the lead. And I remind you, if you're a
soccer detractor, you watch a basketball game and it's just
baskets skip basket until the score gets driven up to
about one hundred points each and nothing really matters until

(21:05):
the last minute or so in deciding who actually wins.
And they always end up winning by just a point
or two. In soccer, getting shut out two to one
in the second half, even if there were a full
forty minutes left on the clock, feels like a death sentence.
It's very difficult to overcome that kind of disadvantage. As

(21:26):
the first projectiles began landing near the players, less aggrieved
fans tried their best to get out of the way,
making for the stairs and heading for the parking lot.
The time was seven twenty two when the Hearts of
Oak scored for the second time, and Kotoko fans disappointment
turned into disbelief. Katoka supporters were enraged. Their porcubine blood

(21:49):
oiled over like a kettle about to whistle. So while
some people celebrated, others were livid. And I don't know
that any kind of an announcement over the PA was
going to calm anyone down. I don't know how one
calms down, not many people at one time. Maybe mass
hignosis or some kind of sleep ray. But this was

(22:10):
two thousand and one and those tools were not yet available.
It wasn't quite pandemonium, but it was getting there. Fans
could hear their pulse quickening in their ears, and began
cascading over seats, climbing down row after row, making their
way closer to the field level. They couldn't actually get
onto the field because the stadium had lined it with

(22:31):
a two meter high fence with barbed wire and spikes
at the top. I should point out Donna didn't have
that same hooligan energy that haunts European soccer matches, but
they could figure out how to muster up some real
guff during these big matches. Other fans determined to make
their displeasure known began ripping apart seats in their anger.
The seats were old and plastic and could be ripped

(22:53):
out of the concrete pretty easily, and they called them throwables.
Debris rained down on the field while tried to breach
the security barriers, but not all the fans obviously. Most
just wanted to leave peacefully. But instead of rows orderly
all queuing out into the stairwells, the stands devolved into
clumps of agitated people gathered out and around the exits.

(23:15):
I mean, you don't have to tell me twice that
a situation is going south and it's time to test
the distance on the remote car starter. I'd be right
there with them, but only to a point. See, the
problem today wasn't just that too many people were trying
to leave too soon. The problem today with that too
many people were trying to leave through too few exits.

(23:37):
The station had been designed with eight exit stairwells, but
only six had been actually built, and they weren't the best.
They were only about a meter wide, that's like three feet.
Imagine being pinned by crowds in such a claustrophobic space.
And the stairwells had these metal railings at the bottom,
which created a kind of a bottleneck. See what about

(23:58):
half of those people discovered were that even though the
stairwells led to the tunnel, and the tunnel led to
the doors, and the doors had a big exit sign
over them, and so in your imagination, you just push
the bar handle on the door and it will swing
wide and turn into a beautiful egress with only about
two pounds of force. Well, turns out that's a lie.

(24:19):
They were supposed to be. Instead, they ended up with
these narrow cages with gates, like I said, And what
they discovered was that those doors to the cages were
temporary walls. When an escalator breaks down, it just turns
into stairs. But when a door breaks down, it becomes
a wall. So they created the impression of exits, but

(24:39):
none of that actual door opening motion that allowed for
such a feat to occur. And it was hard to
tell people fifty deep to back off because I know
it says exit, but it's not as hard to communicate
at a distance, especially when you and everyone around you
is going ah the entire time. Patreons will remember from

(25:01):
the time that we talked about the ten cent beer
Night disaster in Cleveland back in nineteen seventy four, there
comes this point, a tipping point, if you will, where
the atmosphere changes from ordinary tension to dangerous volatility. And
at seven point thirty, just like clockwork, the match was over.
The Hearts of Oak secured a two to one win

(25:23):
over Kotoko, a time for joy and celebration. Wait, was
that a tear gas canister flying overhead? Oh? Yes, cue
the screaming. It was at this point that the police
began launching tear gas into the stands. Attendees described im
media panic and disorientation and coughing and wheezing and crying

(25:46):
when tear gas comes into contact with the moisture from
your eyes, or your skin or your lungs, it produces
hydrochloric acid, which irritates the hell out of them. You
got your blindness, you're choking, you're burning and your skin
and even a little exposure can last about half an hour.
And the gas worked perfectly as designed. I was about

(26:08):
to say as planned, but I don't know that there
was really a plan here. That gas was overwhelming. I
forgot to mention. Outside of North America, people really liked
letting off flares during soccer matches and it creates this
incredible glow on the TV and it usually ends up
filling the stands with a nice thick cloud of smoke.

(26:29):
Between that and the tear gas, everything had finally arrived
in a state of pandemonium. People started running, trying to escape,
but they found themselves with nowhere to go, and worse,
they couldn't breathe. The gas spread rapidly through the stands,
sending fans surging towards the exits. People began to trample
over one another in a desperate attempt to escape the fumes.

(26:53):
Bodies were piling up near the gates. People were screaming
for help, but there was no escape, So so you
flew all the way to Ghana to see an international
football game, when instead of just flicking the lights on
and off to get you to all go home, they
start blasting tear gas into the stands. Would you know
what to do? It begins with people pressed into place

(27:18):
against the doors by people pushing from behind, who are
themselves being pushed from behind by even more people pushing
them from behind. Doorways, hallways, bridges, they're perfect places for
choke points to happen, and this makes them the most
dangerous place to be in any kind of a stampede
or crush like this. The disaster was set into motion

(27:39):
the moment the first body fell. When a person falls
in a dense crowd, the person directly behind them is
treated to a better view, at least momentarily. See. Nature
hates a vacuum, and that small void that gets created
above where you were just standing is almost instantly filled
by people being pushed from behind, And the moment that
person behind you reach out to brace themselves, it's already over.

(28:03):
They fall, and now somebody falls into their space directly
on top of them, and technically both of them are
on top of you. Those at the back of the
crowd continue pushing forward, not realizing that those at the
front are in trouble and it's impossible to resist. So
all that you can do is brace. When someone falls

(28:23):
on you, they can blow all the air out of
you in one shot, and with the weight on your
diaphragm increasing by the second, you are not going to
be able to get that next breath. The key to
your safety in any crowd experience is a not to
be in the middle of one. But no judgment here
it happens, which is why I always tell you when

(28:44):
you arrive somewhere new, try to make a mental note
of all the exits, and in a panic, you're going
to try to exit the exact same way you came in,
but that's not always going to be the safest option.
And b to keep your arms up and fold it
in front of you like a or like a boxer.
You do this and it creates the space to move

(29:04):
your chest and to keep breathing. Now, being in a
crowd crush is going to be the hardest physical endurance
test of your entire life, So conserve your energy. Don't
bother pushing against the crowd. You're not strong enough to
affect it, and don't even bother yelling or screaming. Save
all your strength because adrenaline will not last forever. And

(29:25):
on that. The downside is that adrenaline may make things
feel like you're in slow motion. But you can use
this to your advantage. If you're trapped in a crowd
and you haven't fallen yet, there's something else that you
can try, which I call the accordion method for personal extraction,
which sounds kind of like a bowel thing, but I'm

(29:46):
sticking with it. When you're in a crowd doing this
kind of thing, you will notice that people tend to
push in surges, kind of a heave ho, heave ho,
And in the surge is where all that exertion is
the strongest, but done during that little hoe phase, very briefly,
the crowd kind of relaxes a little bit before people
begin pushing again. It's almost like it creates this little

(30:10):
moment of space between people, but only for a moment.
And if you can understand and recognize this pattern, you
can use this timing to get in a couple of
steps sideways, keep those arms up, keep them braced, and
then just wait for the next wave or surge to
try to get in another couple of steps. It's slow,
and all you want to do is work your way

(30:30):
diagonally and sideways until the pressure begins to let up
enough that you can finally make your escape. The further
that you can get away from the center of the calamity,
the less pressure that you're going to feel from the
number of people squeezing into the same space. So you
work your way diagonally and sideways until that pressure begins
to let up enough that you can finally make your escape.

(30:52):
I have to say, there may be nothing you can
actually do in this kind of situation, but that is
a terrible attitude to go into it with, so just
remember to keep your arms and your chin up. It
is completely clear that the situation was now out of
control at this point. Some police even tried to help

(31:14):
rescue people from the crowd, but it was a little
late for that. Many fans have been left trapped or
suffocating under piles of bodies, which I have to say, sadly,
is a slow and terrifying way to have to die.
As the new body arrived at the pile, pressed on
by panicking hordes from behind who didn't know that there

(31:34):
was no exit, the weight increased, and more than just
the physical pain, the fear of listening to people screaming
for their lives is itself an actual torture. The sounds
of their screams weakening and petering out is a different
kind of a torture. It was a full half an
hour before emergency responders arrived, again too late to help.

(31:56):
The body is of those who died from asphyxiation and
trampling injuries were pulled from the stadium, and survivors were
forced to file past rows of lifeless bodies as they
laid stacked near the exits. By the time the smoke cleared,
one hundred and twenty six people died, with another seventy injured.
So what happened? Well, where do you want to begin.

(32:20):
The public and the media were all, the police are
trying to kill us. They've gone mad. But the problems
that day were twofold. People wanted to know why tear
gas was deployed in a crowded area and why the
exits were locked, and so a commission was set up
to investigate. Newspapers in the media immediately criticized the firing

(32:41):
of the tear gas for creating the lethal stampede. Testimonies
from survivors and families victims painted a picture of negligent homicide. Obviously,
they know their job better than us, and I'm not
going to say that they weren't anticipating crowd disturbances, but
geezus done as now. Sports council actually had asked the

(33:02):
police to provide extra security that night, and they did
up to and including stationing riot control police officers around
the stadium. You ever heard of acorn cop? He was
this Okaloosa County, Florida Sheriff's deputy, Jesse Hernandez, And this
guy unloaded an entire clip of AMMO into a locked

(33:22):
patrol car holding a handcuffed suspect. And he did it
because he thought he'd been shot. He thought that he'd
been shot because he tried doing some John Claude van
Dam but ended up somersaulting onto his own duty belt
and pulled something in his hip. He thought he'd been
paralyzed and started yelling shots fired. Well, he wasn't paralyzed,

(33:44):
He just hadn't limbered up in about three years, and
so somersaulting away and air raiding his own vehicle because
an acorn, which, if you don't know, is a small nut,
not much bigger than the top of your thumb. Well,
an acorn fell from a tree and bounced off the
roof of his car. Acorn cop got fired because he

(34:05):
got all fired up and fired on an unarmed suspect.
And why do cops do this? Why do they overreact
this way? Well, long story short, they're programmed too. They've
heard endless stories of some innocent old grandma pulling a
nine from their purse, and they just don't trust anyone
or anything. And it's not just a Florida problem, it's

(34:25):
a global phenomenon. So did the police an acra overreact, Well,
they didn't like the look of the crowd and they
decided to play keep away. When the police normally play
keep away with a crowd, they're probably just standing in
the line, holding up riot shields and batons and marching
forward one foot at a time, shouting we're just gonna

(34:45):
swing these clubs and if you get hit, it's your
own fault. But they're not always that way. Sometimes they
just start lobbing to your gas, which is good for
keeping people away, sort of when you lob a volley
of rubber bullet side of crowd. They tend to stumble
away from the source of the affliction. But when you
fog an area with tear gas, people don't just politely

(35:08):
corral to leave. They are blinded and panicked, and they
will run in any available direction. A panic and stampede
ensued as fans tried to flee the irritating fumes. Oh,
and I should mention, just to confirm, they also did
fire rubber bullets and flash bangs. If you do not
know what a flash bang grenade is, it is basically

(35:30):
a grenade that explodes with a magnesium based flash and
a sound as loud as the Krakatau of volcanic explosion.
They will cause temporary blindness and loss of hearing, and
loss of balance and just a whiff a panic. Now
I believe I was just telling you about some malfunctioning exits.
It's a pretty common practice on the show that different

(35:53):
venues control crowd movements and prevent people from sneaking in
by locking extra doors or fire exits. Of course, building
code state you're gonna need x number of exits for
every x number of people. The reason the code exists
in the first place is because when you have fewer
exits than people, bottlenecks of people will form by the exits.

(36:15):
As the stampede grew, people struggled over the crowded stairways.
Some tripped and fell, and others tried to help them up,
but the crush of people either pushed them away or
threw them to the ground as well. Either way, once
you've tripped, it's only a matter of seconds before someone
falls on top of you, and another and another. And
you ever tried planking, well, you ever tried planking with

(36:38):
seven people on your back and legs. One man survived
by sticking his head through a staircase railing for air,
while the rest of them was neatly flattened. And these
people were trapped like this for almost an hour and
a half without help, and good luck holding that plank.
For ninety minutes, people died. Imagine not dying, but carrying

(36:59):
the weight of these people who had already asphyxiated and
now lay as dead weight on top of you, urinating
and defecating from all the pressure, and the fact that
death releases all of your sphincters, holding all that in
from their duty to withhold your duty and I promise
you I am not saying any of this to be
COI or funny. There's just nothing funny to be had here.

(37:20):
And I'm sorry, folks. Not every disaster is hilarious. What
those people went through was an unimaginable experience and something
that I would wish on no one. The one hundred
and twenty six people who died that day, one hundred
and sixteen died from compressive or traumatic asphyxia, which, if
you don't know, means that their chest cavities were effectively

(37:43):
crushed inwards and they suffocated. The remaining ten died from trauma.
The Ghana Institute of Architects called the stadium a death trap,
and actually the problem was threefold. With so many people
trying to leave, Even if first responder had been standing by,
which they weren't, they would have had an impossible time

(38:04):
trying to swim upstream, so to speak, to reach the
people in immediate danger. It took more than an hour
for rescuers to arrive, and by then it's well, where
do we even start. In fact, there were more than
three folds to the problem that day, in no particular order.
The lack of safety oversight, poor emergency services, lack of

(38:25):
safety staff, structural shortcomings, poor maintenance, a lack of communication,
and my not favorite no least favorite aspect. Rather than
divide the injured and the dead amongst various hospitals and morgues,
a single hospital kept the bodies, but because they didn't
have the capacity for that many bodies, they were left

(38:46):
to decompose before they could be prepared for burial. You
got to remember it's hot and Ghana, you can't leave
a body in a non refrigerated area. Military police then
escorted relatives in groups of twenty two to an noticed
board outside the morgue to look through pictures of the deceased.
People collapse with grief, sobbing and screaming the names of

(39:08):
their loved ones. The bodies were later placed on the
floor of a large room to aid an identification, but
even with their conditioning, it was a little too late
to do anything to mask the smell. President of Ghana,
John Kuffor addressed the nation. He said that six police
officers in charge of security at the stadium that day
had been suspended, and he made it sound very clear

(39:30):
that if they found anyone who really overflecs that day,
they were going to feel the full weight of the law,
and he appealed for restraint. He said, let us not
rush to judgment. I am aware of the anger many
of you feel about the conduct of the police, but
the eyes of the world are upon us, so let
us show the world that we are a dignified and

(39:51):
peace loving people. Let us all be united and support
each other in this moment of national grief. The government
also set up a co made of religious leaders to
console the Barris families and a funeral committee to help
arrange burials. Kufor said the government would pay the medical
expenses of survivors. Ghana's soccer federation indefinitely postponed all Premier

(40:15):
League matches. There wasn't a single Ghanian who believed the
police weren't responsible and aggressive and excessive, because this wasn't
even the first time that this had happened. Parts of
Oak had a similar incident playing against Esperance of Tunisia
in the Africans Champion League final in December. At that game,
police fired tear gas on unruly fans during the match too.

(40:38):
The only difference was that one didn't turn into a
full on disaster, which gave the authorities a kind of
a mental pass, like normalcy bias. We pumped tear gas
into the stands and no one died, so we can
continue using this tactic because no one will ever die.
In the end, the official inquiry did blame the police
for overreacting with res and indiscriminate behavior. It went on

(41:03):
to accuse some officers of dishonesty and indefensible laxity, which
sounds a little bit like malingering to me. Six officers
were charged with one hundred and twenty seven counts of manslaughter.
But what have we learned from every single time a
government is forced to hold their own people accountable? From

(41:23):
even hearing me say that, you can pretty much already
guess how the trial went down. The court ruled that
the prosecution had failed to make their case, and not
just that. They found that the asphyxia was caused by
the stampede and not the tear gas, so it didn't
matter how the gas got there. All that mattered was
that it was their own fault. So put up a

(41:46):
finger if your legal system sucks. The Commission of Inquiry
also recommended improvements to stadium security and first aid facilities.
They also suggested nationwide rapid response teams should be set
up because God knows they weren't going to address the cause,
just the response. The Acro Sports Stadium itself was renovated

(42:06):
in two thousand seven. A statue was created where wreaths
were laid and memorials are held every year to remember
those lost on that terrible day. The statue itself appears
to depict an exhausted man carrying a dead man on
his back, and the title is inscribed, I am my
Brother's keeper in honor of the victims. In twenty sixteen,

(42:29):
an annual memorial May Ninth Cup football competition was created
and the memorial events came to be themed Embrace the Day.
Fans who attend matches of the stadium no longer sing
about your mum or your bum. They now chant never again.
The Acre Stadium disaster was the result of a perfect

(42:50):
storm inadequate crowd control panic exacerbated by the tear gas
and the rubber bullets and the flash bangrenades and the
locked exits that created the deadly bottlenecks. Basically excessive police
force in a death trap of a location created by
poor stadium management. The Acros Stadium disaster of two thousand

(43:11):
and one, killed one hundred and twenty six people, making
it the worst stadium disaster in African history. Now I
get to tell you one of the more original and
unusual anecdotes that has ever been my privilege to share

(43:34):
on this show. A man named Abdul Mohammad had been
one of the fans caught up in the chaos that day,
and according to reports, he had been trampled in the
stadium and by the time emergency services found him, he
was dead. His body was taken to the morgue. And
here's where it gets good. You know that scene from

(43:55):
the horror movie where the morgue worker is going about
their duties and then suddenly one of the corpses just
sits up, sometimes still inside the body bag. Yeah, Abdul
was that guy, but in real life more workers noticed
him moving around still sealed in his body bag, and
body bags just normally don't do that. They actually call

(44:15):
it the Lazarus syndrome. It's where a person shows signs
of life after death. It's actually the origin of vampire mythology.
He used to get corpses and they'd fill up with
gas and maybe they'd burp or speak or sit up
or give you the finger, and people assumed that they
were the undead, but rather than stabbing Abdula in the
heart or cutting off his head, they opened the bag

(44:36):
to find a very confused man. What happened was he
just got knocked silly, but it left him unable to
communicate or move, so he was mistaken for a corpse man.
He got treated as such. Abdulla Muhammad became part legend
and part miracle, but he also became the very first
zombie in doomsday history. If you were lucky uy enough

(45:00):
not to wake up in a bag or a fridge today,
why not celebrate your uninterrupted lifespan by considering becoming a
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(45:21):
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(45:42):
new episode is worth it, you can learn more at
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You can reach out to me on Twitter, Instagram, and
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(46:05):
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(46:27):
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(46:50):
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(47:11):
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The Accra Stadium Disaster of 2001 | Episode 79

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.css-14f5ked{margin:0;word-break:break-word;display:-webkit-box;-webkit-box-orient:vertical;box-orient:vertical;-webkit-line-clamp:2;overflow:hidden;}The Accra Stadium Disaster of 2001 | Episode 79