Scott seemed to be aware that something was going on in the crowd, but he might not have understood the severity of the situation, Johnson said. He said it felt like 100 degrees in the crowd. Johnson said fans started to crush each other, and people started screaming. You can’t even pick your arms up,” Johnson said. “Everyone was passing out around you, and everyone was trying to help each other. Then when Scott took the stage, the crowd seemed to rush to the front, trying to get closer to the stage, said Nick Johnson, a high school senior from the Houston suburb of Friendswood who was at the concert. People in the Houston crowd reported lots of pushing and shoving during the performances leading up to Scott’s set. Other past crowd catastrophes include the deaths of 97 people in an overcrowded Hillsborough Stadium in 1989 in Sheffield, England, and numerous disasters connected with the annual hajj in Saudi Arabia.
The deaths called to mind a 1979 concert by the Who where 11 people died as thousands of fans tried to get into Cincinnati’s Riverfront Coliseum. “It was the crowd control at the point of the stage that was the issue, especially as the crowd began to surge toward the stage,” Peña said. He said he usually does not look at eyewitness reports in the early stages of analyzing an incident because emotions can cloud the picture, and witnesses can see only what’s immediately around them.īased on fire codes, the venue could have held 200,000 people, but city officials limited the attendance to 50,000, Houston Fire Chief Samuel Peña said. Keith Still, a visiting professor of crowd science at the United Kingdom's University of Suffolk, has testified as an expert witness in court cases involving crowds. The crowd is often running either away from a perceived threat or toward something they want, such as a performer, before hitting a barrier. "But until we determine that, I will ask the tough questions.”Įxperts who have studied deaths caused by crowd surges say they are often a result of density - too many people packed into a small space. “It may well be that this tragedy is the result of unpredictable events, of circumstances coming together that couldn’t possibly have been avoided," said Judge Lina Hidalgo, Harris County’s top elected official. He called the disaster “a tragedy on many different levels” and said it was too early to draw conclusions about what went wrong. The dead ranged in age from 14 to 27, and 13 people were still hospitalized Saturday, Mayor Sylvester Turner said. Goods said she was so desperate to get out that she bit a man on the shoulder to get him to move. You’re trying to breathe, but you can’t.” "All of a sudden, your ribs are being crushed. “As soon as he jumped out on the stage, it was like an energy took over and everything went haywire," concertgoer Niaara Goods said.
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