On Friday, November 5, 2021 in Houston, TX, 10 deaths and 25 injured at American rapper Travis Scott’s concert due to crowd surges. 

    This event brought a light to crowd surges, when the audience is pushing forward and the front of the crowd is trying their best to escape. When this is happening, and someone falls, then it is harder to get up, since everyone is rushing to get to the front, and it’s hard to breathe. Everything was going great until Scott came out to preform. Wanting to get a better view of him, and wanting to be closer that is how it all began. “My opinion on the crowd surges is that now after Travis Scott’s concert, you have to be more safe at these events,” said sophomore Dereck Cornejo. “With Covid-19 being around, I think that it is surely dying off and people are still wearing their mask, but also vaccinated, it helps. It is a lot safer than we think.” 

    When hearing what happened at this concert, sophomore Zeltin Carillo says, “I felt really disappointed in the people who didn’t help them and I feel sorry for the families who lost their loved ones.”

    In a Nov. 7 Los Angeles Times article by August Brown, it mentions how Tame Impala and Bad Bunny were going to perform on Saturday the next day, but that got cancelled due to what happened. Artists SZA, Lil Baby, and Roddy Ricch did give a show before Scott on Friday. Other than Scott, many people wanted to sue performer Drake as well. The lawsuit’s main reason for Drake and Scott to be under fire is due to not having safety measures. There are many families wanting to sue these two men, because they lost loved ones at the concert since no one was providing their assistance. 

    “Personally I don’t think Drake should have got sued since it was not his concert,” said Cornejo. “He was just there as a feature in the event, it is all on Travis Scott.”

    According to the NPR website which was updated on November 6, 2021, Rachel Treisman and Deepa Shivaram state that at the event, eight people lost their lives due to choking, gasping for air and being rushed by others to go to the very beginning of the crowd. The other two were rushed to the hospital but ended up dying later into the night.

    NPR’s journalism explained that there wasn’t as much staff for security, but half of them were beginners for big concerts. 

    “A good way to prevent situations like these is having better security that knows what they are doing and applying rules,” says Carillo. “The rest really depends on how the audience behaves.”

    “Travis Scott, unlike most rappers, didn’t care that his fans were being crushed, instead he assumed that everyone was having fun, but he should’ve made sure people were okay,” said Cornejo.

    In a Nov. 8 article from The Cut website by Calire Lampen, article an anonymous person at the concert said it felt like “drowning in a pool of people”. There are conspiracy theories that at Scott’s concert that it looked like the realm of death. 

    “I honestly don’t really look into it that much, but I mean it could be possible. The main thing for me is whether or not it’s a conspiracy Travis should’ve stopped the concert once he saw the ambulance and the people who were fainting,” said Carillo. 

    On Nov. 7, on YouTube there was a video that released Scott’s apology, and everyone was hating on it. Others believe that it was scripted and he wasn’t so sorry about it. Both Carillo and Cornejo agree with the statement too. They think that he was trying to be sad, it seemed very insincere, and almost as if he was forced to do it. 

    “This situation would maybe not deter me from making me more careful at music festivals and concerts, but I most likely will be more cautious with what I do and be more thoughtful of the things that can be useful for those concerts,” says Carillo.