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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. On Friday night in Houston, as you all probably know, an outdoor music concert became a mass casualty event. Eight people were killed and many more injured. One nine-year-old remains in a coma in what's been described as a crowd crush at rapper Travis Scott's Astroworld Festival. We want to focus our coverage on this mainly on what best practices are at concerts to prevent horrific things like this in the future. This isn't the first time people have been killed in concert crowds. In lawsuits filed over the last few days, victims' families have accused the event's organizers of negligence in their preparations. Here's Attorney Tony Buzbee, who represents 35 families of victims.

Tony Buzbee: This concert was planned incredibly poorly, that no regard was given to the safety of these young people.

Brian Lehrer: On Instagram, Travis Scott himself said this.

Travis Scott: I'm honestly just devastated. I could never imagine anything like this just happening.

Brian Lehrer: Some people are blaming him, at least in part. One report I saw on television this morning said the concert continued for 40 minutes after it might have been apparent from the stage that there were people being injured right in front. What appears to have gone wrong, and what should event organizers do to ensure crowd safety to prevent this from happening again? With me now are Bart Whitaker, a veteran venue and event management professional, and Mark Herrera, director of education for the International Association of Venue Managers. Bart and Mark, thank you so much for joining us. Welcome to WNYC. Of course, I'm so sorry it's under the circumstances.

Bart Whitaker: Hey, Brian.

Mark Herrera: This is Mark. Thank you, Brian, for having us. I truly appreciate what you do in informing pretty much the world in regards to what's going on in the world today, and this is an unfortunate situation.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you so much. There are many places we could enter, but let me enter here. The local CBS affiliate in Houston, KHOU, obtained a copy of the operations plan, and the station reported that the plan did not address the possibility of a crowd surge or crowd crush. Mark, how typical is it for these potential incidents to be raised and safety preparedness plans for big crowds like this 50,000 people, 2 stages at an outdoor venue?

Mark Herrera: Listen, Brian, I just first want to say thank you for having me on your show. I just got to begin here. Prayers and condolences out to the families and those that were affected by the deaths of these individuals, these students, and these kiddos that were attending this event. Just a very unfortunate situation. In regards to crowd density, when you're talking about 50,000 people in a facility or at a venue, I can tell you right now that if the behavior of that crowd changes, it's going to alter the effects of what goes on. The crowd dynamic shifts or changes based on the behavior, whether it's influenced or agitated, it creates that crowd surge.

When we talk about our emergency action plans and what should be integrated into them, it's basically-- This is some of the things that we talked about when we train and we teach other facilities on crowd management best practices is how do you control a crowd of such magnitude? At the end of the day, if you can have-- Might say, "I didn't have the right standard control." NFPA highly recommend, first of all, Brian, there's about one PCM trained crowd manager for every 250 in attendance.

A lot of facilities that are hosting these large events, they may or may not have those numbers. Even if you did, with 50,000 people that obviously were influenced or agitated, or whatever the case might be as the investigation unfolds, which I think everybody has an idea of the high-energy event that was brought to NRG, I think that it has the propensity to potentially once the crowd shifts, to effectively crush people. Really when you look at the autopsy report, they basically expatiate this's what happens. Unfortunate.

Brian Lehrer: Do you want to jump in on the same question, Bart?

Bart Whitaker: Sure, Brian, Bart Whitaker. Thanks for having me. It appears to me that they did at least have some planning because the police chief there mentioned that they met with actually Travis himself because he had a couple of incidents with other concerts prior to this. It appears, and let me state upfront, I was not there and I do not have firsthand evidence of any of the information. From what I've seen on the videos, television, and articles and talking to some folks, they did have some plans for that type of crowd on the floor, because they had barricades to keep different amounts of people separated. What could have prevented this from happening is the most simple thing.

You can have the greatest plan in the world, but if you don't execute, it's like a football team in a football pitch planning and practicing before, but if you don't get out there and execute on the day of, then it's not worth anything. There's two performances going on during an event. There's the performance on the stage, and there's the performance of the crowd managers. They could have prevented this very simply by having somebody in the press box or somebody up in a tower, we call eye in the sky. When they see the crowd moving around, you have cameras, you have binoculars. They could have stopped this before it happened. It's just ridiculous that they just didn't notice and react in time.

Brian Lehrer: A CNN story-- Go ahead.

Mark Herrera: Brian, I'll echo what Bart just said. The key to preventing something like this is when individuals are trained to understand the behavioral patterns. The behavioral patterns initially precipitated and began at some point in time in the middle of that crowd. The posts are trained to spot that at its initial phases of movement, then that's where you can start shutting things down. You look at the artist as an example, he or she has the ability to control a lot of things that happen within the crowd. They can agitate the situation, or they can influence it, or they can actually shut things down and maybe have someone that can actually mitigate the risks by speaking to the crowd.

I've seen that happen on many occasions where they're saying, we're collapsing the buffer zones, the buffer zones near the stage, they're starting to collapse. They'll shut things down, they'll have somebody message that to control the crowd because everybody only wants to see the event. Once they shut it down, they can create that safe zone or that safe time area and create that buffer that they need.

Brian Lehrer: What do you think the responsibility of the artist is either in this particular case or in general in terms of stopping a concert and giving the crowd time to back off? I know I've personally been to at least one concert where I was way in the back but apparently, there was some kind of crowd crush toward the stage. The performer said, "Hey, everybody, chill out, take a step back." I guess they made the situation safe enough because I never heard of anybody actually having gotten hurt at that concert. What is the responsibility of the artist if they can see something taking place, which I guess we don't know for sure that Travis Scott could see in this case, but some people are saying he could?

Bart Whitaker: He did see because he made an announcement. He saw some flashing lights coming onto the field, and he said, "Whoa, wait a minute, wait a minute," so he did see what was going on. He had been notified or had problems at least two concerts before that. He does have a reputation of agitating the crowd. He said it's not a mosh pit unless somebody gets injured. If that's not inciting a riot or an incident, I don't know what it is. I'd like to back up.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead.

Bart Whitaker: A lot of people, a lot of listeners may realize or remember the 1979 Who concert in Cincinnati. I went to that. After that, venues stopped booking general admission shows. You could not book a general admission show, but that's 40 years ago now and it's crept back in. It's ridiculous to have 40,000 people. I don't know if you've seen pictures of that, but it's just a mass of humanity.

Brian Lehrer: By general admission, you mean no assigned seats?

Bart Whitaker: You don't have reserved seats when you come in. The Rolling Stones, I just went to one of their concerts recently. They did it great. They had general admission pockets up front, then they had reserved 100 rows, and then at the back, they had general admission. You could control that. It was in an unlimited amount of space.

Brian Lehrer: I want to play a clip of Harris County Judge, Lina Hidalgo, from over the weekend. Here she is saying that something similar happened at the Astroworld Festival back in 2019.

Lina Hidalgo: There was a similar incident in 2019 with Astroworld. There was a breaching of barricades. There were some issues with crowd control. Actions were taken after that experience. There were stronger fencing, more and more robust barricades, but I want to know the community deserves to know if more needed to have been done.

Brian Lehrer: That's a judge from the bench over the weekend as lawsuits have begun to be filed in this case. Mark, maybe you could talk about two things. One is the role of physical barriers like the fencing that she refers to. The other is about outdoor versus indoors. CNN story about the events Astroworld intimated that standing room environments can be a recipe for a deadly crowd crush. Ii guess that's the same as general admission, but isn't it-

Mark Herrera: Correct.

Brian Lehrer: -also true that seating only setups can be a lot harder to evacuate because I've heard that too?

Mark Herrera: It is. Actually, when you have general admission and you have crowd density that is so high, it becomes a challenge to move or evacuate those crowds. When you erect physical barriers to try to control the crowd, it works in many stances, but I can tell you right now that if they're non-permanent barriers that are fixed within [unintelligible 00:11:27] is not common, but if you have fixed barriers, that's different. If they're not, keep in mind that when that crowd surges, that's enough force coming from different directions to actually knock those barriers down.

What's going to happen is through a root cause analysis, they're going to identify and determine what is the best way to mitigate that? What is the best way to control these large crowds and to prevent it from happening? Listen, a lot of that it's going to come down to messaging, right? Because when we attend these events, there is an assumption of inherited risk. We assume that when we attend these events, but there's also a reasonable expectation that all of the safety precautions are going to be in place.

Somebody says, "How do you create an environment with no risk?" You shut the doors to the venue and even then there's risk. That's just not an option. We just try to provide the levels of security and measures to protect these massive crowds to the best of our ability. There's going to be a lot of things that are going to come out of this investigation. I don't remember who mentioned it, if it was you or Bart, but the other thing is, yes, performers have a tendency to agitate the situation.

I can tell you right now that a lot of these facilities and these venues before a show comes into their venue, they've already done their research and their due diligence in identifying what type of crowds they're bringing. Is it a high energy, is it low energy so that they can prepare and scale their security measures according to the crowd type and the potential crowd behavior that they're going to encounter.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, do you have a question or perhaps an experience if you work in the business about crowd safety at large concerts, or, for that matter, in small venues where crushes could also take place theoretically? 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-WNYC for Bart Whitaker, a veteran venue and event management professional, and Mark Herrera, director of education for the International Association of Venue Managers. 212-433-9692. Let's take a phone call right now from Ken in Stanford. You're on WNYC. Hi, Ken.

Ken: Hi, good morning. The day after the event, CNN had a crowd safety management expert with decades of experience on. He said there are many people so-called experts too who are going to blame the crowd. He said, someone falls down, someone thinks there's a rumor security guard was knocked out with a needle. He said, "They're going to blame the crowd.

He said the blame is criminal negligence and greed. That it's clear the city of Houston, the artist, the organizers, the venue. He said, there's a long history of rock concerts with surges and deaths in crowds. Going back to the '50s to the Who concert you referred to Pearl Jam, he said it's issues of numbers and greed. That the only way to mitigate this is to cut the numbers and have better spacing. He also said, I won't use my language, he said, "What are they doing? What is the city of Houston doing during a pandemic having these people inches away from each other? What are they doing?" That's my comment.

Brian Lehrer: Ken, thank you very much. Bart, you want to weigh in on the pandemic aspect of this? We generally consider outdoors to be safe, but does the industry have guidelines when it comes to people packed so close together that they might be sharing a lot of there with each other even outside?

Bart Whitaker: When the pandemic was at its height, there was a big concern about that, but it's lightened up a little bit. I'm not so much concerned about the closeness of everybody being together, it's outdoors, the winds blowing. I would like to comment on the last gentleman's comment. The fact greed probably does take a good part of this because they want to get as many people in there, and you can get more people in general admission than you can reserve.

If they would have simply executed the plan and had people in the press box or up high looking at the crowd and calling to have the lights turned up or to stop the show and reacted, we wouldn't be talking right now. It was just simply, they did not execute the plan.

Brian Lehrer: Let's take another phone call from Marjorie in Saugerties. You're on WNYC. Hi, Marjorie.

Marjorie: Hi, Brian, and hello to your guests. I was present and worked on the sound crew of the Altamont Festival in 1969.

Brian Lehrer: Wow.

Bart Whitaker: Wow.

Marjorie: I worked with the Maysles brothers.

Marjorie: I was at the stage and I can tell you that no one can have control over anything like that. It was terrifying. It was terrifying. One example-- That's not important. I also live next door to the farm that hosted the Woodstock festival here in Saugerties-

Brian Lehrer: You're like Forrest Gump. You go through life from one-

Bart Whitaker: She's Forest Gump.

[laughter]

Brian Lehrer: -major newsworthy life-altering history-changing event to the next. Go ahead, Marjorie.

Marjorie: They erected a chain-link fence which lasted about maybe three hours. We had people climbing over the fences and relieving themselves in our backyards. It rained, of course, that weekend and so everybody was jumping in the mud and having a good time and nobody could control anyone. I don't know. After Altamont, I never went to another concert.

There was no way I was going to ever [chuckles] turn around and see 300,000 people come rushing up to see whoever it was that was on, Santana or whoever. Anyway, it seems unbelievable to me that all of the people involved in this past tragedy are responsible and should be somehow held responsible for the horrors that these families are now facing. That's what I have to say.

Brian Lehrer: Marjorie, thank you for sharing your experiences. This is WNYC FM HD and AM New York, WNJT-FM 88.1 Trenton, WNJP 88.5 Sussex, WNJY 89.3 Netcong, and WNJO 90.3 Toms River. We are New York and New Jersey public radio. A few more minutes talking about best practices for large concert events to prevent things like happened at Astroworld in Houston the other day with Bart Whitaker, veteran venue and event management professional, and Mark Herrera, director of education for the International Association of Venue Managers.

Mark, being with this association, the industry association, why does anything like this happen anymore? Marjorie mentioned the Altamont Concert in 1969. One of you mentioned the Who Concert in 1979, famous crowd control tragedies. There are others. USA Today has an article, I think it's 9 crowd tragedies in history or 10. There are articles like that elsewhere. You guys seem to be stating the best practices having to do with density, with barricades, with what individual managers are supposed to do, with what the artists are supposed to do from the stage. Mark, how is it that this even happens again? Maybe we lost Mark. Bart, you want to take that?

Bart Whitaker: That's a really good question. It might have to do with the last caller's comment about greed. You want to pack as many people in and make as much money as you can. I still say that if you have the right plan and you have the right people in the right place, they could have pulled this off. I'm not saying that you shouldn't do GA events, you just got to do them right. You have to have a lot of good people in the right places. Like I said, there's two games going on. There's the football game on the 100 yards where everybody's looking at it on TV, and there's 1,000 people around the stadium that are guarding doors and entrances. It's tougher to do the security game than it is the football game on the field.

Brian Lehrer: I think we have Mark back now for a last word.

Mark Herrera: Oh, yes, I'm back. To your question, first of all, let me just say what we're trying to advocate is absolutely zero risk. We're trying to say that, how can we best manage and control these crowds? Once they've been influenced or agitated, that becomes a challenge. Even with the best-laid plans in place, it's still going to challenge a facility, a venue, or an organization. All we can do is say, get ahead of it. The best way to get ahead of this is, who is trained? How many people are trained within the facility even with the show and the artist?

Listen, if I'm an artist and I'm having to speak to thousands of people, I'm going to have someone in there. My emergency action plan is going to be that in the event that I-- I've got the best seat in the house. The best way that I'm going to mitigate this risk is when I make an observation of an anomaly, and that's anything. When the crowd behavior starts to shift or change, at that point, that's when I'm going to shut everything down before it gets to the point that you start crushing people because these people that are attending and these guests that are attending these events have what is called a pack mentality.

Just walk into a crowded room of people and just yell shots fired, you're going to see what kind of reaction you're going to get. People have no clue what's going on, but they're going to follow suit. That's typically what happens. It becomes a pack mentality, but you've got to interject it, you've got to intercept it at the very beginning when this behavior-- The only way you can do that is people have to be trained on what to look for. I think this was mentioned earlier, but the best-laid plans are only as good as--

Brian Lehrer: Execution.

Mark Herrera: You've got to train and you've got to execute them. That's it. You've got to execute these things. My thing is that you're going to have general admission concerts, you're going to have people who are eager and excited to attend these events. Especially during this pandemic where people were removed from the social networks and they were quarantined, they're excited and eager to see these concerts, so emotionally being attached to the event can create a lot of problems.

Let me tell you this when you are dealing with a large crowd and if they're emotionally attached to that event and all of a sudden you have a little bit of a surge, and from a physiological perspective, if the heart rate spikes because is they're mostly attached to that particular event, or the agitation, or being influenced, all of a sudden heart rate spike causes certain physiological effects that prevent the best in crowd managers from controlling that crowd because it causes cognitive impairment. The inability to utilize good sound judgment, tunnel vision, multi-scale degradation, auditory exclusion.

The crowds can't hear you because, automatically, the body shuts its ability to hear as a protective mechanism. These are all of the challenges that come along with hosting these events. Are the events going to stop? No. Are they going to be managed? Are we going to find innovative ways to manage those crowds a lot better and message this in advance and start reinforcing this training, not only with the venues and all of the emergency responders but also with the show as well? Yes, most likely so.

Brian Lehrer: Hopefully and hopefully lessons learned. Mark Herrera and Bart Wicker, thank you both so much for joining us.

Mark Herrera: Thank you [crosstalk].

Bart Whitaker: Thank you.

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