How a crowd can become deadly
Post Reports
The Washington Post
4.4 • 5.1K Ratings
🗓️ 8 November 2021
⏱️ ? minutes
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Summary
After eight people were killed at a Travis Scott concert in Houston late Friday, many of us were left wondering: How did this happen? An expert on crowds explains how too many people packed closely together can become deadly.
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An estimated 50,000 people attended the sold-out 2021 Astroworld Festival at NRG Park to see Travis Scott, whose concerts have a reputation for being raucous.
The Washington Post reviewed dozens of videos from the night to understand how the concert became a mass casualty event, synchronizing video from the audience with a live stream of Scott’s performance published by Apple Music. The videos show a chaotic scene, with concertgoers crying out for help as the show continued, the loud music drowning them out.
The crowd surge victims include a 14-year-old who loved baseball, two friends celebrating a 21st birthday and a 27-year-old attending the concert with his fiancee. Here’s what we know about the victims.
We reached out to Keith Still, a professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in Britain, to talk about how these tragedies happen and how they could be prevented.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On Friday, a huge concert in Houston turned into a tragedy. |
| 0:12.2 | This was at the Asheville World Festival, 50,000 people had shown up. |
| 0:16.8 | Artists Travis Scott took the stage at around 9 pm, and as his set started, the crowd |
| 0:22.1 | pushed toward the front of the stage. |
| 0:24.6 | After a few minutes, people were crushed and started to pass out. |
| 0:38.7 | Dozens of people were injured, at least eight people are dead, and this is now considered |
| 0:43.2 | one of the deadliest concerts in U.S. history. |
| 0:46.5 | You know, it is supposed to be a good time, and this is not something you would expect |
| 0:51.2 | to be doing after going to a festival, going to a memorial for the people that died in |
| 0:56.5 | this festival. |
| 0:58.6 | Today, what we know about what happened at the Asheville World Festival, and we talked |
| 1:04.0 | to an expert on what concert organizers could be doing to prevent these kinds of tragedies. |
| 1:09.5 | We need to know what these risks are, we need to be able to identify them so that we can |
| 1:14.0 | red flag them early enough that the warnings go up, and something could be done about it. |
| 1:20.2 | From the newsroom of the Washington Post, this is Post Reports. |
| 1:23.6 | I'm Martin Powers. |
| 1:25.0 | It's Monday, November 8th. |
| 1:27.8 | Today, Houston's police chief released a statement saying that he met with Travis Scott |
| 1:34.9 | and his head of security to express concerns about safety ahead of the festival, or trying |
| 1:40.0 | to learn more details about that conversation, and officials are still investigating what |
| 1:44.7 | happened Friday night. |
| 1:46.7 | One of the people injured has already filed a lawsuit against Travis Scott and the concert |
... |
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