At Travis Scott’s Astroworld Concert on Nov. 5 in Houston, Texas, an overabundance of attendees resulted in at least eight deaths and a dozen plus injuries after a large crowd began pushing toward the front of the stage. 

Scott’s concert was a part of the Astroworld music festival that began on Friday and was supposed to last until Sunday. On Friday night, an estimated 50,000 people gathered when the injuries happened. 

“When asked whether city officials and organizers allowed too many people to attend the two-day Astroworld Fest, Houston Fire Department Chief Samuel Peña said that there are no capacity limits for outdoor events,” Rolling States Magazine said. 

This event was the deadliest crowd-control disaster at a concert in the country since the 1979 crowd surge in Ohio during the Who concert. 

“Last night was tragic on many different levels,” Houston Mayor Sylvester Turner said. “There are a lot of unanswered questions, and over the next several days, several weeks — it could be longer — we’ll take an in-depth look,” Turner said. 

Many specifics, such as the cause of the surge, remain under investigation. It is unknown as to what prompted the crowd to surge forward. Many described the crowd in its entirety as chaotic and mob-like. 

“’I got there around 3 and saw people already struggling to stand straight,’ she said. ‘There was a lot of mob mentality going on, people willing to do whatever to be in line for merch, food, shows, you name it. A lot of fights broke out throughout the day,’” The New York Times said after a statement by attendee Neema Djavadzadeh was given. 

On social media, there was a contrast between unawareness and pleading for help. Videos were posted near the stage in which people were crying for help or entirely unaware of serious concerns. 

In a YouTube video, for instance, Scott proclaimed to the crowd “I want to see some rages, who want to rage? … There’s an ambulance in the crowd, whoa, whoa, woah.” This identification of the ambulance was when he started to calm down crows. 

After this, for almost a minute, the music halted. But the music soon resumed. “If everybody good, put a middle finger up in the sky,” Scott said in the same YouTube video. The concert persisted for the duration of a half-hour. It concluded with Scott cheering the crowd and running offstage, telling people he loves them and to get home safe. 

The concert organizer Live Nation ordered the concert to come to a stop 30 minutes prior to the original ending time of about 10:40 p.m. This was 40 minutes after the city claimed this was a mass causality event. 

“You cannot just close when you got 50,000 and over 50,000 individuals,” Houston police chief Troy Finner said. “We have to worry about rioting, riots, when you have a group that’s that young.”