MORRISON, Colo. — At Red Rock on Wednesday night, 6,000 people ran for the exits as they were pounded by hail. The show wasn't canceled - but should it have been?
The venue has cancelled shows due to weather before, and one question is whether people got fair warning that baseball sized hail was coming.
Part of last night sounded like a classic case of communication problems.
Red Rocks told concertgoers they were on weather delay and suggested they head to the car. Then, the venue gave the 'all-clear.'
By the time people got the warning again, it was too late.
As calls flooded into Jefferson County's 911 dispatch center, water and chunks of hail flooded the exits.
Ashlie Scott was there and was one of the lucky ones who took shelter under an umbrella.
Hail at Red Rocks
"You're hearing people crying and screaming and you're getting pelted," she said. "Everything was really loud…thunder was echoing everywhere."
Kaiya Olsen was also there.
"There was probably 40 to 50 of us huddled outside of the first aid room waiting to get in and they wouldn't let us in at first," she said. "They finally did."
Olsen's pretty sure she broke a finger.
"There's a lot of people in there with like, bleeding heads. My finger was black and blue already," she said of the first aid room that night.
Both women told 9NEWS about an hour before the storm hit, they were told the show was in a weather delay. Then there was an 'all-clear.'
Moments later, the venue announced another delay, followed by an urgent warning to seek shelter immediately.
Red Rocks' director of communications, Brian Kitts, said it's not out of the ordinary.
"It's not unusual for us to go into a weather delay and then have the weather clear up and the show goes on," he said.
Kitts said the venue has contracted forecasters, and that Red Rocks communicated what the meteorologists told them when they told them.
"Nobody realized the hail was going to be as intense and as big as it was," Kitts said.
Kevin Kloesel, an event meteorologist for the University of Oklahoma, disagreed. He's the chair of the weather advisory committee for a group that advocates for better safety practices at concerts.
"The storms last night and the severity of those storms were no surprise, right. These were storms that had been forecasted all day long," he said. "In this case, I think you really need a professional meteorologist on site to assess risk, much like you would have law enforcement."
Kloesel said an event like this should be a wakeup call.
"These are events that people go to to have a good time. We don't want to cancel them. We certainly don't. But we want to be the office of we're going to have it but have it safely," he said. "And in this particular case, I think everything that could have gone wrong, went wrong."
Red Rocks issued a statement Thursday on Twitter, offering "sincere best wishes" to people who were injured. They said they would talk to mother nature about the weather issues here.
As you can imagine... people with bruises didn't take that kindly.
Kitts told 9NEWS there were a lot of people who enjoyed that response and said that "in a service business, there are a lot of people who aren't going to like anything you say."