On Friday, November 5, Tragedy struck at Houston’s Astroworld Festival. Maria Caamaño has the story.
Chaos, traumatizing, a fight for survival — these are just some of the ways people have described the events that took place on Friday November 5th at Travis Scott’s Astroworld festival in Houston, Texas.
Considered one of the worst concert tragedies in history, the festival ended in disaster with 8 dead, 13 sustaining critical injuries, and more than 300 injured. According to Insider, the victims’ ages ranged from 27 to as young as 14 years old. Although the details have not yet been released, these victims’ deaths are believed to have stemmed from cardiac arrest, and have led many to question whether there was adequate security and medical personnel on hand for the event and why it was not shut down sooner.
According to BuzzFeed News, approximately 50,000 people rushed the stage, with many jumping over barriers, falling over and tripping under the crowd, and many passing out from being trampled or crushed by others. According to the Houston Fire Department, by 9:38 pm they had declared the festival a mass casualty event and alerted promoters of the concert of this. Scott continued performing for 37 more minutes. According to ABC News, the Houston Fire Department transported 25 people to hospitals and CPR was performed on 11 of the victims.
After these events, many concert goers took to social media to explain what the scene was like. Instagram user @seannafaith described the scene as “watching a Jenga tower topple. Person after person were sucked down. You could not guess from which direction the shove of hundreds of people would come next.”
Twitter user @cynthia_lira wrote on the platform that she was buried beneath two people. She said, “Since I was against the plastic ground, there was no oxygen, and the very little light that was available disappeared because of the bodies on top of me.” Multiple videos have surfaced showing people desperately asking security to stop the show and screaming for help from the crowds.
Travis Scott, who was headlining the event, released a statement Saturday saying, “I’m absolutely devastated by what took place last night. My prayers go out to the families and all those impacted by what happened at Astroworld Festival.” The artist will be paying for the funeral proceedings of all victims of the festival.
This is not the first time this happened at a Travis Scott performance, however. Known for his live shows where he encourages the audience to form mosh pits, crowd surf, and rush the stage, in the past, Scott has even encouraged a fan to jump off a balcony and incited violence against a concert attendee who grabbed his shoes. Videos of these events have resurfaced on Twitter this week. Additionally, in another instance, a man has been left paralyzed after attending one of his concerts and Scott has pled guilty on two occasions of misdemeanor charges. Footage of Scott’s arrest after inciting a riot in Arizona back in 2017 even appears in his Netflix documentary “Look Mom I Can Fly”.
According to BuzzFeed News, 3 lawsuits against Scott, ScoreMore and LiveNation – the concert company that organized the event – have been filed by concertgoers who were injured. By November 8th, 16 lawsuits had been filed in Harris County District Court.
According to BuzzFeed News, one of the lawsuits claims that Scott “made the conscious decision to let the show go on” after being aware of an “extreme risk of harm to concertgoers that was escalating by the moment” and is seeking a million dollars in damages. Another lawsuit is not only holding Scott accountable, but also rapper Drake and other artists who performed at Astroworld. The lawsuit claims that, “they either were aware, or should’ve been aware, of the reaction the crowd would have and did have.”
For now, Scott has canceled some of his future performances as an investigation looking into the details of the event begins.
For WNUR News, this was Maria Caamaño.
