Astroworld had a plan for all sorts of emergencies. It designated who could stop a performance and how. It included a script for how to announce an evacuation. It detailed how to handle a mass casualty event.
The Houston Chronicle obtained the 56-page “event operations plan,” which the festival promoter developed to ensure the safety of 50,000 guests at the sold-out event at NRG Park.
“Astroworld, as an organization, will be prepared to evaluate and respond appropriately to emergency situations, so as to prevent or minimize injury or illness to guests, event personnel and the general public,” the document states.
Attendees described an entirely different scene: an overwhelmed venue where security personnel were unable to prevent fans from being crushed. Where medics were too few. And where production staff were unwilling to halt the show despite pleas from fans that others had collapsed.
The tragedy at Astroworld Festival
Attendee Maximiano Alvarado said he witnessed a medic treat two victims by herself. He heard her say she could not detect a pulse on either.
“Finally paramedics come, and they started doing CPR,” Alvarado said. “I didn’t even pay attention to Travis more than half of the time because there were so many things, cops and stuff, going on around me.”
All of the nine concert promoters and security personnel named in the document as responsible for managing the show declined to comment on what went wrong or did not respond. They include Seyth Boardman, author of the plan and the festival’s safety director, and Brad Wavra, a vice president at promoter Live Nation.
Harris County Judge Lina Hidalgo said a review of the plan — and whether it was properly followed — should be part of an objective, third-party investigation of the tragedy.
“What I know so far is that Live Nation and Astroworld put together plans for this event,” Hidalgo said Saturday. “A security plan, a site plan. That they were at the table with the city of Houston and Harris County. And so perhaps the plans were inadequate. Perhaps the plans were good, but they weren’t followed. Perhaps it was something else entirely.”
The plan for the Astroworld Festival said that the executive producer and the festival director had the ultimate authority to stop the show. In a dire emergency, the document said an incident command post would be established and the incident commander could order the power to be diverted from the show if lives were in “immediate danger.”
That step was never taken.
Stopping a human crush once it has started is difficult, said a security guard who has worked NRG events in the past. Video from attendees in the minutes before Scott took the stage at 9 p.m. shows fans jumping barriers by the front of the stage to escape overcrowding, which could have been a critical, missed warning sign for security staff, he said.
“You have to pay attention to that stuff, when people are getting pushed against the fences,” said the guard, who asked to remain anonymous because he still works in the security field. “If you can’t put a stop to it then, it’s a lot harder to control.”
Houston police officials said they asked concert promoters to halt Scott’s concert after the crowd rushed the stage and fans began collapsing around 9:30 p.m. Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña said a “mass casualty” event was declared at 9:38 p.m.
“Suddenly we had several people down on the ground, experiencing some type of cardiac arrest or some type of medical episode,” said Larry Satterwhite, executive assistant chief at the Houston Police Department. “And so we immediately started doing CPR and moving people right then. That’s when I went and met with the promoters and Live Nation, and they agreed to end early in the interest of public safety.”
It’s unclear whom Satterwhite spoke with or how long that conversation lasted. Police Chief Troy Finner later said there were concerns about shutting down the show too abruptly and risking a riot.
But concert attendees said Scott didn’t end the show early — he continued playing his full set of songs for 37 minutes after the mass casualty event was declared by the fire department. The show finally ended at 10:15 p.m., they said. Finner and Mayor Sylvester Turner said it ended five minutes earlier at 10:10 p.m.
The police department said it would not grant any interviews on Sunday. Peña said that even though the plan didn’t call for it, the fire department positioned extra EMS units nearby and they swiftly responded.
“We went ahead and pre-planned in anticipation for a contingency,” Peña said. “That’s the reason why we had units deployed around the perimeter and were able to respond so quickly.”
Still, even that measure was inadequate. The fire department dispatched an additional 28 units to the scene after declaring the mass casualty event, according to radio traffic.
The emergency plan stated that if someone is seriously injured, concert personnel can request a partial evacuation of the area. The plan also offered scripts on what to say to concert attendees in the event of an evacuation.
It’s unknown if any requests for partial evacuations were sent to the event’s supervisors. Live Nation did not use the PA system or video boards to broadcast any safety messages Friday evening, attendees said.
The report recommended dealing with civil disturbances or riots by maintaining control from the outset of the show.
“The key in properly dealing with this type of scenario is proper management of the crowd from the minute the doors open,” the report stated. “Crowd management techniques will be employed to identify potentially dangerous crowd behavior in its early stages in an effort to prevent a civil disturbance/riot.”
But crowd-control efforts fell short earlier in the day, when a VIP entrance was breached by hundreds of fans at 2 p.m. The plan made no mention of a similar breach in 2019, nor how security measures had been improved in response to it.
The plan also details how to handle a fatality, including how to report it up the chain of command.
“Notify Event Control of a suspected deceased victim utilizing the code ‘Smurf,’” the plan stated. “Never use the term ‘dead’ or ‘deceased’ over the radio.”
Alejandro Serrano contributed reporting.
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Astroworld had a plan for mass casualty events. It's unclear whether promoters followed it - Houston Chronicle
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