Rocket Summer brings fun, danger for some
Crowd favorite The Rocket Summer, the moniker for performer Bryce Avery’s musical stylings, performed a nighttime street concert at USU Saturday, and inadvertently showed some listeners how dangerous large events can sometimes be.
Shortly after the headliner left the stage, a young woman fainted, said Reno, Nev., resident Andrew Blackmore. Blackmore was one of the several hundred students and non-students who came from throughout the region to see Avery perform.
“I saw them hold her up and pull her over the fence,” Blackmore said.
The woman appeared to be unconscious when she was lifted over the barrier, which separated the crowd from the stage, he added.
“She was getting squeezed in, and so people around her got concerned, so they picked her up and passed her over the top to security staff,” said Capt. Steve Milne of the USU Police. Milne said the woman was Ashlee Whitaker, a student from Utah Valley University, and she recovered quickly, backstage.
Soon after seeing the girl faint, Blackmore said he and his friends were pressed up and squeezed against the fence.
“My rib cage was caving in,” Blackmore’s friend Amy Glaess said. “I couldn’t breath.”
After being pressed against the barrier, Blackmore knelt down and, clutching his chest, USU police helped him walk to some nearby grass where he was checked out for injuries.
“I was borderline passed out due to asphyxiation,” Blackmore said. “I got crushed against the gate in front of the stage.”
Blackmore said he didn’t let getting crushed by the crowd ruin his night, though. He continued watching Rocket Summer from a less-crowded area after he recovered. He said he traveled over 600 miles to see the band and would have driven another 600 if he had to.
USU Police Sgt. Jessica Elder said the crowds often create problems at concerts.
“With crowd surfing we give them a warning,” Elder said. ” If there’s anymore problems, we kick them out.”
Elder said the biggest problem with previous concerts has been high school and middle school students. She said the smaller kids get swallowed by the crowd, and they get crushed against the gate.
There weren’t as many middle school kids in attendance, Elder said. She said overall the crowd was better behaved than those at the two concerts held last year.
“Our job was pretty easy,” Milne said. lot of it had to do with the age of the crowd. There seems to be more college students compared to what we had before.”
The Student Traditions and Activities Board (STAB) Activities Director Kellen Hansen said ASUSU Programming tries to prepare for incidents like these at concerts.
“We make sure that the police are definitely on hand. We have to make sure medical is there,” Hansen said. “And we usually try to have an area where they can take them.”
Hansen said police and medical teams were allowed to take people to the tent behind the stage, as well as an additional temporary command center for the event.
“We have a command center,” Hansen said. “This one was in HPER 102, where the police can take anybody that’s acting up and get them away from the crowd. Or if there’s any severe medical situations, and they don’t go straight to the ambulance, they can use what we call the ‘command center’ as a place to treat them.”
Along with police and medical teams, Hansen said they had people certified in CPR, as well as security teams on hand.
“It was the fewest number of incidents we’ve had, but we had probably more help this time than we have at any of the other concerts,” she said.
Milne said he deploys officers based on the types of events. He said events with large, rowdy crowds require more officers than the more mellow events.
“We knew from a year ago when they had the Red Jumpsuit Apparatus, we didn’t anticipate a very big crowd,” Milne said. “We didn’t have very many officers there, and there was more people there than we anticipated. We ended up having to pull Logan City (Police) off of their regular patrol duties to help us out.”
Milne said they brought in more staff for the last two concerts. He said the Rocket Summer concert had two medical incidents and one incident of a minor in possession of alcohol.
— chris.w.lee@aggiemail.usu.edu
