Astroworld Festival: when a crowd goes beyond your control and turns out to be deadly

(CNN) – The sold-out Houston Astroworld Festival was packed Friday night with some 50,000 people in another sign of a nation eager to escape pandemic grief and let go.

Then, just after 9 p.m., with rapper and event organizer Travis Scott singing, the tight crowd began pushing toward the lighted stage, authorities said.

At least eight people were killed and dozens injured in the resulting crush that, according to people at the concert, apparently overwhelmed event staff and medical personnel at NRG Park. The dead were between 14 and 27 years old.

Paul Wertheimer, who founded the consulting firm Crowd Management Strategies and has campaigned for safer concert environments for decades, called what happened at the festival a crowd crush, a highly preventable tragedy, he said, as old as rock. ‘ n ‘roll.

“Standing room settings, often called festival seating, are the most dangerous and deadly crowd configuration at live entertainment events,” he commented.

“It forces people in a crowd to compete with each other for the best location or the best area to be. And for the safety of the crowd, that’s the last thing you want to happen. You want people to work together.”

The 73-year-old Wertheimer has promoted crowd safety since 11 people died in a group of thousands trying to enter the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati for a The Who concert in December 1979.

Wertheimer said authorities often mischaracterize the actions of concert goers during a crush.

“When you try to save your own life or the lives of the people around you, that is not panic. That is self-preservation,” he said.

“When you are being crushed by 5,000 people behind you and you are faced with people in front of you who are being crushed, you are trying to save your life because they have put you in a position and an environment that is beyond their control.”

While many details surrounding the tragedy remain unclear, Wertheimer said deadly crowds generally develop over time. They do not happen by chance. He said investigators will have to look at staffing levels and training.

“When authorities say that a surge happened quickly, that’s not how it really works,” he said. “It takes time to build density in a crowd. It will create the increase or the crowding of the crowd or the collapse of the crowd, which happened over time. Crowd safety experts know this.”

People run through the VIP entrance

The Houston crush came hours after at least one person was injured when people rushed to a VIP entrance on Friday afternoon, according to officials and video from the scene.

Two years ago, three people were trampled and injured at the same festival, as many rushed into 2019.

“We’re certainly looking at all the video footage,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner told CNN on Saturday, referring to the investigation into the cause of the Friday night crush.

“We are talking to witnesses. We are talking to the organizers of the event … We are analyzing everything.”

Houston Fire Chief Sam Pena said the crowd “for whatever reason started pushing up and up towards the front of the stage, which caused the people in the front to compress.”

Travis Scott says he’s ‘absolutely devastated’

Some patients suffered cardiac arrest, Peña said.

“People began to fight, to lose consciousness,” Peña said at a press conference.

In a statement on Twitter Saturday morning, festival organizers said that “our hearts go out to the Astroworld festival family tonight, especially those we lost and their loved ones,” and that “they are focused on supporting officials. locals as we can. “

Scott, via Twitter, said he is “absolutely devastated by what happened last night.”

“My prayers go out to the families and all those affected by what happened at the Astroworld Festival,” says Scott’s statement.

“The Houston Police Department has my full support as they continue to investigate the tragic loss of life,” he added. “I am committed to working together with the Houston community to heal and support families in need. Thank you to the Houston Police Department, Fire Department, and NRG Park for their immediate response and support.”

When you lose control of your body in a crowd

John Fruin, a retired research engineer, wrote in an article titled “The causes and prevention of mass disasters“, that individual control is lost in a crush and” one becomes an involuntary part of the mass. “

“With an occupancy of about 7 people per square meter, the crowd becomes almost a fluid mass. Shock waves can propagate through the mass enough to lift people and propel them to distances of 3 m or more. People can literally be left without shoes and clothes, “Fruin wrote in the document originally submitted in 1993 and revised in 2002.

“The intense pressures of the crowd, exacerbated by anxiety, make it difficult to breathe. The heat and thermal insulation of the surrounding bodies cause some to weaken and faint. Access to those who fall is impossible. The extraction of those who they are in danger can only be achieved by picking them up and passing them over their heads to the outside of the crowd. “

Fruin wrote that most crowd deaths are the result of “compressive suffocation” rather than trampling. He described steel railings capable of withstanding a thousand pounds of pressure bent by the “domino effect” of the force of the crowd.

“I felt like I couldn’t breathe”

Viewers at the Houston festival described feeling increasingly crowded as Scott’s performance approached, as well as feeling crushed and seeing others pass out and scream in terror as the performance began.

“The crowd was crushing me so much that I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” 22-year-old Emily Munguia told CNN.

Another woman in the crowd, Madeline Eskins, eventually passed out and was apparently taken to safety, she wrote in an Instagram post.

When a timer on a screen counted back 30 minutes to Scott’s performance, “people were squeezing against each other and pushing back and forth, and it got progressively worse,” Eskins told CNN on Saturday.

“I had constant pressure on my chest, constant pressure on my back. From the side, they squeezed me,” he described.

Medical staff were so overwhelmed with the injuries that audience members attempted to administer CPR.

Investigators will review how the site was designed and whether it had enough exit points, Peña said. They will also explore “what caused, one, the crowd compression problem, and two, what prevented people from escaping from that situation,” he added.

Turner, at a news conference Saturday afternoon, said city officials were speaking with festival organizers, promoters, witnesses and others “to try to understand much better what happened, what went wrong, where the wrong steps were taken. “

CNN’s Jason Hanna, Maya Brown, and Rosa Flores contributed to this report.