Concerns about the capacity of the main stage at Astroworld 2021 were expressed by staff working on the festival in the weeks running up to its fatal edition, it has been revealed. Safety Director Seyth Boardman told colleagues ten days before the event, “I feel like there is no way we are going to fit 50,000 in front of that stage".
Planners also worked to a metric that the site should provide five square feet of space for each attendee, when the Texas state fire code mandates seven square feet per person. These revelations appear in new filings with the court that is handling hundreds of lawsuits filed in the wake of the crowd surge at the Travis Scott headlined event.
Ten people died and hundreds more were injured when that crowd surge occurred during Scott's headline set at the festival he founded, which was promoted by Live Nation and its Scoremore subsidiary at Houston's NRG Park.
Included in the new court papers, which have been seen by Houston Landing, is a pre-event text conversation between Festival Operations Director Emily Ockenden and Kathryn Paraskevas, who was using relevant software to design a final site plan.
Ockenden tells Paraskevas that the main stage needs to accommodate 50,000 people, basically everyone at the festival, because Scott didn't want any competition to his headline set. “Stage one you got 40,105", Paraskevas responds. "I got real close to those barricades too. Even if I cheat it on stage right, I don’t think you’ll get another 10,000".
The ultimate solution to that problem was to expand the nominal boundaries of the viewing area of the main stage. But, say experts cited in the legal filings, planners failed to fully take into account things like the trees on the site, which impacted where people chose to stand in order to get a decent view of the show.
There were also issues created by another of Scott's demands, that only he performed on the main stage. That meant there was a huge movement of people towards the main stage area in the hour before his set.
Although some measures were implemented to deal with this, experts hired by plaintiffs say not enough was done to monitor crowd movement - or to deal with the fact that more fans would inevitably gravitate to the 'house left' audience area, where all ten of the fatalities occurred.
Another expert cited in the filings, Larry Perkins, says that the flaws in the site plan devised by Live Nation and its contractors should have been obvious to NRG Park’s operators at SMG, who had the ability to reject that plan.
The first Astroworld lawsuits are due to reach court in May.
In a recent SEC filing, Live Nation revealed that it has already settled six lawsuits filed by the families of those who died at the festival and 29 other claims, adding, "The impact of these claims was not material to our consolidated financial statements of operations for any period presented due to insurance coverage of the related claims".