World Expo 2010 Shanghai China: Feeling Safe and Comfortable in Shanghai Expo 2010

Cooling mists at Entrance Gate 2

While Expo 2010 was running uneventfully in Shanghai of China, there were two dreadful holiday tragedies occurred in the other part of the world in the past 2 months. The first one was resulted from a chaotic stampede at the world's largest techno music festival in the German City of Duisburg on July 24, 2010. Nineteen concertgoers were crushed to death and 342 more were injured in the overcrowded tunnel that served as the sole entrance to the festival site in where many people came from across Europe. There left many evaluation questions particularly on the risk management. Another incidence was a tour-bus hijacking crisis in the Philippines capital Manila on August 23, 2010. Eight out of 15 Hong Kong tourists were killed and 2 out of the several survivors were critically injured after they had been held hostage for more than 11 hours. These innocent people started their trip from Hong Kong with happiness but ended with tragedy in Manila. How furious we were when following to watch the whole process of the coverage on the live TV. Everybody criticized the way that the siege was dealt with. The Philippine police didn't appear to have well prepared for the rescue. The President of the Philippines said that he didn't expect the hostage-taking situation to turn worse. This showed that the risk had been underestimated. Obviously, there is a lack of crisis management in the Philippine case. I have never been to the Philippines, and there is not any temptation for me to pay it a visit.

Electric fan at Romania Pavilion

On the contrary, I felt safe and comfortable during our visits to Shanghai Expo 2010. I visited the Expo in May and July this year, and still I would like to go again. The Expo 2010 is very impressive and well organized. There are in total 13 entrances/ exits for the site. Things appear to have been well planned to facilitate smooth logistics and high visitor flows. There are in average 400,000 people visiting the Expo each day, and everything is under good control. Lots of improvement are noted when comparing our two visits. For example, cooling mist systems have been increasingly installed at various sites including entrances, rest places, and queue-up areas for popular pavilions. Paper fans are distributed to visitors free of charge. More sunshades have been erected at the site. We occasionally saw people jump the queues during our first visit to the Expo in May. However, no more such situation was detected in our second visit in July. In many occasions, I could see that the Chinese government had put lots of efforts on the prevention of chaos. For risk management, policemen are assigned to stay with the queues at the pavilions with big crowds. People lined up in good order among the metal barriers. Wide gaps are allocated between queues to allow good ventilation, and boxes of ice are placed in these gaps to lower the temperature of the environment. Electric fans are set up at the queue-up area for some pavilions. For the popular pavilion with large amount of visitors, queues are divided into sections. After people have moved forward to the front section, their former space is left empty for about 10 minutes for the clean-up purpose. People from behind can then move forward. Please refer to the attached video. This system makes people feel more comfortable and most important avoid chaos.

Warning notice at Japan Pavilion

When we were lining up at the Japan Pavilion during our latest visit, we did not see any queue. jumping People kept their discipline well even though there were not any police. The notice of discipline warning erecting at the queue-up area seemed to be effective. Some wrote, "Please be patient and do not jump the queue", while others stated, "Polite Sharing and No Challenging".