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Taken individually, each of these events can seem like bad luck — part of the vagaries of nature. But stitched together, a clearer pattern emerges: Climate change is ushering in more extreme weather worldwide, and with it, greater risks for outdoor events. Many venues, organizers and fans are ill-prepared.
At 8:30 p.m. Skyview cleared the lightning risk, and the concert’s opening acts took the stage. But by 8:58 p.m., the lightning was back. At 9:09 p.m. another weather alert went out. This time, Arrington headed to her car. “By the time I made it from my seat to the stairs, it was hailing marble-sized hail,” she says. “It was maybe two, three minutes past when they sent out the second warning.”
The warnings at the Tomlinson show also came too late for most attendees to get to their vehicles. Arrington estimates her car was a 15-minute walk away, but she didn’t even have enough time to leave the venue. Red Rocks’ website states that “routes from parking lots to the gates may be partially dirt, uphill and sometimes lengthy in distance.”
It risked becoming a “crowd crush situation,” Haghani says, referring to a phenomenon where so many people are squeezed into a tight area that breathing becomes difficult. Crowd crushes killed 10 people during a Travis Scott show in 2021, as well as 125 people at an Indonesian soccer match in 2022 and 159 people during Halloween festivities in Seoul that same year.
At the Taylor Swift show in Rio, people in the general admission area said it was hard to push through the crowds when they needed air, and difficult for vendors selling water to reach them. At one point during the show, Swift stopped performing to point out fans in need of water; at another, she chucked bottles into the crowd.Many of the threats to outdoor events are growing with climate change.
Florida’s Daytona International Speedway was redeveloped in 2016, and is another example of designing with fan safety in mind, says Kevin Kloesel, an event safety meteorologist at the University of Oklahoma who has studied the racetrack. There was “a really close call with a tornado in 2014,” Kloesel says, after which it “did an entire reconstruction.” Today 100,000 people can shelter on-site.