I absolutely love seeing live music performances and attending concerts. I believe music is one of the best ways to bring people together. Therefore, after seeing that 10 people had died and hundreds more were injured at Travis Scott’s Astroworld Festival in Houston, I felt saddened and confused as to how something like this could happen. 

There are quite a few different reasons as to how people could have died. Dehydration and heat exhaustion could have come into play during the concert. Some attendees experienced cardiac arrest, losing heart function, and the ability to breathe. Perhaps the most awful cause of death or injury was being trampled due to a massive crowd surge. This crowd surge took place as Travis Scott began performing. About 50,000 people were in the crowd and began to rush to the front of the stage, knocking others over and compressing anyone else in their way. 

Medical personnel was probably the most needed people during the Astroworld Festival event. Unfortunately, there have been reports of medical staff leaving as the crowd got larger because they were too overwhelmed. This is devastating because when it got to the point where attendees needed medical help, there was not enough staff to make sure everyone was alright. 

Travis Scott has been known to get his crowds pumped up during shows and let fans come in without tickets. He has even been arrested twice for inciting riots at his concerts. So why didn’t Live Nation, the festival’s promoter, take this into consideration when planning for the event? They should have known things could get out of hand with Scott performing.

The attendees at the event showed no guilt for what they did at the moment. The fact that people were pushing others to the ground and trampling them just goes to show the blatant disregard for human lives in a high adrenaline environment. The crowd was so reckless and did not pay attention to the harm they were causing.

People have been placing blame on the security at Astroworld Festival. The security at Astroworld Festival was completely unprepared for what was going to happen. They can’t fully be at fault for this, however, because security guards for the event have admitted that they had no experience or training beforehand. This just shows how the festival did not mind the potential danger that could have come from the event. 

The incident that occurred at Astroworld Festival will forever change the way we feel as concert-goers. We will always have the question in our minds of “what if this happens to us?”. That being said, concert organizers and performers should learn from this experience to make sure that those in attendance are safe and defended from everything that can happen.

What took place at Astroworld Festival was an unfortunate combination of unprepared staff and organizers, several health risks, a performer that did not care for the safety of his fans, and fans that were too excited to notice what was going on around them. Everything that could have gone wrong went wrong and innocent people suffered because of it. It is so disappointing that all the unnecessary lives that were lost just wanted to feel a sense of normalcy and happiness by seeing live music.