A Brief History
On November 5, 2021, the Astroworld Festival in Houston, Texas, a rap fest, went horribly wrong when a crowd fueled by drugs and alcohol overwhelmed insufficient concert security and created a “crowd crush” that cost eight lives and injured over 300 people.
Digging Deeper
An enormous crowd tried to tear down barricades and storm into the concert venue, creating a crushing wave, as well as the crowd already inside rushing the stage. Many accusations and lawsuits followed, but other concerts have ended badly as well.
In 2003, a Rhode Island concert by Great White was the scene of a fire that took 100 lives and badly burned another 115.
An infamous concert disaster was the Route 91 Harvest music festival in Las Vegas in 2017, when a shooter fired over 1,000 rounds into the crowd, killing 60 people and wounding another 413. Hundreds more were injured trying to escape.
A 2017 Ariana Grande concert in England was bombed by an Islamic terrorist, killing 23 and injuring over 1000.
Question for students (and subscribers): What concert disasters would you add to this list? Please let us know in the comments section below this article.
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Historical Evidence
For more information, please see…
Barylick, John. Killer Show: The Station Nightclub Fire, America’s Deadliest Rock Concert. ForeEdge, 2015.
Diaz, Eric. The 2017 Las Vegas Shooting: The Deadliest Mass Shooting In America, Inside The Mind And Psychology Of Stephen Paddock. Independently published, 2020.
The featured image in this article, a photograph by WhisperToMe of a memorial located outside the NRG Park, is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication.
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