Last Friday, Astroworld had planned a Mega Concert in Houston, where the sparks went out literally. The concert’s star performer and pride of Houston for the night, Travis Scott had his special entry planned after RZA performed, and got the audience in the mood for partying.
The crowd jumped in excitement when Scott took the stage. The stage was made in 2 levels, the main and a second stage. People gathered extremely close to the performer, and cluttered the space, as per the attendees.
Around 9 p.m. crowds were getting wild with enthusiasm and started to “compress” towards the podium occupied by Scott as per law enforcement officials. As per observations of, Houston Police Chief Troy Finner, people started “going down” at 9:30 p.m. Officials did not anticipate this, and notified the producers of it before things would go out of hands. They decided to culminate the event a little later than 10 p.m., he said.
Keith Still, a crowd science expert in the UK, said, “That sounds pretty scary,” “If you have a multi-stage setup, you would assume people would be distributed among states.”
“Part of when we have large events, one of the things that we consider is to ensure that the crowds are subdivided,” he said. “They had two separate stages in two separate areas. That was part of the plan.” The promoters believed that alternate stages should have been used in festivals so that there is proper crowd management, and division.
The key to the technique is, “If you’ve got favorable artists on different stages at the same time, then the crowd will be split,” said a veteran Los Angeles festival promoter. “You’ve got to have secondary options for stages and another talent.”
The continuous use of the same platform drew crowds closer to a single point, which resulted in a stampede crushing hundreds and killing 8 concertgoers. The artists have been “devasted” and took to social media to offer apologies.
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“I could never imagine anything like this just happening,” he said. “My fans really mean the world to me, and I always just really want to leave them with a positive experience. Any time I can make out … anything that’s going on, I’d stop the show and … help them get the help they need,” said Travis Scott in an Instagram story to his fans.
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