A study of physical factors related to accidents in EDM festivals in Bangkok

The popularity of Electronic Dance Music (EDM)in Thailand shows significant growth amongst other festivals. Since such festival mostly takes place in a limited space, problems emerge from inefficiency in crowd management, often causing chaos that leads to incidence related to damage in properties and fatalities. Safety is one of essential factors in physical space management in EDM festival. Safety factors are an essential condition that can prevent accidents, damages ,and crimes. Hence, the purpose of this research is to study physical factors related to accidents in EDM Festivals at Live Park, Rama 9, Bangkok.The research aims to study the events in two aspects: physical evidence and factors related to accidents, by conducting an observation, online questionnaires from attendees derived from literature review under the name of ‘Event management’, ‘Health & safety management’, ‘Crowd management’ and ‘Physical characteristic of event venue’. After, in-depth interview to managerial staff of the most popular EDM organizer in Bangkok, observations and online questionnaires were collected to compare results. The results from the online questionnaires were completed from 388 respondents who had experienced ever attending EDM festivals. From the observations, interview process and questionnaires, Dance zone is the most unsafety zone in the EDM festivals in Live Park. Within 5,000 square meters, this Dance zone area can contain average 20,000 people per event, which is high density during the event. Most attendees concern exits and emergency exits, which should be increased to reach two normal exits and four emergency exits with a width of 1.2 meters per exit. Also, the mobile signal was pointed out to be a pain point for event attendees, which the service problem was out of scope in this research. This research suggests the event organizer raising awareness to exit and emergency exit by 1) providing enough exits, 2) giving enough information for preparing themselves facing unexpected situations or any accidents in EDM festivals.