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Astroworld festival plan had more instructions for extreme weather than mass casualty incidents, document shows

The 56-page operations plan does not address what staff should do in the event of a crowd surge like the one that erupted on Friday

Megan Sheets
Tuesday 09 November 2021 22:10 GMT
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The operations plan for Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival dedicated more space to instructions for extreme weather than for mass casualty incidents, it has been revealed.

The 56-page document came under scrutiny after eight people were killed and hundreds more injured in a crush while Scott was performing on Friday night at Houston’s NRG Park.

A copy of the plan, written by Texas concert promoter Scoremore and obtained by CNN, addresses multiple scenarios including active shooter, power loss, release of hazardous materials, severe weather and Mass Casualty Incident (MCI).

The MCI section takes up about half a page, outlining the protocol for establishing communications and triage stations, alerting local hospitals and prioritizing patients based on degree of injury.

The section is significantly shorter than its successor, severe weather, which spans three pages with subsections about different types of weather. The subsection on high winds is broken down into four categories: 25mph, 30mph, 35mph and 45mph.

Other key areas of the plan including directions for crowd control and quelling civil unrest are decidedly vague, although CNN noted that the version it obtained may not have been final.

In the event of a fatality, staff were instructed to “never use the term dead or deceased over the radio” and instead to use the term “smurfs”.

Paul Wertheimer, founder and president of Crowd Management Strategies, noted that the plan is missing crucial information about how to deal with a crowd surge.

"It doesn’t even really appear in what is the equivalent of the Astroworld’s crowd management plan," Mr Wertheimer told CNN.

"There’s no reference to crowd surge, crowd crush, crowd panic. There’s no reference to the front of the stage and festival seating crowd. And therefore, there’s no specific emergency planning for a mass casualty crowd crush event."

The 56-page operations plan came under scrutiny after eight people were killed and hundreds more injured in a crush while Scott was performing on Friday night at Houston’s NRG Park.
The 56-page operations plan came under scrutiny after eight people were killed and hundreds more injured in a crush while Scott was performing on Friday night at Houston’s NRG Park. (Reuters)

Eight people, ranging in age from 14 to 27, were killed when the crowd of around 50,000 fans surged towards the stage during his performance, causing people to be crushed and trampled in the melee.

Around 300 more were injured in the incident, which is now the focus of at least two criminal investigations as well as a growing number of lawsuits against Mr Scott and event promoter Live Nation.

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