Astroworld aftermath: Can crowd-surging be stopped?

Concert venues in the Bay Area, and around the world, have long taken measures to help provide safe environments for seeing live music.

“Safety is the utmost important thing to all of us,” says Steve Kirsner, longtime vice president for booking and events at SAP Center at San Jose. “We belong to a number of associations and groups where this is discussed.”

Sadly, concert safety is once again a topic of discussion among venue and entertainment officials, as well as musicians and fans. This is in the aftermath of the Nov. 5 tragedy at the Astroworld festival in Houston, when what has been identified as a massive crowd-surge incident unfolded while headliner Travis Scott was performing, leading to nine deaths and hundreds of injuries.

Answers to exactly what happened thus far are few, with several investigations now underway, including a criminal probe by the Houston Police Department and one by a task force ordered by state Gov. Greg Abbott. A plethora of lawsuits have already been filed against Scott, festival promoter Live Nation and others.

But while explanations are still lacking, several questions routinely come up in the aftermath of the tragedy:

• Why did organizers OK an attendance capacity of 50,000 fans to see a performer with a track record of encouraging rowdy shows with “raging” and mosh pits — yet seem so ill-prepared to deal with crowd control?
• Why were the medical and security staffs seemingly so overmatched by the crowd?
• Why didn’t Scott or anyone else halt the performance when it was apparent that things were out of control? Although the hip-hop star reportedly stopped the action on one or more occasions to point out people who seemed to be injured, the show was not finished until some 40 minutes after police had declared Astroworld a “mass casualty event.” Reps for Scott, however, have maintained he did not realize how bad things got until after he was done performing.

Most local promoters, venue operators and security officials contacted by the Bay Area News Group for a reaction to Astroworld declined to comment while so much remains unknown about the event. Those who did cautioned that every venue and event is different, so it’s difficult to speculate on how the tragedy might have been prevented. It’s one reason why crowd control and safety measures need constant re-assessment.

“We have ways that we mitigate those types of situations,” said Kirsner at SAP Center. “The shows are designed to have emergency exits and things like that when we have a GA (general assignment) floor. We hold a strict capacity and that capacity is based on a time study (for exiting the building) that was done when the building was built. … It’s how many people can exit within 30 seconds, 45 seconds, a minute, two minutes … things like that.”

Crowd-surge fatalities have been recorded at several widely varying kinds of events and facilities. A 1989 incident at a professional soccer match at Hillsborough Stadium in Sheffield, England, left 97 dead and nearly 800 injured. People entering a 1979 general admission Who concert at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati created a stampede that ended in 11 deaths. And a surge at a 1974 David Cassidy concert at a London stadium led to nearly 700 injuries and the death of a 14-year-old girl.

Still, a safety/crowd control blueprint drawn up for the Astroworld event covered such issues as weather, a natural disaster and terrorism, but paid scant attention to crowd control, reports NPR, which obtained a copy of the report.

This despite the fact that Scott has twice been arrested for urging fans to climb over barriers and rush past security guards to get to the stage. Fans at Astroworld have been quoted as saying they were uncomfortable by concertgoers swarming the stage even before Scott started performing. As the surge started peaking during Scott’s set, one concertgoer caught in the chaos recalled, “You’re moving with the crowd. The crowd’s like water. It’s like an ocean,” the Associated Press reported.

“It really takes only a handful of bad actors to start a rush to the stage or taking down a fence line,” said Greg Trevizo, who has 20-plus years experience working security at festivals as well as at Oakland Arena, Candlestick Park, San Jose Civic Auditorium and numerous other venues.

Kirsner added there were early signs that the crowd at Astroworld was trouble.

“It started as they got into the building, because they rushed the magnatometers (metal detectors) and they broke through and they got into the building,” he says. “So, there was definitely an element there that was looking to cause trouble. You have to basically be aware of who’s coming into your building and what’s going on.”

But Kirsner adds there are “a lot of tools in the toolbox — from spotters in the catwalk to the way the barricades are designed and the way the stage is designed and things like that that can help mitigate the possibility of (trouble) happening.”

“We do a walkaround every show to make sure every exit is clear — that no door is blocked by any road cases or that people can’t get through the exits,” he adds. “It’s one of the biggest things we do  — making sure that this venue is the safest venue it can be. We know how to evacuate people. We do drills. We do tabletop exercises.”

Adds Trevizo: “The venues here in the Bay Area have some of the best and safest procedures nationwide.”