The Music Festival Debacle: Hosting Large Events Amidst Climate Change
It’s not easy to be a concert planner. You have to coordinate venues, artists, permits, first aid tents, parking lots, sanitary facilities, lighting and stage equipment, and lately the effects of an increasingly hostile and shifting weather system. It used to be that the hardest part of the job was wrangling stoned rock bands onstage and shooing ticket scalpers away from the entrance, but this position should now require a meteorological degree- if not 20 years of direct experience at NOAA. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that warmer temperatures equal stronger storms with heavier rainfall, gustier winds, and a greater chance of damaging hail. But it seems like no one took this into account, leading to a summer of Fyre Festival-esque clusterfucks mired in sewage and mud.
For those of you not familiar with Burning Man, it’s a week-long festival of music, art, and community activities centered on inclusion and radical reliance. While it began in 1986 as a small gathering of friends, it’s gradually ballooned into an enormous event of 70,000 “burners,” including the likes of Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos. Since 1991, Burning Man has been held in Black Rock City, a temporary encampment in the middle of the Nevada desert that roars to life just before Labor Day from a scrubby patch of sand to a colorful jumble larger than most Midwestern towns. The culminating ceremony is the symbolic burning of a giant male effigy meant to represent self-expression.
For the most part, this festival has always gone off without a hitch (although there’s been some grumbling about how the Silicon Valley tech set have hijacked an event once frequented only by hippies and surfers.) But this year Mother Nature gleefully sank her teeth into the Black Rock Desert with a vengeance. A massive storm dumped an inch of rain- two to three months’ worth for the area- onto a playa already soaked from the remnants of Hurricane Hilary. It didn’t help that the campsite was on low ground, the previous home of long-dormant Lake Lahontan. Concertgoers tied trash bags over their shoes to wade through a bog of slippery ankle-deep mud. Officials told attendees to shelter in place and “conserve food, water, and fuel.” Nobody had cell service. DJ Diplo and Chris Rock both walked six miles through puddles and gulches to flag down a passing car for a ride back to civilization.
And yet it could have been much, much worse. I had several friends who went this year and they described it as “challenging, but it really brought the community together.” Burners generously shared dry camper space, toiletries, and fresh clothes. Despite the weather fiasco, everyone I spoke to seemed to have had an (occasionally trying) but generally enjoyable time. Not a single person expressed regret, swore they’d never attend again, or angrily insisted the planners refund them fully for their ticket.
Burning Man may have briefly stranded their participants in the soggy muck of a former Pleistocene pond- through a freak storm that was no fault of their own- but this year’s Blue Ridge Rock Festival was such an epic fuckup that a Facebook group devoted to how concertgoers got “screwed” had 30,000 furious members by last week. Once again, severe weather rolled unexpectedly through the area. Only this time it was compounded by greed, poor planning, and egregious mismanagement.
The Blue Ridge Rock Festival is almost as large as Burning Man, although it’s a lot newer- founded in 2017- and arguably less well-known. It’s held at the Virginia International Raceway, a large motorsports venue close to the North Carolina border that, despite the concert logo, isn’t remotely close to a mountain. While Burning Man costs thousands to attend, the Blue Ridge Rock Festival totals $300 for camping and a five-day concert pass. This year’s headliners were Slipknot, Pantera, Megadeth, Danzig, Shinedown, Staind, Vince Neil, Papa Roach, and Cypress Hill. Billed as “America’s Largest Rock Festival,” the event claimed to host a total capacity of 45,000. Except a lot more people showed up. And then the heavens broke loose.
It turned out that selling 15,000 extra tickets without any sort of emergency weather planning was a really dumb idea. Golf ball-sized hail sent attendees to the hospital, while a resulting lack of water stations resulted in numerous cases of heatstroke. Excess rain flooded overflowing Port-a-Potties that seeped raw sewage into the ground. There seemed to be a lack of communication between managers, stage hands, and other employees- most of whom had wisely left. Ian Roberts, seasoned tour manager for the band Electric Callboy, noted in an interview to Loudwire: “[The organizers] didn’t really know what was going on. . . People need to be held accountable in this business. The fans were treated horribly. The staff were treated horribly.” By the time the concert was officially called off, eventgoers had posted damning photos of trash piles, long wait lines, and filthy restrooms on social media. This colossal failure is currently under investigation by the state’s Health Department as well as the Attorney General.
Whether you believe in man-made global warming or not- and if you’re capable of reading this article then you probably do- the temperature is getting hotter. Storms are getting worse. Burning Man and the Blue Ridge Rock Festival are the canary in the coal mine; while miraculously there were no weather-related casualties, this should serve as a warning for anyone who plans on hosting a massive concert subject to the fickle whim of the Great Outdoors. (Especially if you oversell tickets without adding more trash cans and Port-a-Potties to your site. Virginians have joked that the event’s mountain logo, which looks nothing like the actual Blue Ridge, represents the piles of human waste and plastic debris scattered around the campgrounds.)
Climate change doesn’t just affect coastal homeowners in the Outer Banks anymore. It’s starting to have a significant impact in the places we used to feel free and relaxed. And that should scare the bejesus out of all of us.
