Nothing has changed since Astroworld

When standing in a dense crowd at, say, a music festival at NRG Park, even the slightest of movements can ripple through the masses, causing others to lose balance or fall.

When you’re packed to the gills in tight spaces, constrained by rigid metal barricades on all sides, pressing forward with nowhere else to go, the crowd can collapse on itself. At that point, you’re essentially drowning in a sea of bodies. Arms and legs get twisted together. Blood supply can’t reach your brain. In 30 seconds, you might lose consciousness, and in about six minutes you might suffocate to death.

This is what’s known as compression asphyxia, the cause of death of 10 concertgoers at the Astroworld festival hosted by rapper Travis Scott in Houston.

One year later, this gruesome bit of detail — the technical explanation of how their loved ones died — is pretty much the closest thing that the victims’ families have to closure.

In the aftermath of the tragedy, a cone of silence has fallen in the space where public officials once promised answers and action.

The festival, which damaged the reputation of Scott, one of Houston’s rising stars and cultural ambassadors, and called into question whether the city should ever host a concert of that magnitude again, has left a litany of questions in its wake. A moment that could have ushered in substantive change and set a safer standard for large-scale outdoor events — and perhaps even prevented similar tragedies such as the crowd crush at a festival last weekend in Seoul, South Korea, that killed at least 156 people — is instead at risk of becoming memoryholed by sheer inertia.

“I have never seen a worse response to a crowd tragedy at a live entertainment event than what occurred in Houston,” Paul Wertheimer, the founder of Crowd Management Strategies who has studied crowds for more than four decades, told the editorial board.

The inaction around the tragedy is confounding, given how much attention it garnered and the stature of the artists involved — not just Scott, but Drake, arguably the biggest pop star on the planet — as well as event organizers Live Nation, a corporation that essentially has a monopoly on major concerts across the globe. That the 10 victims consisted largely of teens and 20-somethings with decades of life still ahead of them only adds to the heartache.

And yet, as the Chronicle’s Dylan McGuinness detailed this week, city and county officials have gone 12 months without mustering even a bare-minimum response.

Neither the city nor the county has passed new standards or regulations to prevent any of the myriad factors that contributed to the Astroworld deaths.

A criminal investigation by the Houston Police Department is, somehow, still ongoing, with nary a suspect arrested or even an indication as to what possible crimes might have been committed.

A congressional inquiry into Live Nation was announced by the House Oversight and Reform Committee one month after the festival. While the notion of a federal probe generated national headlines, it hasn’t resulted in a single hearing. The committee granted Live Nation an extension to its deadline to provide requested information. U.S. Rep. Al Green, D-Houston, told the Chronicle “the issues are still being vetted.”

The closest thing the public has to an official response to the Astroworld tragedy comes from a nine-page report released by a task force appointed by Gov. Greg Abbott. That document, however, was riddled with inaccuracies and glaring omissions. It stated that the county had sole jurisdiction over the event — a claim that County Judge Lina Hidalgo and the fire marshal disputed. It conflated separate incidents such as fence breaches at the concert that occurred well before the crowd crush that killed people, and it incorrectly stated the timeline of injuries.

The report avoided any discussion of substantive recommendations addressing Live Nation’s failure to manage crowd control. No mention of requiring event organizers to submit comprehensive plans for crowd management and emergency response to government for approval. No suggestion of requiring a capacity limit for outdoor events. No regulations for what many crowd science experts deem the most dangerous crowd configuration for any concert: standing room audiences.

Instead, the task force let event organizers off the hook. In one section, the report’s authors urge concert attendees to have “collective accountability and responsibility for the safety of others gathered at the event.”

Call it the concert safety edition of picking yourself up by your bootstraps.

On the legal side, thousands of Astroworld attendees await resolution as civil litigation drags on. Of the more than 2,500 plaintiffs who filed suit, most were survivors from the concert, but the number also included employees who worked the event and families of those killed. The Board of Judges of the Civil Trial Division in Harris County decided in December to consolidate the suits into one filing, with 11th District Court Judge Kristen Hawkins tapped to oversee the proceedings.

While Hawkins has issued a gag order preventing attorneys, plaintiffs and defendants from speaking on the cases outside of court proceedings, at least two of the victims’ lawsuits against Scott and Live Nation have been settled.

Whether Live Nation will be forced to answer basic facts about Astroworld remains to be seen. Questions about the festival’s preparation and physical layout and the difficulty in communicating between private security and police and fire officials abound. Astroworld may end up going down as just another dreadful chapter in the company’s checkered history of safety lapses and violations: from a 2011 stage collapse in Indiana that killed seven people to major injuries suffered by faltering equipment. Clearly, these incidents have hardly affected Live Nation’s bottom line. The company reported in August a 40 percent increase in revenue, to the tune of $4.4 billion.

Scott, meanwhile, has somewhat quietly gone about rebuilding his public image. One month after the concert, he hosted a toy drive in Houston. In March, he announced a series of longterm initiatives that included addressing safety at large-scale live events. The plan, dubbed Project HEAL, pledged to fund the U.S. Conference of Mayors Task Force on Event Safety and a “tech-driven device” currently in development.

He’s also returned to the concert stage, headlining major shows in London and Las Vegas as he prepares his next album, reportedly titled “Utopia.” Those shows went off without a hitch. If nothing else comes of the Astroworld catastrophe, perhaps Scott has learned from his previous reckless encouragement of dangerous behavior, undermining security and inciting fans to “rage” and bum-rush barricades and storm the stage.

The reality is that cultural behemoths such as Scott and Live Nation were likely always going to come out of this tragedy facing few legitimate consequences beyond a few dents in their bank accounts. It’s possible the festival might even return to Houston one day. But before we allow that to happen, we should demand and expect more from our public officials, whose silence and inaction are unacceptable. The Astroworld victims deserved better, and so far, our leaders have failed them.

What could have brought real change is at risk of being memory-holed.