Leadership / 11.10.21

For Event Safety Alliance, Education and Information Is Key to Avoiding Another Astroworld

Access Staff

Pollstar (11/08/21) Speer, Deborah

The tragic happenings at Travis Scott's Astroworld music festival in Houston on Nov. 5 was for Event Safety Alliance (ESA) President Jim Digby a horrific reminder of the value of information sharing and education about safety standards. "Our job as event professionals is to have the skills to know how to evaluate the risk to each event specifically and, in that evaluation, determine what are the best measures to prevent bad outcomes of any type," he said. Digby warned against a one-size-fits-all strategy for crowd management, as each event "has a different audience profile and has a different safety profile, a different risk profile." For ESA Vice President Steve Adelman, it is critical to ask proper questions, which demands some degree of professional knowledge and expertise. He cited the American National Standards Institute's document ES1.9-2020, the latest crowd management standards document, which is drafted, edited and continually reviewed and updated by ESA, the International Association of Venue Managers and other professionals. Adelman said the document addresses questions about the atmosphere leading up to the fatal Astroworld crowd surge, including the number of security people near the stage, certain people's knowledge of crowd dynamics and the type of barricade configuration at the front of the stage. "Our job is to analyze the things that went wrong, study what the chain of causation was, not for the legal needs, but so that we can then coalesce that information and give it back to the industry for free to learn from and try to continue to thump people over the head," Digby said.

Read the full story from Pollstar. 

Tags: Music , Security , News