“All of a sudden, your ribs are being crushed. You have someone’s arm in your neck. You’re trying to breathe but you can’t.” - Concertgoer at the Astroworld Festival featuring rapper Travis Scott in Houston three days ago.
“You could see people getting hurt. People were flailing elbows and smashing noses. You could see people going down." – Concertgoer at the Riverfront Coliseum concert featuring The Who in Cincinnati 42 years ago.
Fred Wittenbaum of Blue Ash is one of many in the Tristate wondering whether we learned anything about crowd control after The Who concert in 1979 and before the Astroworld Festival on Nov. 5.
Wittenbaum and a handful of other Finneytown High School graduates lost three classmates in the crowd crush at the concert and created a scholarship program in their names.
“Our hearts are broken for those families and survivors in Houston. We know intimately what they are going through right now,” he said.
“It is a shame that venues, promotors and artists have not learned the lesson of Dec. 3, 1979, as festival seating and concerts are back. These types of horrific situations will continue to occur until festival seating and concert are again banned forever.”
Safety experts say these kinds of deaths are preventable, but the ever-growing number of victims killed worldwide in crowd crushes at concerts, nightclubs, sporting events and even religious gatherings suggests we are not listening.
And so, in Houston, authorities are trying to figure out what sent eight young people to their graves and another dozen to the hospital.
It was Dec. 3, 1979, when a crowd crush killed nearly a dozen Ohio and Kentucky residents aged 15 to 27 at Riverfront Coliseum in Cincinnati and sent a couple dozen people to the emergency room.
More than 14,000 first-come, first-served festival-seating tickets had been sold for The Who concert, prompting fans of the Rock & Roll Hall of Famers to gather on the coliseum concourse hours before the doors opened.
Just two doors of the coliseum were opened when people heard the band testing sound equipment and the crowd began surging forward at about 7:30 p.m.
Cincinnati banned festival seating in the aftermath of the deaths, but overturned the ban 24 years later.
COVID-19 cancels The Who's return
In 2019, The Who co-founder Pete Townshend announced the band would perform in Cincinnati in 2020 for the first time since the deadly crowd crush.
But the concert was canceled due to COVID-19 and has yet to be rescheduled.
Also in 2019, Roger Daltrey, another co-founder of The Who, visited Finneytown High School to tour memorials to the three teens the school lost: Stephan Preston, Jackie Eckerle and Karen Morrison.
The P.E.M. Memorial Scholarship Fund founded by Fred Wittenbaum and friends features the first initials of the victims’ last names.
The scholarships are given annually to Finneytown High seniors pursuing higher education in the arts, including music.
Wittenbaum’s group also hosts an annual event at the high school for alumni, family, friends and concert attendees to meet and share their experiences.
This year, it will be from 6 p.m. to 9 p.m. on Saturday, Dec. 4.
“The Astroworld calamity brought all of us in The P.E.M. Memorial and our extended P.E.M. family directly back to Dec. 3, 1979,” Wittenbaum said in an email.
“It has made us relive the events of that horrific night. The agony of waiting, wondering and hoping that our families and friends were safe. The unknowing….
“It is a pain that never ever goes away,” he said.
The Associated Press and USA TODAY contributed to this report.
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