Crowd Lessons Learned from the Route 91 Harvest Festival Tragedy

Image: Video screen capture image from Las Vegas Review- Journal, 2018

Kevin Kennedy BA, MSc

Crowd Safety Expert | Crowd Flow Analyst & Modeler | Major Event Planning | Trainer | Consultant | MSc - Crowd Science | BA - Psychology

October 28, 2025

In October 2017, the Route 91 Harvest Festival in Las Vegas became the site of one of the most tragic attacks on innocent concertgoers in modern history — a moment that forever changed the way we think about safety at live events.

In pursuit of my MSc in Crowd Safety and Risk Analysis from Manchester Metropolitan University, I completed my dissertation titled Emergency Evacuation During the Route 91 Harvest Festival: A Study to Identify Predictable Behaviours During a Lethal Attack. My goal was to better understand how people respond in a crowd under the most extreme conditions imaginable. While my research confirmed several established theories, it also exposed me to other insights into human behaviours that manifested during that crisis. Although there were more than a dozen key findings, I’m listing three crowd behaviours that stood out. These are critical considerations for anyone involved in designing effective emergency response and evacuation plans.

Predictable Human Behaviour in Chaos

During the Route 91 attack, thousands of people faced unimaginable terror. Yet contrary to popular belief, panic didn’t define their actions; purpose did. My research found that most people acted rationally and cooperatively, not chaotically. For armchair-quarterbacks looking at crowd behaviour after the fact in a sanitized environment, the actions displayed by those on site may be viewed as “panic behaviour.” In reality, interviewees were able to clearly articulate the conscious and rational decisions they made based upon the limited information they could absorb in the chaotic environment. People sought safety, supported strangers, and made quick, calculated choices. Understanding this challenges the outdated “mass panic” myth. Crowds are not mindless as suggested by Le Bon. They are remarkably adaptive. Recognizing these predictable patterns of behaviour allows event planners and emergency responders to design safer environments where human instinct works with safety systems, not against them.

Affiliation: Seeking the Familiar in Fear

When danger erupts, most people don’t run alone. They seek family, friends, or familiar spaces first. This is Affiliation Behaviour: a deep-rooted instinct to find connection before escape. At Route 91, some survivors delayed evacuation while searching for loved ones. This wasn’t irrational; it was profoundly human. Understanding this helps us design evacuation strategies that account for real emotional responses, not just idealized movement models. Safety planning must respect that people prioritize relationships even under threat. People need to understand that affiliation doesn’t make crowds unpredictable. More accurately, it makes them relatable, reminding us that empathy shapes behaviour as much as fear does.

Empowerment: When Crowds Take Control

In the absence of formal leadership, people rarely succumb to paralysis. Instead, they lead. Empowerment Theory demonstrates that crowds under threat often self-organize and act decisively. During the Route 91 attack, concertgoers became their own first responders—guiding others to safety, providing improvised medical care, and restoring order amid chaos. Among them were off-duty firefighters, police officers, paramedics, military personnel, and medical staff. These individuals are accustomed to operating in crisis situations. Numerous examples show these people acting with composure and urgency as they aided others. This spontaneous empowerment underscores humanity’s capacity to adapt and survive collectively. For event professionals, the lesson is clear: when systems fail, the crowd becomes the system. Planning that anticipates and enables this empowerment fosters safer, more resilient responses.

Turning Tragedy into Knowledge

For ethical reasons, researchers cannot conduct controlled experiments in which people are placed in life threatening situations. So we must instead study actual tragedies and seek information from survivors. The Route 91 Harvest Festival will forever represent loss but also learning. By analyzing how people responded, we can design future events that protect life more effectively. Researching Route 91 and other crowd disasters transforms tragedy into actionable insight, bridging crowd psychology and event planning. Organizers must understand that in an emergency, people will display cooperative, affiliative and resilient behaviours. In some cases, these actions may delay a full evacuation, but they must be understood for what they are; a natural human condition that supersedes the self-preservation instinct. Organizers must understand it and ensure it is considered in their emergency response planning.

If anyone would like more information on this research, please reach out to me on LinkedIn or at https://www.kennedycrowdsafety.ca/contact.

References

Drury, J., Evripidou, A., and Van Zomeren, M. (2015) 'Empowerment: The intersection of identity and power in collective action.' In D. Sindic, M. Barreto, and R. Costa-Lopes (Eds.), Power and identity. Hove, UK: Psychology Press, pp. 94-116.

Drury, J., Novelli, D and Stott, C. (2013) 'Representing crowd behaviour in emergency planning guidance: ‘mass panic’ or collective resilience?' Resilience, 1:1 pp. 18-37

Le Bon, G. (1895) The crowd: A study of the popular mind. Kitchener: Batoche Books

Mawson, A. (2005) 'Understanding mass panic and other collective responses to threat and disaster.' Psychiatry, 68(2), pp. 95-113.

Las Vegas Review-Journal (2019) People flee the Route 91 Harvest festival on Oct. 1, 2017. YouTube. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F5EduCSL5qA