My wife produces television documentaries; the one she's currently working on is about coal and the horrors of mountaintop-removal mining.  Her co-producer and another friend of ours came down from Ohio for the Inauguration.  Co-producer had four tickets to the Yellow seating zone, very near the Capitol steps.  After the expected sardine-like Metro ride we arrived on the Mall by 9:30 and asked directions of various official personnel; at least, they wore badges or little laminated cards.  They either admitted they didn't know how to get to the Yellow entrance, or confidently gave us wrong directions.  The result was that we had to retrace our steps twice, three long blocks in two different directions.  On the Jumbotron screens, the dignitaries were beginning to descend from the Capitol.  We were still very far from our seats and there was no way to get to them.  I still have no idea where the entrance was; all we saw were fences and equally confused, wandering people.  Looking for a johnI entered the National Museum of the American Indian and found another big screen and a crowd in the rotunda watching it.  We joined them and stood, wedged among people, through Obama's speech.  (Didn't hear the poem.)  Lighting and projection were bad, images hardly more than outlines in gray.  By now we hadn't sat for four hours.  In the crowd were a number of other people who had not been able to reach their assigned seats; they were holding up their invitations for others to film with their cell-phone cameras.  Leaving the Museum we walked five long blocks west, towards home, along Independence.  At 12th the street was blocked: dangerously dense crowd, moving in several directions, going nowhere.  There seemed to be cops ahead - we saw gesturing, gloved hands - but none of them had bullhorns and no one had any idea what we were supposed to do.  We were in the midst of it, being nearly crushed but managing to stay together.  Then we and several thousand other people wandered around the area for the next hour and a half.  Much of it is under construction, and we climbed Jersey barriers and walked over frozen mud, only to encounter more fences and blockages, NO directing signs, NO officials of any sort.  Finally we found our way to the Metro entrance at L'Enfant plaza.  Apparently someone had had the bright idea of closing most of the Metro stations so that the crowd would concentrate at only a few points (and the people on platforms would not be frustrated by a series of packed trains).  We stood in a crowd of several thousand people for another 1 1/2 hours.  This again was one of those crowds you read about, which trample people to death, and in which you can't breathe.  One woman fainted; one asthmatic man had an attack.  People shouted and apparently Metro medics somehow got to them eventually.  During this time we moved down a flight of stairs and into the approaches to the building - about 150 feet.  Temperature was 19 degrees F.  "Good thing it ain't July," said someone, and there was general agreement.  My wife is short and I tried to create a zone around her with my arms, pushing back against people crushing her.  Our friends were ahead of us and eventually I could no longer see them.  At 3:30 my wife couldn't take any more; neither could I.  We somehow pushed our way out; I told people she wasn't well.  The crowd behaved throughout with civility and good humor.  The only crowd control we saw was one Metro official, again without a bullhorn, who seemed amused at everyone's situation - anger was directed at him.  We returned to the intersection that had been blocked by a crowd three hours before.  Now it was open, and we walked west - past many soldiers and police who appeared to be guarding the WWII Memorial and Washington Monument; they would have been much better assigned to crowd control and guidance.  We walked along the Reflecting Pool.  Jumbotrons there were still on and images of Obama's limo beamed down on no one.  We walked all the way back to Foggy Bottom, where we had entered the Metro, wondering whether our friends (one of whom is not well) would get there before us, whether they even on the subway.  We couldn't reach them, of course, by cell phone.  Eventually my wife reached them from a hotel bar near the Foggy Bottom Metro stop; they had waited in that line for another hour and a half, before entering the train, and had just arrived.

People easily could have been trampled in the crowds we were trapped in; we saw terrifed children and older people having great difficulty bearing up.  
I estimate that easily 100,000 people were subject to this execrable planning.  But from what I've heard, read, and seen so far today, it is being treated as a non-story.