‘Predictable and preventable’: Student dies in UK club queue

The death of a 20-year-old student, who fatally hit her head as she queued to enter a popular club after an ‘inadequate’ barrier gave way for a second time, was ‘predictable and preventable,” according to a prosecutor.

“By re-erecting this barrier and allowing the queue to continue, we are saying they have allowed the conditions which led to Olivia’s death to persist,” Durham County Council’s prosecutor said Monday. Jamie Hill in a lawsuit against one of the UK’s biggest advertising companies, according to various local media.

In February 2018, young Olivia Burt was queuing in Durham, England to attend a student party at the Missoula Bar when a decorative barrier, used to contain the queue, allegedly gave way due to the dense crowd.

In her fall, the young woman would then have hit herself fatally on the edge of the metal barrier, under the weight of other individuals dragged down by the movement.

“She suffered an insurmountable head injury,” the prosecutor said, according to the BBC.

However, the decorative barrier should not have been used in this way, since it was not “adequate” for this kind of use, estimated the prosecutor before the court, reported for his part “The Guardian” .

What’s more, the heavy structure would have fallen for the first time only 30 minutes earlier, requiring four people to straighten it: an “important missed opportunity” to move it away from the crowd, the prosecutor reiterated, adding that the structure “already unfit to manage crowds, had been further weakened”.

The Missoula Bar’s parent company, Stonegate Pub Company, will in turn defend itself during the next few weeks of the trial.

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