Maggie Collins
Senior Staff Writer
On Friday, November 5th, Astroworld, a music festival in Houston, Texas, left eight people dead and countless others injured and hospitalized. There have been reports of over 50,000 people being at this one festival, which security already feared would be too many people to handle. However, instead of trying to do anything to take any precautions for safety, they continued the festival. When rapper Travis Scott came onto the stage it took only about 10 minutes for everything to turn into deadly chaos.
I have read personal accounts from people and watched videos of others being physically crushed. People were trying to get as close as they could to the stage to see Travis Scott that some didn’t care what it took to get there or who they had to hurt. There have been reports of many ending up in piles of people. Those at the very bottom were hardly able to breathe. Many came out of the pile with broken bones.
While there was some medical staff on the scene to assist those who needed help, they couldn’t make it through the sea of people. In many videos from the concert, you can see people getting on top of the ambulances and dancing instead of helping them get through. There have also been reports of people injecting the medical staff with a type of drug that makes them go unconscious.
John Hilgert was 14 years old and was the youngest to be killed out of the 8. The youngest that was hospitalized was 10 years old. I feel that there could have been precautions to take that would have lessened the number of people that died or were injured. I believe that the fault not only falls on the security and people running this festival, but also Travis Scott— the rapper himself.
This has not been the first time that chaos has been started at a Travis Scott concert. He has been arrested at least twice for starting riots and causing people to completely abandon any rules or regulations set in place. He once told his fans at a concert to run past security and go up to the stage. This, while perhaps not a safety concern, shows how irresponsible that he has proven to be in the past.
At the Astroworld concert, Travis Scott continued to perform after noticing that there were ambulances in the crowd trying to save people. People were chanting “stop the show”, but he never flinched. There were even fans going on stage to tell those working at the festival that people were dying and the show needed to stop. Instead of stopping the show they just told them to get off the stage.
The security and people running the show should have not only anticipated for Travis Scott to try and cause chaos again, from past experiences, but they should have also gotten more security and medical staff on scene beforehand. There should have been many more regulations put in place to prevent anything like this from happening. They and Travis Scott should have stopped the show after one sign of someone being injured or an ambulance trying to get through.
I believe that people famously known, like Travis Scott, have a big impact on the world, whether negative or positive. They hold a responsibility to be respectful and responsible at their concerts and to keep their fans’s safety a top priority. I believe that he failed to keep that responsibility and should be held accountable for his actions. There have been numerous people that have performed concerts, like Adele and Post Malone, that have seen someone passed out or needing help and immediately stopped the show to personally assist them.
I struggled to read and watch the videos from this festival knowing how many lives were lost and traumatically impacted. Not only those who passed away or were hospitalized were impacted, but there is an enormous amount of people who will need therapy and other forms of help after this traumatic event. The blame falls into many hands for this tragedy, and I hope that this only opens more eyes to how dangerous things can become without some responsibility.
THE CAROLINIAN 
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