Rhode Island Comic Con Oversold, Overcrowded 126
New submitter RobertJ1729 writes The Rhode Island Comic Con (RICC) is in the middle of a complete meltdown as hundreds are turned away at the door or denied reentry due to the event organizers selling far more tickets than the venue can accomodate. The Providence Journal reports that "According to Providence Fire Chief David Soscia, too many people were being let in at a time and the organizers were not correctly counting them. That led to over-congested areas in the building which has a maximum capacity of 17,000 people." Meanwhile the Rhode Island Comic Con Facebook page is being flooded with comments from angry attendees describing chaos both inside and out of the convention center. RICC initially posted, "Hello RICC fans! WE ARE NOT OVERSOLD!," and promised to honor tomorrow tickets sold for today. That post generated several hundred angry comments before eventually being deleted (though it survives in part on RICC's twitter feed). Commenters are alleging that RICC is deleting negative Facebook comments. Users are tweeting at #ricomicconfail2014 to vent their frustration.
Re:Operative word "Con"? (Score:4, Interesting)
There are counties of some states that are larger than Rhode Island.
San Bernardino County [wikipedia.org] is bigger than Rhode Island, Connecticut, and Massachusetts combined. You could squeeze in Delaware as well.
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Rep Hank Johnson is very concerned about this (Score:2)
I imagine representative Hank Johnson (D-GA) is very concerned about the number of people in one place in Rhode Island.
http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=v... [youtube.com]
Re:tipping point (Score:4, Informative)
While you're joking, the official name on legal documents is "The State of Rhode Island and Providence Plantations".
Providence is actually the "mainland" while Rhodes Island is, well, an island.
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Re:tipping point (Score:5, Informative)
Rhode Island is neither a road nor an island. Discuss.
The original Rhode Island settlers (kicked out of Massachusetts because of their religious beliefs) settled on an island that is now called Aquidneck Island [wikipedia.org].
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You can always sell more tickets... In fact, they still have tickets up for sale.
Citation please? I'm not doubting you, just please provide the evidence for all of us.
Re:Oversold? (Score:4, Informative)
You are doubting, but that's a good thing. No need to lie about it
Follow the ticket links on their page and you'll end up here: http://www.ticketmaster.com/rhode-island-comic-con-sunday-providence-rhode-island-11-02-2014/event/01004B9BF599505C?artistid=1743904&majorcatid=10005&minorcatid=105&tm_link=artist_msg-0_01004B9BF599505C
That ticket is for Sunday. All the Saturday tickets end in dead ends, but it's Sunday now so I don't know if they turned them off or if they expired due to the date. The main site also still lists a few packages for sale. If the tickets mention that only a certain number of people can be at the convention at the same time and that having a ticket does not mean you will get in, then fine. If not, then they really screwed up and should have never sold more than the capacity amount of tickets.
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I'm not doubting, just asking for evidence. And you're right: they're still selling tickets.
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I'm not doubting, just asking for evidence.
A dictionary is only a couple of clicks away. You're no longer doubting, but you did, or you wouldn't have asked for evidence, unless you're a superasshole.
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Asking for evidence is doubting? Not asking for evidence requires faith.
i would rather doubt then place my faith in an AC
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Asking for evidence is doubting?
Yes.
Not asking for evidence requires faith.
Metoo.
i would rather doubt then place my faith in an AC
Right, and I would rather understand that doubt is not inherently negative than claim I wasn't doubting when I was doubting
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"I'm gonna do something bad but I'd rather avoid the consequences, kthx."
This seems to be the prevailing stratagem these days, proactive ass-covering.
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People are desperate for culture (Score:3, Interesting)
I went to the Maker Faire last year and it was insanely crowded. It was the most crowded place I had ever been, hour long waits to get food or do just about anything. I have been to healh and wellness conferences where they charge $1500 for three days and they were extremely well attended. It seems like any bad art or artisinal toothpick festival with beer and parking will be mobbed.
The peak of insanity for all this was the San Francisco Ramen Festival. People stood in line for multiple hours to eat a freakin' bowl of ramen. Just check out this ridiculous reddit thread:
http://www.reddit.com/r/sanfrancisco/comments/2b5z1a/at_japantowns_ramen_festival/
Seriously, I've just given up trying to go to events. If it's advertised and doesn't have a huge entrance fee and/or absurdly niche audience it will be a madhouse.
Re:People are desperate for culture (Score:5, Funny)
Seriously, I've just given up trying to go to events. If it's advertised and doesn't have a huge entrance fee and/or absurdly niche audience it will be a madhouse.
Like those rave parties, when one had to bring a blue sock to a specific parking attendant to get the address of the convenience store behind which a midget dressed like Mickey Mouse sold a map to the event that could only be seen under uv light.
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Too mainstream. Everyone's got a blue sock.
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Indeed.
Smaller local stuff is the way to go. The big cons are ridiculously overcrowded. I guess some people are into that and you do get to meet some of the bigger names, but not worth it in my opinion.
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Too bad, I used to really enjoy it.
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You can't have too many weight-challenged bearded guys dressed as wonder woman in one place. What's wrong with you?
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Sounds like the daily train commute I used to do in Japan. Have you ever seen those videos of white-gloved train station workers cramming passengers into the train? Every morning for three years. If I didn't have my book up by my face when I got in, there was literally not enough room to get it out of my bag and raise it.
Not that unpleasant when you are crammed against high school girls and OLs ("office ladies", female office workers), but when it's a 50-year-old oyaji who just threw his cigarette away befo
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Well... (Score:1)
They could offer something to those turned away at the door. Do they have a ball pit?
What did they expect? (Score:5, Funny)
Rhode Island is tiny.
Next time maybe they'll have it in a larger state.
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First hand report (Score:5, Informative)
I was *at* the con when this went down, was in the rotunda where the marshal/police were, and listened in on all the conversations. The fire marshal is completely to blame for this, he's an idiot.
To reduce the number of people, the fire marshal ordered anyone leaving the con could not reenter for any reason, and decided that going to the ground floor constituted leaving the con... despite having con functions on the ground floor.
Volunteers and con workers who went to the ground floor to connect with the main desk couldn't get back in, vendors who went to their cars couldn't get back to their stalls, program participants (celebrities with scheduled appearances) couldn't make their appointments, people who had paid $$$ for a photo-op with the celebs couldn't make their appointments, and so on.
I innocently went down the escalator to check out the [ground floor] kids area and was marooned. No jacket, no cell phone, and no car keys to get into my vehicle and it was 'friggin cold outside. I saw one woman who couldn't get back in to her special-needs child, I saw one man who came down for wheelchair and couldn't bring it back up.
A better solution would have been to stop letting new people in, while letting the steady stream of outgoers reduce the number. There was no fire, no emergency, no need to be a complete prick to people who were already at the con.
This was the fire marshal being ignorant and inflexible. He's an idiot.
Re:First hand report (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:First hand report (Score:5, Insightful)
That sounds exactly like a fire marshal who wasn't sufficiently bribed.
Well, you're probably joking but we are talking about Rhode Island, the most notoriously corrupt state in the Northeast, after maybe Pennsylvania. Some say [newsweek.com] that on a per capita basis it's the most corrupt state in the country.
I had a colleague whose father was an electrician in Rhode Island. When he saw what the state was paying to maintain the lights on a bridge near his house he figured he could easily do it for less. The contract came up to bid and when he found out the amount he'd have to pay in bribes, he realized he couldn't afford to do it.
I personally like Providence quite a bit. I think Federal Hill is great,Waterfire is a blast, and many times we drove down to take our kids to the zoo or the Children's Museum. But I wouldn't do business in the state. It's not worth the hassle.
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But I wouldn't do business in the state. It's not worth the hassle.
Their legislators are working on banning businesses, at which point they can resurrect Chairman Mao and disband themselves, for a state of nirvana.
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The fire marshal is completely to blame for this, he's an idiot.
If the organizers had been doing their job, the fire marshal would have never gotten involved.
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Please show us your qualifications pertaining to the application of building capacity laws. As far as I can tell you are making assumptions and stating them as fact. The fire marshal probably opened up the building when he considered the numbers to be close enough to be correct. I bet for the rest of the day the organizers kept very close count on the number of people in the building. One of the reasons the number of entrances and exits are limited is so that people can be counted. HAd the fire marshal just
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Unless it wasn't actually overcapacity to begin with...
I have no idea if that's the case but it is a plausible explaination.
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There is no way the fire martial would have done anything if they were not over capacity.
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There is no way he SHOULD have, but SHOULD and DID are different things. I have seen bizarre things happen when a minor government official finds hhimself in a position of power.
I have no idea if that was or was not the case but the era of assuming government officials must know what they're doing and and be doing what's right died a long time ago.
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The Rhode Island Convention Hall is a multi-story complex. It was never designed to be put into lockdown for a headcount.
Multi-story buildings do have capacity requirements. If you have a fire, or a small explosion, you could easily have the crowd stampeding itself at the exit points, or on the stairs.
It was never designed to be put into lockdown
The place wasn't placed on lockdown. A lockdown would imply that people were not allowed to leave. Also, all buildings and all rooms in a building are "designed" with capacity in mind and fire safety in mind. That's why it takes architects, structural engineers, building inspectors, and fire safety inspectors to sign off on eve
Re:First hand report (Score:4, Informative)
A better solution would have been to NOT SELL TICKETS TO MORE PEOPLE THAN YOUR VENUE CAN ACCOMMODATE.
I know it's a wild and crazy idea but it just might be crazy enough to work.
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The organizers apparently work at an airline in real life. ;-)
While I realize your statement is mad in jest, had they worked at an airline they may not have had such a problem. Airlines are actually very good at capacity control; what throws them off is usually weather or mechanical issue start disrupt the flow of passengers. When that happens they have to redo schedules and often will cancel flights, even when a plane is at the gate, to maximize the number of people getting to their destination.
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I just flew across the country last week so I'm getting a kick out of your reply. When I bought my ticket, I picked a good aisle seat so I wouldn't have to deal with the ass/crotch conundrum. (I forgot that seats are so close now it's more of a "can you please get up so I can go take a leak?" conundrum because there's no way you can fit past a seated person in steerage these days.) So the night before departure I go to print my boarding passes. My assigned seat on the long leg of the trip had been unass
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A better solution would have been to NOT SELL TICKETS TO MORE PEOPLE THAN YOUR VENUE CAN ACCOMMODATE.
I know it's a wild and crazy idea but it just might be crazy enough to work.
While some overselling is reasonable since everyone won't come at the same time nor stay the entire day, at some point you need to cutoff sales because the sheer numbers of tickets sold would indicate a high probability of capacity issues. It sounds like they sold at least 20% more than the previous year; a simple analysis of traffic patterns would have told them what the likelihood of reaching capacity would be and indicate when to cutoff sales to avoid problems.
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While some overselling is reasonable since everyone won't come at the same time nor stay the entire day
Why is it reasonable? If customers pay for the right to be there the entire day, why should the promoter be allowed to gamble on whether a critical mass of attendees will exceed the building's capacity? If promoters want to bet on margins and keep a negative float, they should get a license to trade financial instruments.
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While some overselling is reasonable since everyone won't come at the same time nor stay the entire day
Why is it reasonable? If customers pay for the right to be there the entire day, why should the promoter be allowed to gamble on whether a critical mass of attendees will exceed the building's capacity? If promoters want to bet on margins and keep a negative float, they should get a license to trade financial instruments.
Done properly it has no impact on the customer experience. While you cannot accurately predict what any one person will do you can get a pretty good idea of aggregate behavior; so identify your peak and sell accordingly. If 90% of the purchased ticket is the max load then selling selling extra ticket that take them close to the capacity is reasonable. With enough historical data they can avoid issues and maximize attendance revenue. Problems only arise if they oversell without planning properly.
Re:First hand report (Score:4, Informative)
A better solution would have been to stop letting new people in, while letting the steady stream of outgoers reduce the number.
What a wonderful comment from someone who has never dealt with liability issues. Had there been a fire when there were too many people in the building then the fire marshal and the state would have been liable. Your solution may have taken hours to get to the legal levels. The fire marshal's decision was the quickest way to get the numbers down without emptying the building.
This was the fire marshal being ignorant and inflexible. He's an idiot.
The fire marshal was doing his job and doing it correctly. He even compromised. He could have shut the whole thing down, removed everyone from the building and had them all re-enter and be counted properly.
Blame the organizers who did not follow the law and count the number of people coming in to ensure that the building capacity was not exceeded.
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Had there been a fire when there were too many people in the building then the fire marshal and the state would have been liable.
Right, so therefore...
Your solution may have taken hours to get to the legal levels.
So did his. And yet it was abusive.
Applying rules inflexibly leads to abuse. That's not doing one's job, which in the case of a public figure is to serve the needs of the public.
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Applying rules inflexibly leads to abuse
How was it abusive? Would it have been better to shut the con down, remove everyone and start over? If you are talking about the wheel chair, disabled person, etc, I doubt that the OP saw the whole story and how it was resolved. How does he know the people were not lying? How does he know that a few minutes later they were not escorted in by staff to do what was needed and then escorted out?
So did his.
There is a big difference between an orderly decline in numbers and the OP's solution that may not have reduced the nu
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Wow, an insult from an AC. I am going to cry myself to sleep now./sarcasm
If you don't have intelligent things to add to the conversation then STFU.
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If the con had more people in that room/floor/whatever than fire occupacy allowed, the blame is 100% on them, not the marshal.
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In both your examples, there were multiple failures, not just capacity. The first included padding the stage with flammable materials, using improper fireworks for indoor performance, having bouncers deny exits "reserved for the band" and having the alternative (non-front door) fire exits underutilized as people crushed others for the front door exit. Yes overcrowding was an issue, as it was 15% overbooked; but, it wasn't the 15% more people that was the primary cause. If only one of the many mistakes tu
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I've been to plenty of very large events with at capacity crowds (but never over) and the fire marshals never had to get involved. I think this is simply a case of the convention staff mismanaging the event and you're blaming the wrong guy.
When you read other accounts, it's not hard to see that the upper floor was way too crowded. He didn't consider the lower floor being outside of the convention. He did see it as one less person in an overcrowded area.
It is rarely a good idea to have an over-capacity cro
Firemans logic (Score:4, Interesting)
That could well actually have been the CORRECT thing to do.....
Don't forget that the fire marshalls job is NOT to be concerned about the paticular event, he is being paid to be constantly asking himself "what if a fire breaks out in the next 5 minutes", can we evacuate in time? Separated people and unavailable car keys rate some way down his priorities!
Large buildings (Like convention centers) have a multi tiered structure of occupancy limits, it is in no way as simple as saying the capacity is 20,000 or whatever.
Typically what you find is that the ground floor has direct escape routes and thus can support a lot of bodies, but that there is a rather tighter limit on total occupancy for floors above ground because these are limited (Sometimes severely) by the available exit stair capacity.
Each floor then has a capacity, and each room has a capacity.
Now the kicker is that it is NOT a case that the number within the room is within capacity makes everything ok, but that ALL of the numbers leading to that room have to be ok.
Add to this that the fire marshall will have seen the Station Nightclub / Great White video nasty, and may well even have been involved in pulling the bodies out, and that he is looking at a conference cente with an uncommon fuel load in it, and I can see a fairly hard line being taken.
My guess is that he saw the numbers on the upper floors well above the available exit capacity from the upper floors even while total building occupancy was below the limit and got the numbers back to a safe level the reasonably fast way, not IMHO unreasonable, and no reason to stop more attendes arriving, as long as they stay on the ground floor (And as long as the ground floor is within capacity limits itself).
Sounds to me like blame probably lies with whoever was running the stewards who should have stopped people heading upstairs once the upper floors number was reached (Any, yes, I know stewarding these things is a pain in the arse), and on whoever did the planning for crowd capacity and occupancy failing to take the upper floor numbers into account.
Were there clearly defined show stop and area clearence procedures in place?
Regards, Dan (Who used to do major events professionally (In europe not the US so the terminology probably varies a bit, but the principles are pretty much universal).
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This.
Although the fire was a minor one, and self-limited to a single light fixture, BronyCon 2012 had one break out in the middle of a talk. Everyone left in orderly fashion, the fire department came in (and that's a
Re:First hand report (Score:4, Informative)
I was *at* the con when this went down, was in the rotunda where the marshal/police were, and listened in on all the conversations. The fire marshal is completely to blame for this, he's an idiot.
It sounds like the organizers didn't properly keep track of occupancy levels and overloaded some floors, resulting in the fire marshall stepping in to fix the situation. The real idiots are the organizers who failed to be sure they could properly control the crowds; especially since they knew the number of tickets sold and could gauge expected attendance and plan accordingly.
To reduce the number of people, the fire marshal ordered anyone leaving the con could not reenter for any reason, and decided that going to the ground floor constituted leaving the con... despite having con functions on the ground floor.
As long as the ground floor and the building were not at capacity that is a perfectly reasonable response.
I innocently went down the escalator to check out the [ground floor] kids area and was marooned. No jacket, no cell phone, and no car keys to get into my vehicle and it was 'friggin cold outside.
Next time, don't leave your stuff somewhere when you wander away. Simple solution.
A better solution would have been to stop letting new people in, while letting the steady stream of outgoers reduce the number.
They were doing just that; except they were not letting anyone in. Letting people go in and out does nothing to solve the overcrowding problem. By not letting people who left the upper floors back in, they addressed the occupancy issue. Once the occupancy levels were within the legal limits and under control, then they can let people in.
There was no fire, no emergency, no need to be a complete prick to people who were already at the con.
This was the fire marshal being ignorant and inflexible. He's an idiot.
The fire marshall's job is to minimize the potential for loss of life due to overcrowding, inadequate exits, etc. before a fire breaks out. Fires are pretty inflexible themselves and don't really care if they inconvenience someone.
Responsibility for this lies with the organizers. The knew what the advance sales were, what previous attendee patterns were and the venue capacity; they could have put plans in place to deal with the crowds and maybe even work with the venue and fire marshall to be sure there were no issues. They may have done that but clearly were not properly prepared based on what happened.
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This was the fire marshall doing his job properly and you speaking from ignorance of the matter and the situation in general.
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Having been to some conventions in RI ... I will say the fire marshals aren't known for what's between their ears. Silly rules and pointless enforcement are only the beginning. Wielding power for amusement, revenge, and personal gain is considered much more the norm.
Maybe it's the NYer in me but I always keep my important things on my person. I'd never be stuck without a phone, keys, or money (or my special needs child!?) because I left them at a convention.
I figure RICC is getting hit with tons of rever
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THINK OF THE CHILDREN!
Seriously? You're seriously going to try emotional manipulation on Slashdot? You're a particularly stupid troll, aren't you? Fuck off and go troll Facebook, you cretin.
It would appear that trolling works on you...
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You've managed to troll yourself, bud. Nice job.
As a bonus, there's no longer any need for you to include Slashdot in the equation.
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Actually, unlike a lot of the think of the children crap, separating parents and children that way is a really really bad idea. It is a bad idea for perfectly rational reasons.
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Technically speaking, the parents separated themselves from their children. Not necessarily a wise idea at a large event. This was just one thing out of many possibilities that kept them from rejoining them. For example, the halls could have been evacuated for a half dozen reasons, fire alarm, actual fire, bomb threat, gas leak, etc. And finding people under such circumstances is extremely difficult.
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Sure, anything could have happened including alien abduction (yes, kidding :-) but in this case it was an inflexible fire marshal. Why not escourt the parent to the child and then escort both from the building?
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Because that would 1) take work and 2) not let the fire marshal punish the con.
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Over and over again ... (Score:3)
... my con experiences demonstrated why a managerial class exists.
(insert subject here) (Score:1)
I wonder what kind of Oreo [vimeo.com] you get with #ricomicconfail2014.
I felt a great disturbance in the Force (Score:3)
As if thousands of angry nerds had suddenly cried out in anguish.
The news readers will have a hay day with this story...
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OMG (Score:1)
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With those concerned destined to crawl at the bottom. Got to be funny at the very least.
Even my IT inventory supplier wants to stuff me with kitchenware these days.
Some more news coverage of the meltdown (Score:3, Interesting)
Mike Ferreira describes some of the chaos on the Anime Herald [animeherald.com]:
Some people on Facebook describe the conditions inside the convention center as unsafe. RICC has responded to some of the comments, saying, "There was no mess up. This happens a lot at large events. It is very difficult to predict the turnover flow of patrons. Sometimes, for the safety of all, we need to halt entry to let the crowd thin out." RICC Organizer Steven Perry of Altered Reality Entertainment has been unreachable by media and disgruntled fans.
People are being very supportive of the Fire Marshals who handled the mess. One Facebook user writes, "Fire marshal #9 guarding the Omni North Garage was awesome. Delt with an angry mob through the whole 4 hours." I personally witnessed that marshal do a really great job with a really bad situation. Rhode Island is the site of the worst nightclub fire in US history [wikipedia.org], and Rhode Islanders understand that the Fire Marshal was acting with restraint and responsibly.
I have not heard about the conditions at the convention center today. They have apparently already sold to capacity but are still selling tickets online [ticketmaster.com].
Need to clear overcrowded con? (Score:2)
Use some powder to make yourself a litle pale, rub fingers in dirt to dirty under fingernails real good, dirty hair a little. Smoke joint for some red eye.
Act sick
While standing in line act like you have flu but casually mention you and friend recently got back from safari vacation outside Liberia but you bright own food so you say its just a flu or cold.
Cough
Have friend make Ebola joke...
Watch place clear out.. :-P
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