until the night he piloted the Titanic into an iceberg . Likewise , the sorts of extreme impacts we are talking about after Manchester are mass casualties during and after events .
Third , human nature makes us create explanations for the occurrence of a Black Swan after the fact , in which we try to fit it into a pattern of previous events both to make sense of a seemingly random act and to predict how and where it might happen next . I saw this repeatedly in reporters ’ questions , in which they almost uniformly linked Manchester to the Bataclan nightclub attack even though the incidents had little in common other than that both took place in Europe .
You can read much more about the specifics of black swan theory in Taleb ’ s book , but I ’ ll warn you that it takes a commitment . At one point he pokes fun at people who quote ancient philosophers they ’ ve never read , but The Black Swan is so dense that I bet it will also be more widely quoted than read .
So rather than getting hung up on the details , let ’ s apply to live events the general concept of an occurrence which is rare , has an extreme impact , and only retrospectively predictable .
THE PARADE OF HORRIBLES
from outdoor stage roof collapse .
2013 Boston Marathon , Boston , Massachusetts : 3 dead , 280 injured from two bombs left in crowd near finish line .
2013 Kiss , Santa Maria , Brazil : 231 dead , 630 injured in nightclub fire .
2015 Bataclan , Paris : 89 dead in nightclub shooting , 130 dead overall , another 368 people injured in attacks on six venues in Paris .
2016 Pulse , Orlando , Florida : 49 dead , 58 wounded in nightclub shooting ; most total shooting casualties in U . S . history .
2016 Nice , France : 86 dead , 458 injured when a truck was driven into a crowd on a road closed to vehicles following Bastille Day fireworks .
2017 Foyer outside Manchester Arena , Manchester , England : 22 dead , 116 injured in suicide bombing during concert egress .
Off the top of my head ( with help from the Internet ), here is a non-exclusive list of disasters in and around live event spaces since the worst recent Black Swan , the September 11 , 2001 terrorist attacks . As you read , consider which of these hazards the operators should have reasonably foreseen , such that they had a moral or legal duty to prevent the disaster :
2003 The Station , West Warwick , Rhode Island : 100 dead , approximately 230 injured in nightclub fire .
2004 Republica Cromagnon , Buenos Aires , Argentina : 194 dead , more than 1,400 injured in nightclub fire .
2010 Love Parade , Duisburg , Germany : 21 dead , more than 500 injured in crowd crush under an overpass during festival ingress .
2011 Indiana State Fair : 7 dead , 58 injured 52
Does reading this list make you feel like the live event industry is under attack , if not actively in crisis ? ( Does it make you a bit queasy ?) Talking heads in the media , including guys like me , mostly get asked these days about stopping shooters and bombers . But we rarely get asked whether , in