Fox News Flash top entertainment headlines for December 15
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Travis Scott is working with government and public safety officials to establish guidelines to ensure another tragedy like the one at the Astroworld Music Festival never happens again.
Scott was performing at the Houston, Texas festival in November when a crowd surge resulted in the deaths of ten people in the packed outdoor area and left hundreds more with injuries. Now, a source confirmed to Fox News Digital that the rapper is working with the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) to put together a team to find vulnerabilities and subsequent solutions to how concerts are held across the country.
Scott is using his position in the industry to bring together key stakeholders from government, public safety, emergency response, health care, event management, music and technology to establish clear guidelines that can be distributed to cities across the nation that will address potential safety issues and how to prevent another Astroworld Festival tragedy from ever happening again.
The USMC was established 90 years ago and acts as a nonpartisan group representing all cities in the U.S. with a population of 30,000 or more. The source reports that the USMC plans to convene "a representative and knowledgeable working group of leaders across the industry and local government over the course of the next six months to create a comprehensive report complete with recommendations to help ensure festival safety and security going forward."
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Travis Scott is working to help prevent another tragedy like the one that took place at his Astroworld Festival. (Erika Goldring/WireImage via Getty Images)
Among the knowledgeable participants that the group seeks to utilize are members of the Tourism, Arts, Park, Entertainment and Sports Standing Committee as well as the Criminal and Social Justice Committee. It also hopes to establish a task force made up of participating mayors and chiefs of police.
The goal of the group is to establish a uniform chain of command at events like Astroworld as well as how lines of communications should work in the event of incidents. It will also establish guidelines for crowd management and monitoring, enforcement of health and safety protocols as well as how to utilize essential technology.
The news comes days after Scott gave his first tell-all interview about the tragedy with Chalamagne Tha God on his YouTube channel. In the interview, the 30-year-old artist reiterated claims that he was completely unaware of what was going on in the crowd from his vantage point on the Astroworld stage.
"I didn’t know the exact details until minutes before the press conference [after my set]," the rapper alleged. "And even at that moment, you’re like, ‘Wait, what?’"
"People pass out, things happen at concerts, but something like that…’" Scott shared.
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Scott went on to deny hearing any distress from the crowd that would have prompted him to stop the show sooner.
"It’s so crazy because I’m that artist too — anytime you can hear something like that, you want to stop the show," Scott explained. "You want to make sure fans get the proper attention they need. Anytime I could see anything like that, I did. I stopped it a couple of times to just make sure everybody was OK. And I really just go off the fans’ energy as a collective — call and response. I just didn’t hear that."
Travis Scott's Astroworld Festival resulted in the deaths of 10 people. (Jamaal Ellis/Houston Chronicle via AP)
Since the incident, Scott has become the subject of multiple lawsuits alongside promoter Live Nation and other companies connected to the event.
The youngest victim was a 9-year-old. The others who died ranged in age from 14 to 27.
Attorney Brent Coon, who is representing about 2,000 concertgoers and is asking for $10 billion in damages, made his consolidation request last month. He said that having all the cases before one judge will create efficiency, eliminate redundancy and spread costs in the cases to everyone involved in the litigation.
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But the consolidation that was granted might conflict with a similar request made by lawyers for ASM Global Parent, Inc. and its subsidiaries, which manage events at NRG Park, where the Astroworld festival was held.
Travis Scott is working to prevent another tragedy like the one that took place at Astroworld. (Rich Fury/Getty Images)
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Lawyers for ASM Global have also asked in a motion filed with the Texas Judicial Panel on Multidistrict Litigation, which is overseen by the Texas Supreme Court, to consolidate the lawsuits but assign them to a different Harris County judge, Lauren Reeder.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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