The Silver ticket area.

There were definitely problems at Purple, and some reports are coming in that people were turned away from the Silver section. As far as I know, that is not true. I had Silver tickets and got in near the end. The section did NOT fill up. As a matter of fact, there was room at the back for at least another few thousand people. What happened, as near as I can tell, is that a lot of people with Silver tickets just turned out to be so impatient that it hurt them, and everyone around them.

The Silver section was split in half by Third Street (see map at right). If you had Silver, the entrance gate was at Third and Independence SW. Once through the gate you were supposed to get off Third Street and either go to the grassy area between Third and the Capitol reflecting pool, or go to the first section of the Mall between 3rd and 4th. The tickets, which everyone had, were very clear on this point.

What actually happened was thousands of people just stopped around Third Street and Maryland Avenue and watched from there, creating a huge bottleneck immediately inside the gate. As a result, the security people at the gate could only let people through very slowly, and in chunks. They’d let a hundred or so people through, then close the gate while those they let through forced their way back to the viewing area, through the people who had just decided to stop in the middle of the street just inside the gate. Then when there was room again, gate security would let another hundred or so through to repeat the process. Because the gate was moving slowly, and was sometimes shut for a few minutes at a time, rumor got spread around that it was closed for good, and a lot of people (believing rumor rather than any official announcement) turned around and left.

Thus some people decided the line at the gate was too long to risk, some ended up thinking the Silver gate was turning people away, and others who got through ended up thinking it was so overcrowded that you had to watch from just inside the gate at Third Street.

But anybody who waited patiently and followed the simple instructions printed on their ticket did just fine. The back of Silver (near Fourth Street) never got close to filling in completely.

Long story short: Silver probably should have been split into two sections with two different gates, but all the delays and problems were caused by folks who couldn’t follow simple instructions that they had access to well in advance. The folks who stopped at Third and Maryland (where they were not supposed to) gummed the whole thing up for everyone. The planning could have been better, but no plan will work if the public refuses to follow it. The blame for Silver’s poor performance lies with the people who stopped permanently just inside the gate, and with security for not moving them along.

Update: This satellite image from GeoEye taken at 11:19 tells the whole story. To orient: the Capitol is off screen to the right, Independence Avenue is running along the bottom, Third Street runs from top to bottom, and the prominent building is the National Museum of the American Indian. The red line is the Silver gate. You can see a throng of people just inside it, and plenty of empty land beyond. The red dot is where I finally settled. For the high-res GeoEye image of the entire Mall, use WaPo’s viewer.