Outdoor festivals in Edmonton are putting their emergency plans to the test this year, as unprecedented rainfall and severe thunderstorms take their toll on the city.
On Saturday, multiple festivals, including the Neon Skies Festival, the Great Outdoors Comedy Festival and Taste of Edmonton, were forced to evacuate due to a severe thunderstorm.
“From 9:34 p.m. until 10:24 p.m., we had — in that 45 minutes — almost 5,000 people on site that we safely evacuated,” said Donovan Vienneau, the executive director for Taste of Edmonton. “No casualties, no injuries, everybody got out of here safely.”
It’s the first time Vienneau has had to shut down the festival under the current leadership of the annual event.
And while Vienneau said the evacuation of Taste of Edmonton went as well as he could have hoped for, evacuating large-scale events doesn’t come without its challenges.
Jaimie Olchowski travelled to Edmonton from Saskatoon for the Neon Skies Festival. Before the singer Kesha was about to take the stage, an emergency alert was played through speakers notifying attendees that the show would be suspended due to weather conditions.
The Saturday night show was ultimately cancelled.
Olchowski said she believes communication between the event organizers and the attendees during and after the storm wasn’t clear. She said festival-goers were left confused as to where they could safely go.
In a statement to CBC News, the Oilers Entertainment Group (OEG), which organized the Neon Skies Festival, said attendees and staff were forced to evacuate the Fan Park in the Ice District and seek shelter as part of OEG’s standard emergency procedures.
OEG also noted that it is reviewing next steps and will be communicating directly with ticket holders once additional information is available.
KDays was also hit by the storm on Saturday. Speaking broadly about what happens when severe weather hits festival grounds, KDays director Jessie Radies explained why organizers may avoid calling for a full evacuation and enact shelter-in-place protocols instead.
“We don’t want to push people out into bad weather if they should be sheltering in place,” Radies said.
She said that a full-scale evacuation of the grounds would pose its own unique challenges.
“I think any time you’re trying to get all of our guests off the site at the same time, there will be some bottlenecks, specifically in our parking lots. Our site is not designed to absorb or have that many people leave all at the same time. But if people are in their vehicles, they’re relatively safe.”
When to make the call
According to Vienneau, there are two main factors that impact the decision to enact emergency response protocols: lightning and wind.
“If there’s rain that is happening in and around the festival, and as long as there’s no lightning strikes, then we can make an executive decision on whether we can proceed and keep the festival open or not,” he said.
To mitigate the risk posed by severe weather, both Vienneau and Radies said they have systems in place to continuously monitor the weather on site at their respective festivals.
Communication strategies are also put in place to ensure that everyone is aware of any risks the weather may present, as well as what to do in case of an emergency situation.
We can take rain, we can take extreme heat, but smoke you can’t blow it away, because more smoke just fills its place.
For outdoor festivals, specifically ones with large metal stages like KDays, the threat of lightning is especially dangerous.
“If the lightning is within 12 kilometres, nobody can be on the stage,” said Radies. “And there has to be at least a 30-minute break between lightning strikes before it’s safe to resume operations on the stage.”
Vienneau said Taste of Edmonton has similar parameters set around lightning, but added the real pain for festival producers is the wind.
The Edmonton Folk Music Festival is no stranger to how dangerous strong winds can be. Dangerous winds forced the festival to evacuate in 2017.
In the wake of that weather event, the festival completed a safety audit to ensure its infrastructure could resist high winds.
A look at Edmonton Folk Music Festival in 2017, the year it was evacuated because of wind. (CBC)
This year, however, it’s not the threat of storms that concerns Terry Wickham, the festival’s producer.
It’s the air quality.
“We have on-site continuous monitoring of wildfire smoke,” he said. “Especially … the dangerous particles that can get in our bloodstream and do damage.”
The threat of wildfire smoke is also what prompted the folk festival’s organizers to acquire cancellation insurance in case the event is forced to evacuate due to dangerous conditions.
“We can take rain, we can take extreme heat, but smoke you can’t blow it away, because more smoke just fills its place,” said Wickham.