Yes. The worst civilian loss of life in Britain in WW2 was a crush that occurred at Bethnal Green station on a stairway down to an air raid shelter. A woman tri

Yes. The worst civilian loss of life in Britain in WW2 was a crush that occurred at Bethnal Green station on a stairway down to an air raid shelter. A woman tripped and fell on the stair and people above carried on pushing to get down and the bodies piled up. 173 people died. There wasn’t even a stampede. I think that’s why we have the shelter in place rule for fires in the U.K. In more modern buildings there is a staged evacuation which is done automatically by the fire alarm system where it sets off alarms to evacuate the fire floor, then the floor above, then floor below then all the floors above the fire at intervals followed by all the floors below. In an office block with 5000 people in it you wouldn’t need much to recreate the Bethnal Green disaster no matter how much stair capacity you have. In Grenfel the staged evacuation was meant to be done manually by the fire brigade as it was a 1960’s building with no whole building alarm system but for some reason this happened too slowly. Possibly because the escape stair was not pressurised as would be required by modern regulations and the smoke seals on fire doors had been compromised during the refit and smoke got into the stair so the fire brigade felt they needed BA to evacuate people safely from the stairs, I’m not sure. So if everyone in the ship or the building or plane or whatever acts entirely in their own interests in almost all situations it ends up worse for everyone, but there has to be some leadership somewhere and the systems need to be checked and practiced regularly.