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Ten days before the 2021 Astroworld music festival, the event’s safety director was worried about whether organizers could cram throngs of fans in front of main act Travis Scott.

“I feel like there is no way we are going to fit 50k in front of that stage,” Seyth Boardman wrote to the festival’s operations director. “Especially with all of the trees!”

Boardman’s fears became deadly reality on the night of Nov. 5, 2021, when 10 young fans packed into a section near the stage suffered fatal injuries from a crowd crush during Scott’s musical set.

Boardman’s message was one of several high-level conversations about crowding at the festival in the days and hours leading up to the festival’s deadly climax, according to a review of hundreds of pages of court records filed in recent weeks.

Those documents, submitted in connection with the mass of civil litigation from victims, contain the most detailed information yet about the lead-up to the festival, which has never been the subject of an independent investigation. Harris County commissioners rejected Judge Lina Hidalgo’s request for one after the tragedy.

In the absence of an outside review, contract experts for the plaintiffs have authored their own attempts to make sense of the disaster. They contend festival planners relied on a fundamental misunderstanding of how many people they legally could pack into its grounds – and they did not have enough space even by their own, generous estimates.

That error, the experts allege, was compounded by security lapses on the day of Astroworld that allowed gatecrashers to swarm the festival grounds, and a failure to monitor the crowd for the tell-tale signs of crowd crush.

With the first trial among hundreds of lawsuits over the festival set to begin in May, the plaintiffs’ consultants soon could battle in court with expert witnesses for defendants including Scott, multinational concert company Live Nation and venue manager ASM Global.

For now, the plaintiffs’ reports have not been countered in the public record. The defense team’s expert reports have yet to be filed in the court, and the parties to the case are subject to a gag order from District Court Judge Kristen Brauchle Hawkins.

Warnings from 2019

On the night of Nov. 5, 2021, 10 fans watching Scott’s show died of compression asphyxia. Packed behind a barricade so close that their lungs could not expand, they could not get enough oxygen to breathe.

Two days after those deaths, Scott took to social media to express his shock: “I’m honestly just devastated and I could never imagine anything like this happening,” he said.

The threat of crowd crush at big music festivals was well known in the industry, the plaintiffs’ experts said in their reports, after similar catastrophes, including a European music festival in 2000 that ended with nine dead.

Closer to home, there was the example of the 2019 edition of Scott’s music festival. Fans crashed the gates to the festival that year, and footage of them doing so was recycled in a promotional video for the 2021 edition.

In an “after-action” meeting following the 2019 festival, newly filed documents show, Houston Police Department Executive Assistant Chief Larry Satterwhite voiced concerns about conditions inside the festival.

“Biggest concern that night — safety of the kids up against the barricade at the stage,” Satterwhite said, according to minutes of the 2019 meeting. “Need more ways to get to the middle of the crowd and get to the kids that have trouble in the middle of the crowd. There were kids who were up against the barricade who were experiencing crowd crush and turning blue.”

Ahead of the first festival after the pandemic in 2021, planning was divided among a web of corporate entities. Concert conglomerate Live Nation and a partially-owned subsidiary, Scoremore, rented out part of NRG Park for the festival. They contracted with a company called B3 Risk Solutions, which is run by Seyth Boardman and his wife, Shawna, to oversee safety and security.

NRG Park, meanwhile, is managed on behalf of the Harris County Sports & Convention Corporation by ASM Global, through a division called SMG.

Bad math

To address concerns about the site’s capacity, Live Nation and Scoremore contractors devised T-shaped barricades that divided the crowd into four quadrants, which were designed to relieve crowd pressure and allow easier access for first responders.

The festival organizers, however, failed to consider how many fans could safely fit into each of those sections, according to Darrell Darnell, the former emergency management director for the District of Columbia who serves as one of the plaintiffs’ experts.

Instead, they ran calculations for the full viewing area. Those calculations were based on a misunderstanding of how many fans were allowed under the state fire code, according to the expert reports.

Festival organizers incorrectly thought they were required to provide five square feet for each of the 50,000 fans in attendance. The state fire code mandates seven square feet per person, according to the reports, which would have given members of the crowd more breathing room.

Even by their more forgiving standard, the festival organizers still struggled to find enough space for 50,000 fans, the plaintiffs’ experts say.

On Oct. 27, 2021, festival operations director Emily Ockenden, an employee of event production company BWG, had a text message conversation with Kathryn Paraskevas, who was drafting a site plan for Astroworld using a computer-assisted design program.

“I need to show 40k at stage 2 and 50 at stage 1,” Ockenden said. Scott was set to perform at Stage 1 by himself at the end of the night, and concert organizers expected most or all of the 50,000 ticketed fans to be in attendance.

Later in the conversation, Paraskevas replied that she was having trouble hitting the requested capacity mark.

“Stage 1 you got 40,105, I got real close to those barricades too. Even if I cheat it on stage right, I don’t think you’ll get another 10k. Stage 2 you get 36k,” Paraskevas said.

The festival’s planners responded to the capacity shortfall by expanding the nominal boundaries of the viewing area. By Oct. 29, they had settled on a site plan that made room for 44,000 people in the general viewing area, plus 3,500 in a VIP area.

Those calculations were based on the erroneous, five-square-foot-per-person standard, according to a plaintiffs’ report from Keith Still, a United Kingdom-based expert on crowd management. By the standard the planners should have used, the site plan actually had capacity for 32,000 people in general admission and 2,500 people in a VIP pen – 15,500 short of ticketed attendance.

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 it, according to Larry Perkins, a crowd management expert retained by the plaintiffs.

Trees blocked sightlines

Worse, Still said, the planners ignored the way visual obstructions would make concertgoers act in practice. The trees that Boardman worried about in an Oct. 26, 2021 text message to Ockenden, lined the edges of the site.

Assuming that people moved inside a second row of those trees to see the stage, there only was room to safely fit 23,000 people inside the general admission area, according to a plaintiffs’ report from the firm McSwain Engineering, a Pensacola, Florida-based failure analysis and engineering investigation company.

Ockenden, the operations director, defended the idea that concertgoers would stand behind the trees in an Aug. 2, 2023 deposition.

“The canopy is very high, and the trunks are very narrow,” Ockenden said.

The plaintiffs’ experts said that in addition to the trees, raw numbers for the full viewing area failed to capture concert-specific dynamics. Scott had insisted that only he would be allowed to use Stage 1, forcing planners to figure out how to move tens of thousands of people from the secondary stage in under an hour.

Festival planners widened a pathway, removed a Ferris wheel and made other tweaks to smooth traffic. They made a critical error, the plaintiffs’ experts allege, in failing to think through what would happen once the surge of fans moved to Stage 1.

Those fans naturally would pack into the “house left” area of the viewing area, as it was closest to the other stage. The festival planners failed to create a way to monitor and limit crowd density in that section – where all 10 victims suffered their fatal injuries, the experts said.

Concert day lapses

The frantic dynamic on the day of the festival has been documented in previous investigations by the Houston Chronicle and the Houston Police Department. Hundreds of gatecrashers swarmed into the site earlier in the day, and a festival dispatcher in the command center warned about the potential for deaths minutes before Scott took the stage.

“I would pull the plug but that’s just me,” Reece Wheeler wrote from the festival command center, in a message made public last year. “Someone’s going to end up dead.”

The woman on the receiving end of that message, Shawna Boardman, said in a newly released deposition that she ran to check on the crowd.

“I immediately assessed the situation on that frontline barricade. I made eye contact with the crowd. There was nobody along that barricade being crushed,” Boardman said.

The plaintiffs’ experts, however, say there were obvious signs of crowd crush on video feeds from the concert they have reviewed.

The newly filed court documents also show the gatecrashing earlier in the day appears to have raised early concerns that the festival was veering out of control to the point that it could be canceled.

“Talk of cancellation,” Shawna Boardman wrote to John Junell, Live Nation’s senior director for global security operations, at 2:20 p.m. on the day of the festival. “Seyth is with Chief. Not sure exactly what’s up yet.”

Satterwhite, the high-ranking HPD officer on site that day, mentioned discussions with Seyth Boardman about the gatecrashers, but not a conversation about canceling the festival, in the written statement he submitted to the HPD detectives.

Continuing her conversation with Junell, Boardman said there already were about 19,000 people in the festival grounds.

“They aren’t even the problem,” she told Junell. “It’s the hundreds without bands on the perimeter. We are going to be absolutely screwed when the sun goes down.”

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