Astroworld security under new scrutiny as CNN obtains seemingly ineffective training document

Victims of the deadly crowd surge at Houston’s Astroworld festival last week—and people in general who are horrified by the tragedy—continue to look for answers to how and why it happened, with festival headliner and co-creator Travis Scott facing a number of lawsuits alongside other festival sponsors and organizers.

Now, CNN has obtained a 56-page training document created by concert organizers that seems to indicate that a specific plan for the sort of stampede that happened was not in place, only that “crowd management techniques” would be used in the event of “potentially dangerous crowd behavior” like a “civil disturbance/riot.” The specific techniques are not elaborated on in the version of the document that CNN has.

The plan also notes that only the festival’s director and executive producer would’ve had the authority to stop the concert early, which further complicates the situation (Scott’s performance that night continued on for quite some time after security knew that people in the crowd had died, with Houston’s police chief arguing yesterday that ending the show early would’ve just made things worse.)

CNN spoke to the president of Crowd Management Strategies, who pointed out that the Astroworld plan doesn’t say anything about a crowd surge or similar potential issues, meaning it didn’t have any information on what to do about the exact thing that happened. That being said, again, this might not be the final or the complete document.

In related news, TMZ has a story on a man who was hired to work security at Astroworld but “bailed on the job” when he arrived on Friday because he felt “inadequately briefed or coached for the task at hand.” It’s TMZ, so you know what you’re getting, but it doesn’t look good for anyone involved—though no updates on a tragedy like this are going to be very positive.