It's a very long article, and the closest it comes to answering the question of "is there a way to keep safe" are these two sentences: "Keep your elbows akimbo, to protect your chest and give yourself enough breathing room. Don’t fight against the flow of the crowd if you’re trying to get out of it; rather, go with it, and during lulls try to work your way diagonally through the crowd to the perimeter. If you feel faint, grab on to someone, and, if you do fall, try to protect your head."
"When people die in huge crowd 'stampedes', it's rarely from being trampled, it's from being crushed and suffocated (while still standing) by densely packed bodies."
Yeah, that doesn't seem useful to me either. It does seem like that's what the word 'akimbo' usually means, but I'm envisioning that they are advocating something more along the lines of this: http://creativefan.com/important/cf/2012/04/elbow-tattoos/ir...
Yeah not sure how that would help from having your chest compressed by the crowd. That would help with saving your sides, are those the most vulnerable parts in such a case?
That's basically the technique I use when I'm at a show in a really full pit next to the moshers. Having your elbows jut out lets them poke into people who are getting to close and lets you maintain a little bit of breathing room.
I actually keep my hands in more of the "secret service stance" rather than on my hips so that if I'm pushed suddenly I'm more likely to have my arms available for balance, or grabbing/pushing people so I don't fall. Having your arms at your side is not good when you get pushed very suddenly because usually your arms get pinned to your sides and then they're completely useless.
When things get really tight, I put my hands together in front of my chest (up by the sternum) and put my elbows against my sides. That forms a triangle and protects from the front and sides. Again, the hands are up and available so that they don't get pinned when I need them most.
Having been in quite a few mildly scary crowd situations at concerts, "elbows akimbo" seems like the worst possible idea. The main force will be coming from the front and back, but your elbows will be out to the side, so people in front and back will still be able to crush you just as badly, while your arms will get trapped between the people standing beside you, giving you even less mobility than you'd otherwise have. It also seems like a good way to get your arms dislocated in a surge.
In my experience, elbows crossed in front of your chest will give you a little bit of extra breathing room, but even that doesn't do much.
Another lesson from mosh pitting: move around, bounce off people, shove people away. Make a bubble for your to move in.
Even as a 130lbs guy, it's surprisingly easy to make a bubble if you just throw yourself at people back-first, and keep moving around roughly in a circle. Flailing your limbs also helps.
Or at least it worked when I was at a hugely packed Guns'n'Roses concert at a festival a few years ago.
The article talked about a crowd surge that bent a steel guard rail in its force. These instances seem like a different world from any mosh pit i've seen.
The New Yorker and The Atlantic can be interesting, but with the rise of the web and not so much empty time to try to fill, one sees how they expand a little bit of information to fill all of the empty space between the ads.
