On November 5th at 10:00 p.m, Travis Scott took the stage at Astroworl to a reported crowd of 50,000 people. Twelve minutes later, people started screaming for help. Forty minutes after the concert started, the concert was declared a mass casualty event, but the concert didn’t stop. There were no evacuations or concert shutdown, only the thunderous sound of applause, cheering, and cries for help. This event is one of the deadliest crowd control disasters to occur in the United States in many years. While new evidence is released from an ongoing investigation, what do we know about the night of November 5th?
At 3:00 p.m, concertgoers jumped the gate and flooded the park. As the park continued to fill with people, people pressed right next to each other. At around 9:30, the pit began to compress towards the stage and the crowd’s push became more intense. Crowd goers reported that it became harder to breathe. Travis Scott took the stage at 10:01 and the crowd went crazy. But eleven minutes later, a video released from the concert shows people in the pit beginning to shout for help. Thirty minutes after the start of the concert, the police department was notified of people passing out at the concert. Around the same time, Travis Scott paused to acknowledge that an ambulance had entered the crowd. A teenager warned a cameraman about the danger in the pit. The student warned that people were dying, but the cameraman did nothing. Two minutes later, another woman came up to the same cameraman warning about the danger; again, the cameraman did nothing.
Officials labeled Astroworld Festival a mass casualty event at 10:38 and park officials agreed to cut the concert short. At 10:42, Travis stopped in the middle of a song to tell security about a man who had fallen unconscious. Part of the crowd started to chat “Stop the show.” Around this time, security was also dealing with other attendees who had no pulse, and video shows concertgoers standing atop emergency vehicles At 10:54, the rapper Drake took the stage with Travis Scott and the crowd goes crazy again. Finally, after more than thirty minutes since the mass casualty event was declared, the show stopped.
There were many failures at the concert. Why didn’t officials shut down the event sooner? The Houston police chief stated that officials were afraid of a riot from concertgoers. Officials have also considered overcrowding; many people did cut through the entry gate or entered without a ticket. Park officials reported that there were 50,000 people at the concert and no overcrowding occurred, however, the fire chief said that there could have been 200,000 people in a venue with a maximum capacity of 50,000. This is not the first time that Travis Scott has been under fire for poor crowd management; Travis Scott is known to encourage crowds to push to the stage and attack members in the crowd. Even the 2019 Astroworld festival had similar crowd control issues. Texas Governor Greg Abbott has created a concert safety task force in hopes to prevent a similar incident from occurring in the future.
Sources –
Astroworld Victim Sues Travis Scott and Concert Organizers
At Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival, a Sudden Life-and-Death Struggle