“People were going nuts pushing each other, falling over left, right and centre.”
Music fans are calling for safety concerns to be taken more seriously after events unfolded at the Astroworld festival.
Calum Kent, a music business student, remembers his haunting experience at a Ghostemane concert in London back in 2019. The venue only held a few hundred people which makes fatalities more of an occurrence. Being in the middle of a mosh pit, where majority of crowd surges happen, he remembers how he “got crushed a few times.” Kent assumes because of how dangerous the pit was, he remembers the show coming to an early finish “they ended the show an hour early no explanation just lights on. Everyone was shouting”.
Safety has become a sharp focus after the deaths of eight people and the injuries of over 300 others at Astroworld festival. The event held by Travis Scott has raised the concerns of many people around how safe they are when attending festivals. Scott has been actively criticised for his lack of response to the dangers that arose from the crowd surge. People believe he should have stopped the show to benefit the health services being able to get to the people who suffered in the crowds. At this point, 60 lawsuits have been made against Scott due to his actions and the consequences of them.
Another young person who has had a bad experience at a festival is Anna Preece, a journalism student, who went to Reading back in the summer. Preece didn’t enjoy her time at the festival and expressed concerns about how drunk people were “they were drunk to the point where they didn’t care and were pushing each other and running into groups of people.” Despite drunken crowds, Preece said that security was doing a good job at keeping people safe.
“I was fully squashed, I couldn’t move my arms and I was crushed at one point.”
Saffron Morgan, Reading Festival
Another attendee of Reading festival was Saffron Morgan, a student, who said what happens in festivals like crowd surging depends on the behaviour of the people “I think the types of people in the crowd makes a big difference.” Morgan says that whilst watching AJ Tracey on stage, the crowd started to rile up “people were just moshing and pushing the whole time. It was pretty stressful.”
There is a clear link between music crowds and football crowds concerning crowd surging. An anonymous source who was a security guard at an Aston Villa v. Manchester City football match said people went crazy in the crowds “Everyone was jumping on each other, shoving people out the way which lead to fights. You couldn’t imagine it.” It brings back memories from Hillsborough disaster in 1989 where 97 people died after being crushed by crowd surges.
The safety of people at large events should always be a priority and should have been a lesson learnt from the Manchester Arena bombing where 23 people died and roughly 1,000 people were injured. Only after this event did the safety of crowds become prioritised.
More needs to be done to ensure the safety of crowds at these large events. Lives shouldn’t be taken from innocent people who want to have a good time at places that radiate thrill.
