ROME. The eight people who died last night on the first day of the Astroworld Festival music event in Houston, Texas were crushed against the stage: this is what emerges from the first indications of the rescue teams. Hundreds of people were injured in the crowd. The victims were trapped in the crowd that pressed towards the stage, said the head of the fire brigade of Houston, Samuel Peña: “The audience – he explained – was pressed against the stage and panic broke out”. Eleven people were hospitalized in cardiac arrest and eight of them died. About 300 of the 5,000 people present sustained minor injuries and were treated on the spot. “It was an extremely tragic night,” said Lina Hidalgo, a Harris County judge. “Our hearts are broken,” he continued. Rapper Travis Scott, founder of the festival, interrupted his performance several times when he saw some of his fans in trouble at the foot of the stage and asked security members to help them. Emergency services vehicles made their way through the crowd with sirens blaring more than once to rescue them, the newspaper said. The organizers stopped the event when they realized the gravity of the situation. A massacre, therefore, while rapper Travis Scott performed on stage at the Astroworld Festival music festival in Houston, Texas. In the hours preceding the tragedy, there had been reports of a large crowd at the gates with people pushing to enter the structure, stepping on some fallen to the ground.
Dynamics
Around 9:15 pm local time (3:15 pm in Italy) the crowd that attended the first evening of the festival, about 50 thousand people, began to move towards the stage. The panic began to spread as people in the front rows felt crushed. The show was stopped as soon as it was realized that the situation was deteriorating. Already in the phases preceding the start of the demonstration, there was an accident due to the crowd, with several injured at the entrance, when a mass of people overwhelmed one of the areas where security checks were carried out. The 100,000 tickets available for the Astroworld festival had sold out within an hour at the time of presales. The highly anticipated festival, organized by rapper Travis Scott, was in its third edition after the 2020 one was canceled due to the pandemic.
Previous
In Houston, therefore, the massacre began when a group of people moved towards the stage, starting to crush the audience in the front row. There are many similar tragedies all over the world. At the Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati, United States, eleven people were killed 42 years ago before a Who concert and eight others were seriously injured. In 1969, then at the Altamont Free Concert, a rock festival held at the Altamont Raceway Park, during the performance of the Rolling Stones, the young African American Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death in 1969 in front of the stage. At the 19th edition of LoveParade, on July 24, 2010, 21 people died in Duisburg, Germany and another 510 were injured when crushed by the crowd. Two years ago six people killed by the crowd in an evening at the “Lanterna Azzurra Clubbing” in Madonna del Piano in the countryside of Corinaldo (Ancona). While hundreds of very young people danced waiting for a DJ set by the trapper Sfera Ebbasta, a pepper spray is sprayed by a gang of thieves. In the general stampede, the boys flock to a slide at the rear exit of the room, a side balustrade collapses and many fall into a small ditch. A flight of a few meters but enough for six people to die crushed or suffocated. A year ago, six people died in Algeria during a concert by rapper Abderraouf Derradji, better known as Soolking, in Algiers. The victims were overwhelmed by the crowd that had thronged in front of one of the gates of the stadium that hosted the singer’s performance.
Panic
In Houston the crowd began to squeeze towards the front of the stage, and this “caused panic and started causing some injuries,” the fire chief said. “People started arguing, losing consciousness and this created further panic.” The show was canceled shortly after several people began to suffer injuries. Rescuers transported 17 people to the hospital, including 11 in cardiac arrest, Pena said. Many people were also treated on site at NRG Park, where a field hospital had been set up. About 50,000,000 attended the festival. The fire chief added that the doctors could not immediately indicate the causes of the death of the eight people. A coroner is at work. Astroworld is a two-day music festival that was supposed to take place on Friday and Saturday in Houston. The event was sold out, according to the Astroworld website. The promoters of the event had arranged for medical units to be present at the festival scene, however once the wave of crowds began, those units were “quickly overwhelmed,” Pena said. Crowd squeezing towards the stage occurred while Travis Scott was performing. The wave occurred around 9pm on a Friday evening. The show was stopped shortly after several people “started getting injured.”