The Astroworld Festival crowd crush shouldn’t have happened. And the fact that it has is infuriating, heartbreaking and almost unbelievable.

Have crowd surges happened previously? Yes.

Have people previously died whilst attending a gig or a festival? Yes.

Have there been new schemes implemented to stop incidents like this? Yes. So how come this has happened?

In September of this year, Bring Me The Horizon headlined The O2 in London. BMTH are notorious for its energetic live shows, fans happily slamming into each other whilst Oli Sykes screams encouragement into his microphone. During the last half an hour of the show, a group of kids got the attention of security due to an injury in the crowd. A spotlight was shone onto the area of the incident, the band stopped the show, asked fans to create a walkway for security to get through and the person was quickly removed from the arena and the gig started again.

This is just one of the countless examples of how crowd control and good communication between security, medics, the band and stage crew can stop mass incidents from occurring, and how quickly any injuries in the audience can be dealt with.

At Astroworld Travis Scott carried on playing whilst fans were screaming for help. Audience members, Ayden Cruz and Seanna Faith, heroically climbed up a stage rig to get the attention of a cameraman, begging him to help them stop the show, who went on to ignore them. Security vans that were trying to get through the crowd to reach those in desperate need, were being used as dancing platforms. Attendees in VIP were trying to stop people from coming into the area, more concerned that they hadn’t paid for the area, rather than the human sinkhole that was happening behind them.

There are a lot of different factors that have contributed to this tragedy at Astroworld. And there are a lot of people who are responsible.

Our hearts truly go out to all those affected by this tragic incident. Nobody should ever go to a music event and not come home.

Danish Baig, Rudy Peña, Franco Patino, Brianna Rodriguez, John Hilgert, Jacob Jurinek, Axel Acosta, all your loved ones and every single person who suffered an injury at Astroworld, whether that be physical or mental, you are in our thoughts. 

“I learned that people can easily forget that others are human.” —’ Prisoner’ from the Stanford Prison Experiment (1971)

whygeneration.co.uk