At Least 8 Dead After Panic at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston [Photos + Video] | lovebscott.com

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At Least 8 Dead After Panic at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston [Photos + Video]

At least eight people have died after a mass casualty event at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston on Friday night.

via: Daily Beast

Attendees at rapper Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival have recalled being crushed to the point of passing out, having their pleas for help ignored, and seeing overwhelmed medics struggle to evacuate bodies as the Houston event turned into one of the deadliest concerts in U.S. history.

At least eight people died and 17 others, including a 10-year-old child, were hospitalized after being trampled in a panic-fueled crush during Scott’s livestreamed opening-night performance on Friday, which featured a surprise appearance by Drake.

Police say at least 11 of those hospitalized suffered cardiac arrest after trying to escape what appeared to be crowd crushes. More than 300 of the 50,000 attendees were treated at a field hospital on the grounds that day.

“It seems like it happened with just over the course of a few minutes. Suddenly we had several people down on the ground experiencing some type of cardiac arrest or some type of medical episode. We immediately started doing CPR,” Houston Police Chief Lt. Larry Satterwhite, who was working near the stage, said.

Houston Fire Chief Sam Peña said the disaster began around 9:15 p.m. local time when the crowd began to “compress toward the front of the stage,” according to CNN. “People began to fall out, become unconscious and it created additional panic,” he said.

Satterwhite said medical staff onsite were so overwhelmed they had to ask people in the crowd to administer CPR to revive injured concertgoers.

Scott eventually stopped his performance but disturbing fan videos and witness accounts provided to The Daily Beast showed him still performing as fans and paramedics performed CPR on passed-out concertgoers. Other videos show a cameraman ignoring attendees who were begging him to stop the show because people were dying.

https://twitter.com/Ashmelym/status/1457001681376452608?s=20

Multiple videos showed fans dancing on top of emergency vehicles as they were trying to help unconscious people. In one clip, Scott spotted an ambulance with flashing lights, making mention of it from the stage, pausing for a few moments—and then sending two members of his entourage diving off the stage to crowd surf.

Concertgoer Madeline Eskins, an ICU nurse who has worked in the ER, was trapped in a crush of bodies near the front of the stage and said she thought she was going to die.

“I’ve seen people die. Nothing could have prepared me for what I witnessed last night,” Eskins, 23, told The Daily Beast. “I was about to tell my boyfriend to tell my son that I loved him, because I really thought that I was not gonna see him again. And before I could say anything, I fainted.”

Eskins’ boyfriend and a good Samaritan lifted her up and “they basically crowd-surf me out of there,” she said. She eventually came to in a safety zone just behind the teeming sea of people.

“I wake up with a bottle of water in my lap, and I look around and there’s just bodies getting carried back,” Eskins said. “The security guard dropped me off and left to go pull more people out.”

It was then that Eskins said she realized the festival staff were hopelessly out of their depth. She spotted another security guard carrying out a man who appeared to be in dire shape. Eskins asked if anyone had checked his pulse. The security guard looked at her in a panic and said he didn’t know how, according to Eskins.

“I was screaming, ‘Do something! People are dying!’ They put their hands up, like, What can we do? I said, ‘You need to figure out where the nearest medical staff is, and get him there.’ He takes off running, and another security guard says, ‘Please come help us.’”

Eskins said she followed them to a VIP area, where she said she saw a woman and two men on the ground getting CPR. There weren’t enough medics on hand, and they didn’t appear to have the proper training or equipment, said Eskins, who began performing CPR on one of the victims herself.

“As I’m doing CPR, one of the medics is checking the radial pulse, which is incorrect,” she said. “These people did not have a lot of experience in code situations or CPR… There was not anywhere near enough medical staff… they only had one stretcher. It was a complete nightmare… Toward the end of the concert, a bunch of cops showed up with more stretchers and carried some more people out of there.”

Eskins described herself as an avid Travis Scott fan, and said she has been to all three Astroworld festivals. What happened on Friday night, she said, “was absolutely despicable.”

In a lengthy Instagram post, an attendee named Seanna said people were packed in so tightly that they struggled to breathe as soon as Scott’s performance began.

“Within the first 30 seconds of the first song, people began to drown — in other people… The rush of people became tighter and tighter. Breathing became something only a few were capable of. The rest were crushed or unable to breathe in the thick hot air.”

She said her friend began to “gasp for breath” and tried to leave but there was nowhere to go. “The shoving got harder and harder… People began to choke one another as the mass swayed. It became more and more violent. We began to scream for help.”

She said scores of people around her began screaming as they struggled to breathe, and some people collapsed. “We begged security to help us, for the performer to see us and know something was wrong. None of that came. We continued to drown… Once one [person] fell, a hole opened in the ground. It was like watching a Jenga Tower topple. Person after person were sucked down.”

She said more people were pushed or sucked into the pile of people and trampled on. Others were shrieking and had “terror in their eyes.” She managed to get to a filming platform to alert a cameraman that people were dying but he “told me to get off the platform, and continued filming.”

Earlier in the day at around 2 p.m. local time, hundreds of eager and rowdy concertgoers had stampeded the entrance of the festival, just outside of NRG Park, knocking over fences and metal detectors, and appearing to overwhelm understaffed security teams guarding the perimeter. No major injuries were reported from the rush.

The second and final day of the event was canceled following the tragedy on Friday, Astroworld Festival said in a statement. “Our hearts are with the Astroworld Festival family tonight—especially those we lost and their loved ones,” it said.

Houston Police Chief Troy Finner said over 360 police officers and 241 security officers were stationed at the event throughout the day, and the promoters were cooperating with police.

“Nobody could dream of this,” he said. “But we’re here, and I think it’s very important that none of us speculate. Nobody has all the answers tonight.”

Another attendee, Cody Hartt, wrote on Twitter that he repeatedly tried to alert security about putting a stop to Scott’s headlining set in order to bring proper attention to the people who needed medical assistance, only to have his pleas fall on deaf ears.

“I screamed for help so many times, alerted security, asked everyone in the crowd if there was anyone who was CPR certified. Every call went unanswered. I was told, ‘we already know, and we can’t do anything to stop the show, they’re streaming live.’ Disgusting,” he wrote.

In 1979, 11 people were suffocated and trampled to death at a Who concert in Cincinnati. Singer Roger Daltrey and guitarist Pete Townshend have said they were affected deeply by the loss of life, which they didn’t find out about until after the show was over.

Thoughts and prayers to everyone effected.

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