Thoughts on the Astroworld disaster

Horrible news out of Houston this weekend as several people were killed in a crowd crush at a Travis Scott concert. While I have no special knowledge about this particular event, I do have more than a passing interest in the phenomenon of crowd crushes, so I’ve been following the coverage with interest.

In particular, as I noted on Twitter, there are an awful lot of things being reported that one should treat with an appropriate amount of skepticism. No two events like this are ever exactly the same, but they’ve been happening for as long as human beings have been congregating and there are certainly commonalities that you find again and again. I wanted to look at just a couple of the claims I’ve seen made and explain why I think we should wait for more information to come out before we accept them as true, and contribute to spreading misinformation ourselves.

Dubious claim: The stampede was caused by “panic”

This appears to have been revised out of the AP reports, which is good, but initially they included this language (emphasis mine):

At least eight people have died and 17 others, including a 10-year-old child, have been transported to the hospital after being trampled at a panic-fueled stampede Saturday night in Houston, Texas. The crush happened during the opening-night set of Astroworld Festival founder Travis Scott, whose livestream was halted as the panic ensued. More than 300 of the 50,000 people in attendance were reportedly treated at a field hospital on the grounds that day.

Police say at least 11 of those hospitalized suffered cardiac arrest after trying to escape a yet unknown source of panic during Scott’s set, which featured a special appearance from Drake.

Suffice it to say that this is rarely the cause of a crowd crush. It’s much more common for crushes to occur when a mass of people is all trying to move toward something, not away. Why? Because there is usually a smaller, central point that too many people are trying to get to — such as the front of a stage. People in the back, unaware of what’s happening ahead of them, add to the compressive force, which multiplies throughout the crowd. When people are trying to escape, they often have more options and can spread out.

Consider some historical examples. The wire stories have compared this disaster to the one that occurred at a concert by The Who at Riverfront Stadium in 1979. In that case, most of the entrance doors were closed and locked. The crowd believed, incorrectly, that the concert was starting, and began to surge toward those few doors which were open. The doors couldn’t handle the capacity, and the crush developed then. This was also the case at the Victoria Hall disaster, which I covered in an episode of Fatal Errors, and the famous Hillsborough disaster.

It’s also suspicious that the “source of panic” was not identified. When there is a “source of panic,” there is no doubt about what it is: for examples, a fire or gunshots. In a case like that of the Station nightclub fire, indeed the fire did cause a rush to the exits, and most of the dead were clustered around a few points of egress. But these people mostly died of smoke inhalation, not compressive asphyxiation. And in the case of the Las Vegas concert shooting, despite the obvious panic, all of the reported fatalities were caused by gunshot. There was no crush.

Dubious claim: Concertgoers were out of control

There was footage of some people rushing the gates beforehand, and I’ve seen one story making the rounds of a reporter saying she felt uneasy with the vibe there, which is fair enough. But there are a couple of points I’ll make here. One, out-of-control concertgoers do not a crowd crush make. How many crush deaths were there at Woodstock 99? Two, it’s straight out of the official playbook to try to blame the victims of this kind of an event for their own deaths.

The most infamous example of this is clearly the Hillsborough disaster, in which police and the media conspired to accuse the crowd of being drunk and out of control, publishing an entire front page that accused fans of picking the pockets of the dead, urinating on first responders, and other wild claims that ultimately were shown to be made up from whole cloth.

The physics of a crowd crush really do not mesh with the perception of wild, frothing fans. It is simply a function of density. When a certain threshold is passed, it becomes impossible for an individual to move against the crowd and that is when compressive asphyxiation begins to occur. It doesn’t matter what anyone in the crowd is “doing.” The only way to prevent a crowd crush is to prevent the numbers from reaching this density.

Dubious claim: One or more villains was injecting people with an unknown substance

This one would be laughable it weren’t coming from the chief of police, and if so many people weren’t receiving it credulously. It’s actually a combination of two common ass-covering gambits, that of the victim-blaming we’ve already seen and that of law enforcement fabricating ludicrous tales of threats to their safety. Suffice it to say that I would bet my house this is not true. Beyond the logistics of smuggling hypodermic needles in order to stealthily inject random people, you also have to wonder why someone would bother doing that to begin with, and why this would be the first time in history such a thing had happened.

Beyond which, it doesn’t work as a “source of panic” because even in the police chief’s telling, the person affected didn’t even realize what had happened. This is genuinely just somebody throwing shit at the wall to see what sticks.

What really happened?

We don’t know yet. But we know what has usually happened in cases like this. Most of the time the cause of a crowd crush is poor crowd management, which means too many people allowed in too small a space, too few available means of egress, and too few staff members given too little training and/or authority. Sometimes there is a genuine mistake on someone’s part, failing to unlock or open a passageway. More often there are a lot of careless cost-cutting measures that seem innocuous in isolation but which add up to disaster.

The one thing we can say with confidence is that the victims are not responsible for their own deaths and injuries, and that the people who are responsible will do everything in their considerable power to divert blame. That’s a tale as old as time.