Music festival chaos: Inside the deadly risks at concerts

Music festivals like AstroWorld, Route 91 in Las Vegas, and Woodstock ’99 have turned from parties to tragedies over the years, raising serious concerns about safety and security.

These deadly stampedes, shootings, and riots, leave festival goers continuing to question if there are enough safety measures in place to protect attendees.

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The festival promoters often cut costs like at Woodstock ’99 and the much-hyped Fyre Festival which promised luxury in the Bahamas but delivered unsafe, hazardous conditions instead. A common theme with many festivals.

“It was still fun to see that lineup of bands, but in the end it ended up being a disaster,” Rich Dunnet, now 47, told Newsweek about Woodstock ’99.

Each year, reports of drug overdoses, sexual assaults and even deaths are reported at concerts. Between 1996 and 2024, at least 175 people died at events across the U.S.

The 2017 massacre at the Route 91 country music festival in Las Vegas shook the nation and left 59 dead – in what is the worst mass shooting in US history.

At other festivals throughout the country, there were reportedly 43 others who died from drug overdoses and 10 were killed by compression asphyxia or crushing, according to data from a law firm that handles music festival deaths.

The majority of those killed at festivals are in their late teens or early twenties.

Twenty-five years after the rioting and looting at Woodstock ’99, attendee Liz Polay-Wettengel, 56, told Newsweek that she believes very little has changed when it comes to safety at festivals.

“There were a lot of people who were intoxicated and young, very young, women were getting fondled in mosh pits, they were raped in tents overnight,” Polay-Wettengel told Newsweek.

“There were a lot of crying women at Woodstock,” she added, explaining how she worked to get those women to rape centers and encouraged them to report the incidents to police. “Even as recent as the most recent Boston Calling, there was lack of security, there was lack of water, there was lack of shade.”

Other concert goers who attended Boston Calling in May echoed her complaints of overcrowding, emergency services struggling to help those in need and organizers providing limited ways in and out of the site.

“In my mind, if I’m thinking about fire safety or concerns of something happening and needing to exit, it does feel a little worrisome to not have multiple places that are an apparent way to leave a big gathering,” Kim Drastal, 27, who attended Boston Calling, told Newsweek.

‘When the train came off the track’

Dunnet vividly remembers the security at Woodstock ’99 as being “non-existent’ and talked about how it turned into “a disaster.”

As soon as Dunnet and his three friends walked onto the festival grounds, it was clear things were going to be rough.

“As far as safety and security, it was non-existent except at the front gate where they took our beer and water,” the New Jersey native told Newsweek.

He also talked about the price gouging for water and food throughout the three-day festival.

“By the end, they ended up charging seven, eight, ten dollars for a bottle of water,” he said. “Everything was about money.”

Dunnet described the port-a-potties as the worst he’s ever seen in his entire life.

“I have worked construction my whole life, and I have never seen anything like it.”

He described the extreme heat with temps in the high 90s and reaching into the 100s deep with the mosh pits closer to the stages.

“It was brutally hot. It didn’t do anything but fuel the whole thing.”

Dunnet remembers the turning point in the weekend was Limp Bizkit’s performance on Saturday night leading up to Rage Against the Machine and Metallica.

“That is when the train came off the track. Limp blew that place apart. It just spiraled out of control,” said Dunnet who managed to work his way up to the front. “The single greatest set list I have ever seen any band do, but it did nothing but fuel the anger.”

The final night of the concert Dunnet recalls festival goers being given candles amid the sea of trash covering the ground after three days of partying as the ground is covered in trash.

During the Red Hot Chili Peppers set is when the fires, riots and looting unfolded.

“When they pushed the white car and flipped it over and piled plywood boards and started lighting it on fire, it rolled right next to us. I was like ‘Holy shit I was right there.'”

Dunnet’s been to other concerts like OzzFest, but admits “nothing ever like Woodstock. It was a hell of a time.”

Music industry experts share festival insights

Music industry experts say there are not standard protocols which leads to varying degrees of safety at each festival.

“The tone of the festival, the attitude of the people that go there, that starts at the top,” Dr. Andrew Mall, a music industry scholar at Northeastern University, told Newsweek. “So festival organizers have a responsibility. They are partly able to kind of set the tone, set the expectations for how people behave.”

Mall said that some organizers see their events purely as a branding exercise and therefore seem to ignore responsibilities around safety for attendees.

The recently much-hyped 2017 Fyre Festival is a prime example of a promotor Billy McFarland ignoring safety.

From the moment the first attendees set foot on the festival site, it was clear something was terribly wrong. Despite being mere hours away from the festival’s start, the site looked weeks behind in preparation. Staging, tenting, lighting, and power were all still incomplete, with most areas lacking running water. The sparse crew on-site worked sluggishly, showing no sense of urgency.

By Friday morning, the inevitable happened: the festival was officially canceled. Chaos erupted both on-site and at the airport as stranded attendees and staff scrambled for a way out. What was meant to be a luxurious and unforgettable festival is now remembered as one of the most notorious debacles in festival history.

Other organizers do take that job seriously, Mall told Newsweek, and have expectations for how fans should behave.

Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, for example, sets a code of conduct for its attendees, which includes bans on any form of harassment or threatening behavior, and a plea for anyone witnessing unacceptable behavior to speak out.

“Maybe there are things outside the festival organizers’ ability to control, but also if the crowd is behaving in an unpredictable way, that could be because the organizers haven’t done enough work to lay out the expectations to build a community and a culture of safety and of care,” Mall added.

“Every festival is certainly different in their prep and protocols. All do put in quite a bit more training and effort, but there is still not standard protocols across the board. Therefore, there is still a varying degree of safety at each festival. I also believe that all the responsibility cannot be put on the festival itself and individuals need to take precautions and measures when attending as well.”

Learning lessons from tragedy

The City of Austin, Texas, welcomes thousands of visitors to some 2,000 events managed by the city’s police department each year, from block parties to larger festivals like South by Southwest (SXSW) and Austin City Limits.

Officer Amy Thomas, who has worked in the special events department for Austin Police Department for over 15 years, told Newsweek that her team learned valuable lessons from the crowd crush at AstroWorld in Houston in 2021, which left 10 dead, including children.

“We collaborate with fire and EMS and the promoters, all of us collaborate together to have plans,” Thomas said. “So when we tell them, ‘Hey, there’s a situation, we need to pull the plug on this concert’, they’re gonna do it. One of the issues in Houston is that they didn’t stop the concert even though people were getting hurt.”

When the crowd surged at the hip hop music festival AstroWorld in 2021, many people were packed in so tightly that they could not breathe or move their arms. One of the youngest victims was 9-years-old.

“So we do everything we can with EMS with fire to prevent that,” Thomas added. “[We] have emergency exits, so that if we get in a crowd crush, we can open up those exits, get people back, get people out to try to relieve that pressure.”

Thomas said no matter how much her team and organizers prepare, something can happen – like in 2014 at SXSW, when a driver plowed into the crowd, hitting many attendees and killing five.

“After the initial collision where people were hurt, we got with fire, we got with EMS, we had people all around administering aid and getting these people to the hospital quickly,” Thomas explained.

“So we shut down the roads, we said ‘EMS is gonna stage here’, we have a casualty collection point where the patients are brought to and taken to the hospital.

“So that’s what we gear for, we try to have all of these areas already set up before the event even starts. So if something bad happens, we have these plans.”

Several years later, the humid Miami night was electric with anticipation as festival-goers flooded the Rolling Loud grounds in the parking lot of Hard Rock Stadium in May 2019.

The festival boasted a heavy security presence, with local law enforcement, the sheriff’s office, and festival security all working in tandem to ensure the safety of the attendees. But as the first night unfolded, chaos erupted in a way no one could have predicted.

A wave of panic swept through the crowd as false reports of a shooting spread like wildfire. Fans, gripped by fear, trampled over each other and staff, pushing through barricades in a desperate attempt to flee the festival grounds. The scene was chaotic, with screams and the sound of metal barriers crashing to the ground filling the air.

The tension was palpable throughout the weekend and worsened on Saturday when word spread that the U.S. Marshals took rapper Kodak Black into custody on weapons charges before he was about to perform at the festival.

Inside the relative safety of a SiriusXM trailer, most of the staff huddled in the interview and broadcast location, anxiously monitoring the unfolding events. But one staff member found himself caught in the turmoil near the main stage, trying to capture photos and videos amid the frenzy.

Mike D’Alonzo, former head of security for SiriusXM, talked to Newsweek about festivals like Rolling Loud.

“That was just total disorganization, total miscommunication or not miscommunication, lack of communication and people didn’t know what was going on. People were afraid they were gonna die. And then it was also in the shadow of Route 91. That’s always gonna be in the back of everybody’s mind. That’s the biggest issue that we learned a lot from. But we also have demons now as a result of it.”

D’Alonzo, whose law enforcement background includes working with the FBI, talked about security footprints at festivals.

“We never really were responsible for a Lollapalooza, but it was important for us to tie into the security footprint that was there,” D’Alonzo told Newsweek.

“The concern I always had was these are once-a-year type events that occur. So you’ll have some pretty qualified people. I like to think of myself as one of those qualified people. But underneath us, you had people that had no experience that were basically just bodies that were paid to man a post.”

D’Alonzo described security at festivals quite simply.

“If I want to get a weapon into one of those events, I will because I know how to because I was responsible for it. I saw it. I watched it,” D’Alonzo told Newsweek. “The key is how do you set up a hard exterior and a soft interior? How do we put a shell around the outside of the event so that a bad actor can’t get in – or at least put up a deterrent so a bad actor can’t get in? But it always goes back to who are the people that are conducting these checks.”

He talked about the quality of these hired security teams.

“It’s the quality of person that’s up front that is on the outside. They don’t want to pay for those people because they’re only yearly employees. That was some of the biggest challenges that I faced.”

For D’Alonzo the red flags would go up when he heard certain words.

“When I hear somebody say we’ve never had an issue here, antenna goes up. That’s a problem because they don’t think anything’s ever gonna happen there. It’s a lack of preparedness for what’s going to occur.”

The law enforcement expert praised Lollapalooza’s security.

“Lollapalooza in Chicago was run really well because Chicago PD had police at each of the checkpoints where people were coming in. If you see a uniform, I used to say it’s serious. I love uniforms. If I have uniforms at the front, even if they’re just standing there doing nothing but getting paid, people are gonna be less likely to do something or carry out some sort of act. So it’s what you wanna invest in it. But the cops cost money.”

‘Why hasn’t this been fixed yet?’

As the sun beat down on those at Boston Calling at the end of May, some started to suffer from the high temperatures and overcrowding.

“My one safety concern was the ability of the medical staff being able to get to those who weren’t feeling well,” Drastal told Newsweek. “I mostly felt like I didn’t have much room. I felt crowded.”

Around 40,000 people were reported to have attended on the final day of the three-day event.

Boston EMS told Newsweek that it treated 412 people that Sunday, with 13 taken to local hospitals, as visitor numbers surged.

For Polay-Wettengel, news of the issue at the event took her right back to Woodstock ’99.

“That really spurred those emotions because, why hasn’t this been fixed yet?” she told Newsweek.

“I understand people want to turn a profit when they are putting on a show like this, but you can’t do it at the expense of human beings.”

Heatstroke is a common issue at festivals, with attendees also struggling with dehydration and a lack of nutrients when going long periods without food, as they try to watch as many performances as possible.

Connor Fitzpatrick is Vice President of Crowd Rx, which runs medical services for festivals and concerts across the U.S.

“Proper hydration is super important, for everyone at festivals,” Fitzpatrick told Newsweek.

“Often we see people just chugging water all day long, which is actually not the best thing. They should be drinking an electrolyte mix.”

He said that just drinking water can lead to sodium imbalances, which can cause life-threatening illness. Fitzpatrick said days-long festivals can also exacerbate issues around ongoing conditions, while strokes and heart attacks will still occur.

Fitzpatrick said the attitude of organizers matters, adding that he has seen a change in recent years.

“There are a lot of fly-by-night medical companies and I think promoters are getting more sophisticated in their vetting process, they are only using companies which are licensed, insured and have qualified staff, which I think is the most important part because it starts with the promoters,” Fitzpatrick told Newsweek, saying organizers are also showing greater appreciation for medics at festivals.

Boston Calling said in a statement to Newsweek that they had taken feedback on board following issues at this year’s event.

“While attendee count was several thousand below the official capacity rating of the site, we never want anyone to feel uncomfortable or unsafe at the show,” the statement read.

“The safety and well-being of our fans, artists, guests and staff is paramount. We will to continue to work with public officials and our operations team to improve the experience, layout, and ultimately create a better environment for everyone.”

What about drug usage?

When it comes to drug usage at festivals, which often happens regardless of the legalities, experts say it is better to buy and test substances ahead of the event, to cut down on any risks.

Research group Innerbody found that the most popular drug was marijuana, while others reported using psychedelics and MDMA.

Investigators found more people are testing their drugs before events, but said it was not possible to eliminate all risks, as many of those surveyed said using drugs led them to participate in riskier behaviors – from not wearing sunscreen to sexual activities with strangers.

Mitchell Gomez, who works with the organization Dance Safe, told Newsweek that he pushes organizers to have teams on-site offering testing kits – especially for fentanyl – along with information that is helpful and not harmful.

“As fentanyl started showing up in cocaine, in ketamine and other substances, it became really important to find ways to educate people around the fact that fentanyl is not evenly distributed within a sample,” Gomez said. “We’ve heard multiple cases of people doing bumps out of the same baggie of cocaine and one person dies. The idea is that if you allow drug checking, it reduces the possibility of your first responders being exposed, it reduces medical transports.”

He explained where drug testing kits are being more accepted.

“Events that are in rural areas, we’ve seen a lot more acceptance because they often have smaller hospitals. If a hospital only has six triage beds and there’s a 30,000-person festival happening, they want to do everything they can to reduce transports.”

What can festival goers do to stay safe?

The size and tone of festivals varies widely, with more intimate settings through to large, multi-stage events hosting a wide variety of music genres, and this often means differences in the fanbase attending.

When it comes to keeping themselves safe from sexual assaults and crowd surges at events, Polay-Wettengel said friends should stay in groups.

“Be aware of your surroundings and try to stay back as much as possible,” she told Newsweek. “I know the temptation and the reason you are there is to see and celebrate the bands you want to see, but if it is going to be unsafe to do so: back up.”

She also said that if offenses do happen, it is important for victims to speak up and make it known to authorities and organizers, as well as to help others around them.

Thomas said attendees should avoid having their face buried in their phone and to instead be aware of their surroundings at all times.

“I take these festivals to heart and all these events, these are I want these events to be successful. I want these events to be safe,” she added. “I want everybody to have a good time and be safe at the same time. So for me it’s a personal thing.”

Mall, who teaches his students about festivals, having worked a handful and attended many, said it’s important for attendees to research an event beforehand.

Mall said good event companies will spend a lot of time thinking over disaster prevention and emergency situation plans and that if previous festivals have good reviews, then they are likely in good hands.

“At punk and hardcore festivals, we’re talking about moshing and slam-dancing, right? For somebody who is not part of that community, it may look very violent,” he said. “But if the festival-goers, the festival organizers and the artists and the security are all on the same page, it can be a very enjoyable experience.”

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