With the tragedy still fresh in mind after the deaths during the recent Travis Scott concert at Astroworld, questions are being raised about the completeness of the existing operations plan for the event. With hospitalizations from trampling occurring at the 2019 event, expectations were that detailed considerations would have been made to prevent or respond to the possibility for this year’s concert. Instead, the plan appears to have been overly vague, and providing only high-level detail, according to articles in CNN and The New York Times.
Says Paul Wertheimer, founder and president of Crowd Management Strategies, on the importance of establishing a crowd surge response plan, “It doesn’t even really appear in what is the equivalent of the Astroworld’s crowd management plan. There’s no reference to crowd surge, crowd crush, crowd panic. there’s no reference to the front of the stage and festival seating crowd. And therefore, there’s no specific emergency planning for a mass casualty crowd crush event.”
Wertheimer does note that additional information may have been available outside the operations plan. Says Wertheimer, “we need to see that risk assessment plan,” which the operations plan references.
While rare, these crowd surge events are not unheard of, with one of the most famous being a 1979 concert in Cincinnati by the Who, where a lack of seat reservations led to fans rushing toward the stage, with 11 people being crushed to death, according to CNN and The New York Times.
Source:
https://www.cnn.com/2021/11/08/us/astroworld-festival-operations-plan/index.html
Link to: https://www.nytimes.com/2021/11/12/arts/music/astroworld-travis-scott-concert-safety.html
