Astroworld Concert Live Updates: Crowd Surge Leaves 8 Dead at Travis Scott Show

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At least eight people were killed and dozens more were injured at a music festival in Houston on Friday night after a large crowd began pushing toward the front of the stage, the city’s fire chief said at a news conference.

The crowd surge, during a concert by the rapper Travis Scott, “caused some panic, and it started causing some injuries,” said the fire chief, Samuel Peña. The concert was part of the Astroworld music festival, a two-day event that began on Friday. About 50,000 people were there on Friday night, according to the fire department.

In a statement posted on Instagram, organizers said that they were “supporting local officials however we can” and that the second day of the festival had been canceled. “Our hearts are with the Astroworld Festival family tonight — especially those we lost and their loved ones,” the statement read.

Twenty-three people were taken to nearby hospitals by emergency responders, Chief Peña said, adding that of those patients, 11 were in cardiac arrest. Over 300 people were treated at a “field hospital” at the site, he said.

The exact causes of death will be determined by the medical examiner, who is investigating the incident, Chief Peña said.

Chief Troy Finner of the Houston Police Department said that many details about the disaster were still unclear, including what had caused the crowd to surge forward.

“I’m sending investigators to the hospitals because we just don’t know,” Chief Finner said. “We’re going to do an investigation and find out, because it’s not fair to producers, to anybody else involved, until we determine what happened, what caused the surge.”

“It happened all at once,” Larry Satterwhite, the executive assistant chief of the Houston police, said at the news conference. He said that at one point, several people in the crowd fell to the ground and began experiencing what he called a medical episode.

The company organizing the festival, Live Nation, agreed to stop the performance early in the interest of public safety, Chief Satterwhite said.

As the sun rose in Houston on Saturday, the scene outside the stadium was quiet. A few flashing lights and signs by the roadside declared that the festival has been canceled. “Astroland canceled,” the signs read.

At a hotel across the street from the stadium, officials had set up a “reunification center” for victims’ families. The police said that a “trickle” of families had come through so far, and that they expected more to arrive as people begin waking up and seeing the news of what happened.

Accounts on social media, which could not immediately be verified, described people gasping for breath in the crush of the crowd during the event and calls for help going unheeded. Videos showed one person climbing up onto a riser, where a cameraman was working, and calling for the performance to stop, shouting that people were dying; other people can be heard insulting him and telling him to “calm down.”

Investigators said that they had not yet reviewed video from the concert but that Live Nation had promised them access to it.

Officials said there had been an earlier crowd surge at the entrance to the festival, but that it seemed to be unrelated to the chaotic events that unfolded later.

“Our hearts are broken,” Judge Lina Hidalgo of Harris County, which includes Houston, said at the news conference. “People go to these events looking for a good time,” she said, adding, “It’s not the kind of event where you expect to find out about fatalities.”

The two-day event, called the Astroworld festival, was started in 2018 by Mr. Scott, who is from Houston and who named it after a best-selling album he released that year. The lineup for this year’s festival included Roddy Ricch, Tame Impala, Earth Wind & Fire and Yves Tumor, among others.

— Azi Paybarah and Aina J. Khan