SILENCE ON REFORMS
Little has changed after 10 people died in the crowd crush at music fest
It has been one year since 10 people were crushed to death in the crowd at the Astroworld Festival, and little has been done to ensure a similar tragedy does not occur again in Houston or Harris County. Neither the city nor the county has passed new standards or regulations to ensure adequate and better-trained security, or to prevent the problematic venue design that experts say contributed to the deaths. A criminal investigation and a citycounty task force carry on behind closed doors, producing no new information for the public about what went wrong. A task force appointed by the governor produced a nine-page report with factual errors. And a congressional investigation into Live Nation, the show’s promoter, appears to have stalled.
Citing those inquiries, public officials are reluctant to discuss the event. Sixteen public officials, contractors and promoters declined to comment or did not respond to requests for this story. Victims are prohibited from speaking out if they are pursuing a legal claim, due to a gag order imposed by a judge last year.
The resulting silence, at best, is justice delayed. At worst, the lack of progress threatens to mute the urgency felt after the tragedy, and it could recede into memory without meaningful reform.
“Ten people were killed here in a situation that was more preventable than what happened in Uvalde, and look at how it has disappeared,” said Paul Wertheimer, the founder of Crowd Management Strategies who has studied crowds for more than four decades. That research began when he worked for the city of Cincinnati when 11 people
By Dylan McGuinness STAFF WRITER
were killed in a 1979 crowd crush at a concert there for The Who. He described the response in Houston as the worst he has seen in the aftermath of a deadly crowd event.
A task force formed by the city and county is close to finalizing a memo that seeks to clarify jurisdiction at events where the city and county collaborate, like those at NRG Park, where the Astroworld music festival was held. The county owns the land, and a semi-autonomous county agency named the Harris County Sports and Convention Corp. manages it. It is within city limits, however, meaning the Houston police and fire departments have jurisdiction there. The overlapping authorities led to much hand-wringing and finger-pointing after the Nov. 5 tragedy.
The Chronicle requested notes and presentations from the task force’s meetings, but the city is seeking permission from the Texas Attorney General’s Office to withhold those records.
Only one member of the task force agreed to speak to the Chronicle. Mike DeMarco, who runs operations for the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo, said he thinks the final product — mostly complete but still getting final approval — will help clarify who is in charge of what. It could be released as soon as this week.
“That’s really what the task was, to make sure you’ve got the right people in the right place making the right decisions,” DeMarco said. “I think the end result is going to be a much, much better flow of information and allocation of resources for all events across the city and county. If that’s the takeaway from this, I think it’s going to be the most positive thing out of it.”
He described the overlapping entities at NRG Park, where the rodeo is held as well, as a bit of a “unicorn” in the event industry. And the nature of the business, he said, is not necessarily trying to predict and prevent every possible scenario but ensuring the correct procedures are in place to respond to them.
“You can’t really prevent things from happening, it’s just nature, but you can mitigate against those things,” DeMarco said.
When Mayor Sylvester Turner and Harris County Commissioner Adrian Garcia announced the group, they said it would be “futuristic” and would not dwell on Astroworld. The memo, therefore, is not expected to address the more detailed problems that experts identified after the deadly concert, laid out in a Chronicle investigation last year.
Those issues included: a lapse of 37 minutes between the first reports of injury and death and the end of the show; confusion about who had authority to order the concert to stop; the apparent lack of a unified command center including showrunners and public safety agencies together in one place; four audience zones that were each barricaded on three sides, preventing people from escaping overcrowded situations; and too few and poorly trained security guards, at least some of whom were not licensed and were hired hastily the day before the event.
Call for standards
It is possible there is work underway to address those shortcomings, or that the various inquiries underway ultimately result in change. Public officials, though, have not indicated that to the public. Susan Christian, the mayor’s director of special events and chair of the task force, presented council members earlier this month with proposed changes to guidelines for large events on private property, including a requirement to submit safety plans at least 60 days in advance.
Christian said she does not think significant adjustments are necessary for those on public land, like Astroworld.
“I think that we have expanded some of our processes to be more inclusive,” Christian told reporters after a council committee meeting. “We work daily on safety issues at events with our police and with our fire departments specifically. And we know we have a very strong, good ordinance with Chapter 25. We are looking to always improve communication and always improve processes. But are there any big glaring holes? I would say no.”
Chapter 25 is the city’s special events law, outlining requirements for using city-owned spaces. The city enacted it in 2010 and last updated it in 2018.
Experts disagree with Christian’s assessment, and cities and states where similar tragedies have occurred have acted quickly to bolster regulations of those events. Three weeks after the fatal concert in Cincinnati, for example, that city banned unassigned festival seating with minor exceptions, a prohibition that lasted for decades. A task force chaired by Wertheimer recommended other changes within a year.
Houston or Harris County could adopt a set of standards for crowd management at all large events in the city. Texas does not have a statewide fire code and leaves those decisions up to local entities. Houston uses the 2015 version of the International Fire Code.
The National Fire Protection Association, a nonprofit, has one such standard called the Life Safety Code 101, which many states have adopted as law. That code includes a section on crowd management. The Event Safety Alliance, another nonprofit, also has a guidebook. The vice president of that organization serves on the city-county task force.
“The argument on festival (standing room) seating after the Who tragedy was, you either allow it or you don’t,” Wertheimer said. “There was no third choice where if you allow it and do these following steps, it could be reasonably safe. That’s what the NFPA presented.”
The code’s standards may have prevented the design that experts say helped lead to the crowd crush at Astroworld. The audience was divided into four pens, each of which was barricaded on three sides. When the crowd from a preceding SZA performance streamed over to watch Travis Scott’s set, it led to dramatic overcrowding in the rear-left pen. The only exit was the entrance where SZA attendees were piling into, essentially trapping everyone else there. A Washington Post investigation found seven of the 10 deaths occurred in that pen.
The NFPA and ESA standards are worthy, but another issue is getting those esoteric and technical manuals to the actual people who matter, said G. Keith Still, a visiting professor of crowd science at the University of Suffolk in England. He has written textbooks on crowd science and helped design the queues for Queen Elizabeth’s funeral procession last month.
“There needs to be some standards that are a little bit more accessible than buried in the middle of massive documents that carry all risks and details,” Still said. “This is part of the problem we’ve got in the industry. In any other safety-related industry, such as aviation, an accident occurs, or a near miss occurs, and you’ve got a team of experts that go in there, evaluate the risks, evaluate the consequences, rewrite the processes and procedures and then that becomes best practices and is sent out to all aviation agencies around the world. A near miss happens in the event industry, and a year after the day, you’re still no closer to figuring out what happened.”
Still has been hired by plaintiffs in the civil litigation and could not speak to the specifics at Astroworld.
‘Original sin’
Brian Gant, a professor of cybersecurity at Maryville University and a former Secret Service agent who helped organize security for inaugurations, said there was a similar crowding scenario at President Barack Obama’s first swearing-in, but prudent design helped avoid a disaster. One portion of the audience space began getting overcrowded, but the area was sectioned off with mesh fencing instead of metal barriers.
“When the issue arose, the fencing was taken down and they were able to spill off and move into another area, and it had zero impact on the inauguration,” Gant said. “That kind of security was built in.”
Experts also agree there should be some sort of a license for promoters, requiring them to exhibit competency in these matters before gathering thousands of people in one place. Astroworld was promoted by Scoremore, a subsidiary of event giant Live Nation, but many large events are put on by people with essentially no experience.
Texas already requires a license for security guards, though some who worked at Astroworld said they did not have one and received no training. The county at the time of Astroworld had a dedicated vendor for security at NRG Park, Contemporary Services Corp., meaning anyone putting on an event there had to use that company for security. The sports corporation’s private manager for NRG Park, ASM Global, raised concerns about the amount of security in the days before the event.
It is not clear whether Contemporary Services Corp. remains the county’s security vendor.
Wertheimer described overcrowding as the event industry’s “original sin,” one that drives profits for showrunners who face little consequence for sacrificing safety. When it comes to Astroworld, he said, the buck stops with Live Nation.
The U.S. House Oversight Committee announced an investigation into Live Nation in wake of the concert. It sent the company a list of questions and requests for information, including pre-show security assessments and planning. That initial letter generated national headlines, but it does not appear anything has come of the probe.
The next month, the committee granted Live Nation an extension to its deadline to provide the requested information. There are no subsequent news releases on its website.
The office of Rep. Carolyn Maloney, the New York Democrat who chairs the committee, did not respond to a request for an update into the investigation. Houston Rep. Al Green, who signed the initial letter, said, “The issues are still being vetted.”