Report: Over 700 seriously hurt at Astroworld
More than 700 people were seriously injured during November’s Astroworld Festival tragedy, according to new court documents filed in Harris County this week.
Plaintiffs’ attorneys Jason Itkin, Richard Mithoff and Sean Roberts notified 11th Judicial District Judge Judge Kristen Brauchle Hawkins that they’d conducted a survey of people affected by the Astroworld tragedy, which claimed the lives of 10 concertgoers late last year, including a 9-year-old boy, a 14-yearold boy and a 16-year-old girl.
According to the attorneys’ survey, some 732 people filed claims tied to injuries requiring significant medical treatment. An additional 1,649 claims were tied to injuries that required less extensive treatment, and they were also reviewing 2,540 claims for injuries where the severity was not fully ascertained.
The filing provides the latest and most complete picture, so far, of the toll of the Astroworld Festival, a music festival that drew tens of thousands of visitors to Houston from across the region and the country.
The high-energy festival, produced by local rap icon Travis Scott, devolved into chaos shortly after Scott took the stage and the 50,000-strong crowd compressed toward the stage as eager fans tried to get closer to the action.
The crowd crush left hundreds of concertgoers fighting for air, and social media videos taken during the fracas caught images of concertgoers carrying unconscious spectators out of the concert or crowdsurfing them out of the dangerous event, which now counts as one of the deadliest concerts in American history.
All of the people who died during the concert suffered “compression asphyxia,” meaning those trapped were unable to expand their diaphragms, restricting blood flow to the brain and heart and causing cardiac arrest. That can cause death within minutes, a doctor said, even if a person is upright.
After the incident, Hearst reporters found a slew of problems or missed warning signs that contributed to the tragedy, including lack of adequate staffing, poorly trained security guards, inadequate operations plans, confusion over who was in charge of the actual site, concerns about adequate medical care, absence of key public safety resources, a dangerous venue layout and missed warning signs about a possible crowd crush — among numerous other issues.
The disaster has opened up a flood of litigation that will likely take years — if not longer — to reach conclusion.
A state task force formed after the tragedy also pointed to training and permitting failures contributing to the disaster.
The defendants in the lawsuit, Live Nation
Worldwide, Scoremore Mgmt, ASM Global, Travis Scott and others, generally deny the allegations, court records show.
One of the companies, Contemporary Services Corp., has come under additional criticism, after a man successfully jumped onstage during a comedy show in Los Angeles last week and attacked Dave Chappelle.
Scott — who pleaded guilty to reckless conduct after urging fans to rush the stage during a 2015 show in Chicago and to a charge of disorderly conduct for similar behavior during a 2017 show in Arkansas — has consistently denied wrongdoing and asked to be removed from the lawsuits.