Members of a densely packed crowd surged toward a stage and were crushed against each other at a Houston music festival on Friday night, killing at least eight people and injuring scores of others.
About 50,000 people were at the sold-out Astroworld Festival at NRG Park - the stadium complex where the Astrodome and the NRG Stadium stand - when the incident began just after 9pm local time.
Video from the event showed the performer on an outdoor stage - rapper and event organiser Travis Scott - pause and look on in confusion as an ambulance with flashing lights moved into the densely packed crowd.
People there described being increasingly squeezed in the minutes before Scott’s performance began, and then feeling crushed and seeing others pass out and scream in terror once his show started.
“The crowd was squishing me so much that I felt like I couldn’t breathe,” Emily Munguia, 22, told CNN.
“I started screaming for help ... I felt so scared, like I was going to die.
“The amount of people I saw get hurt, passed out, bleeding, crying is crazy.”
When Scott came onstage, “everything started to happen,” audience member Anita Amper said.
“People just went berserk. I realised that people were dying,” Amper, 22, told CNN.
The crowd “for whatever reason began to push and surge towards the front of the stage, which caused the people in the front to be compressed,” Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña told CNN Saturday morning.
“People began to fall out, become unconscious,” Peña said at a news conference.
Another woman in the crowd, Madeline Eskins, ultimately passed out and was apparently crowd-surfed to safety, she wrote in an Instagram post.
As a timer on a screen counted down 30 minutes to Scott’s performance, “people compressed up against each other and were pushing forward and backward,” and it got progressively worse, Eskins told CNN Saturday.
“I was having constant pressure on my chest, constant pressure on my back. From the side, I was being squeezed,” she said.
“Right when he started performing his first song, I looked at my boyfriend and said, ‘We have to get out of here.’ He said, ‘I can’t -- we can’t’.”
“And I just remember looking up and passing out,” and then going in and out of consciousness, Eskins added.
She remembers being pulled over a fence, and ultimately waking up for good in a chair.
Alexis Guavin, who has been to numerous Travis Scott performances, said what she experienced at the Astroworld Festival was unlike anything she had seen before.
“I have been to many Travis shows before and am definitely aware of how insane the crowd and pits can be but this was my first Astroworld fest and I had no idea it could get like that,” Guavin, 23, told CNN.
Guavin recounted what she experienced once Scott took the stage.
“Once he started, all hell broke loose.,” she said.
“All of what is to be 50,000 people ran to the front, compressing everyone together with the little air available.
“Luckily, I have mosh pit experience and am 6ft tall so I could at least put my head up to breathe but others not so fortunate,” she said.
“There were mosh pits in every single direction. And if you weren’t in them, you were trying so hard to push to not fall in. Like I’m telling you, there was one in front, back, to the left, and to the right of you wherever you were. Front, middle, back.”
The deadly surge came hours after at least one person was injured when people rushed through a VIP entrance to the event in the afternoon.
And it came two years after three people were trampled and injured at the same festival as many rushed to enter in 2019.
Friday’s horror brought an early end to what was supposed to be a two-day event, as Saturday’s portion was cancelled.
Astroworld was in its third iteration, having been launched by native Houstonian Scott in 2018 at the park, which used to be the site of the Six Flags Astroworld.
More than 300 people treated at field hospital
More than 300 people were treated at a field hospital set up near the festival Friday, Peña said.
Twenty-three people were taken to hospitals, and eight of them died, Peña said.
One patient is 10 years old, and at last check was in critical condition.
Some of the patients were in cardiac arrest as they were taken to hospitals.
Further details about the injuries weren’t immediately available. The causes of death will be determined by a medical examiner.
The cause of the surge was not immediately clear and will be part of an investigation.
Travis Scott ‘devastated’
In a statement on Twitter Saturday morning, festival organisers said “our hearts are with the Astroworld Festival family tonight - especially those we lost and their loved ones” and that they “are focused on supporting local officials however we can.”
Scott separately said he is “absolutely devastated by what took place last night” in a statement posted to Twitter.
“My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld Festival,” Scott’s statement reads.
“Houston PD has my total support as they continue to look into the tragic loss of life,” it continues.
“I am committed to working together with the Houston community to heal and support the families in need. Thank you to Houston PD, Fire Department and NRG Park for their immediate response and support.”
Crowd members attempt CPR on the injured
People who attended Friday’s concert shared on social media the chaos that ensued after the deadly nighttime surge.
Medical personnel were so overwhelmed with the injuries that some audience members attempted to administer CPR.
Amper, one of the crowd members, said she saw a “girl lying on the floor near me, and we had random people doing CPR on this girl”.
More than 20 minutes passed, she said, before “actual medical assistants came”.
Houston police and event security staff stopped the concert “as soon as the situation got to the point where it was overwhelming the resources there,” but by then “the damage had been done,” Peña, the fire chief, said.
Scott stopped the show at least three times to ask for help for stricken concertgoers, audience members Nick Johnson and Angel Rodriguez told CNN.
The moment Lucas Naccarati saw the mosh pit during rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival performance, he knew something wasn’t right.
“That was a different world. I immediately thought, ‘this is not OK. Someone is going to die here,” Naccarati, 26, told CNN over the phone.
Almost immediately after taking the video above, Naccarati said he rushed to administer CPR, which he learned while serving seven years in the Marines, to a male and female he saw pass out.
“I’ve never seen a mass amount of bodies dropping that fast before,” he sai
‘Everyone just started pushing to the front’
The crowd got increasingly packed over a long period, Johnson said, who added eventually “you just feel like there’s a weighted blanket on you”.
Rodriguez said he was about 15 metres from the stage when “everyone just started pushing to the front”.
“It was so hard to breathe up there; you just have to wait until it pushes back, because if it (the crowd) gets pushed forward, it’s likely going to get pushed back,” Rodriguez said.
“When you get pushed back, people always fall over.”
Amper, one of the other concertgoers, said she’s been to the two previous Astroworld events, and that it’s not unusual for a crowd to “rage” when Scott appears.
“Everyone pushes everyone,” she said.
Investigators will review video of the scene and look at how the venue was laid out and whether it had enough exit points.
The investigation will explore “what caused, one, the issue of the crowd surge, and two, what prevented people from being able to escape that situation,” Peña said.
Houston’s emergency management office established a hotline for people who haven’t been able to contact those known to have attended the concert.
Astroworld’s history of rushing
Earlier in the day, video from CNN affiliate KPRC showed numerous people rushing through a VIP entrance at the event - knocking over metal detectors and sometimes other people, and ignoring security staff.
The video showed some people helping a few others up. Peña said he didn’t know what caused that rush, either.
“We do know that we had people jump the fence,” and at least one person was injured in that afternoon rush, Peña said.
In 2019, three people were trampled and hospitalised as thousands rushed to get into the festival.
CNN asked Peña whether that instance led to special precautions at this year’s event.
“It’s obvious that if they did, they weren’t enough,” Peña responded.
This year’s festival was slated to feature artists including SZA, Bad Bunny and 21 Savage.
Houston’s mayor offered condolences on Twitter to the loved ones of those killed.
Authorities are looking into “everything” to find out what happened, Mayor Sylvester Turner told CNN’s Fredricka Whitfield on Saturday.
“We are certainly looking at all of the video footage. We are talking to witnesses. We are talking to event organisers,” Turner said.
https://news.google.com/__i/rss/rd/articles/CBMiowFodHRwczovLzduZXdzLmNvbS5hdS9lbnRlcnRhaW5tZW50L211c2ljL2NoaWxsaW5nLWFjY291bnRzLW9mLXRoZS1tb21lbnQtZmVzdGl2YWxnb2Vycy1yZWFsaXNlZC1wZW9wbGUtd2VyZS1keWluZy1hdC1hc3Ryb3dvcmxkLWZlc3RpdmFsLWluLWhvdXN0b24tdGV4YXMtYy00NDYzNTM30gEA?oc=5
2021-11-06 20:50:00Z
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