Lantern festival marred
18, 2014 on a dry lake bed near Jean. (Sam Morris/Las Vegas Review Journal)
Lantern festival marred by hours long bus woesCrowds wait for a shuttle at Rise Festival on Saturday, October 18, 2014. (Courtesy, Tony DeMartino)
Lantern festival marred by hours long bus woesBuy PhotoPaper lanterns head patagonia new york city0skyward at the RiSE Festival Saturday, Oct. 18, 2014 on a dry lake bed near Jean. (Sam Morris/Las Vegas Review Journal)
Saturday night s RiSE Lantern Festival was two hours of awe followed by nearly four hours of transportation woes at Jean Dry Lake.
We literally had our best, our A team and top staff trying to alleviate the busing issue, said Jeff Gehring, president andpatagonia black hole duffel review co owner of RiSE.
The issue was transportation, which some of the event s nearly 10,000 participants were vocal about the next morning.
Who else was there with the other 10,000 angry people that was stranded in the middle of the desert, waiting for a shuttle? one crowd member asked on Yelp. That had to have been one of the worst managed events I have ever been to.
Savannah Ward, 27, attended the festival with her husband and two friends.
Wait times were a combination of poor planning, poor execution and anxious crowds, according to Dan Hill, who is one of three founders and five owners of RiSE.
Hill said that nearly 500 staff, about 150 of whom were paid and 350 were volunteers, were working to direct buses and crowds for RiSE s fpatagonia girls nano puff jacket reviewsirst festival. That staff doesn t include the 75 100 law enforcement workers Hill said were on hand.
I know it felt under manned for some people, Hill said.
RiSE attendee Stacey Lambert created a the Boycott RISE Festival group on Facebook, which had garnered 60 likes nine hours after it was created. There, a few people expressed their disdain toward the festival s organization.
I agree with the founders comments, but their suppospatagonia clothes new yorked staff was not present when they were needed most: to control the crowds and get everyone back on a shuttle home as quickly and as safely as possible, Lambert said in an email to the Review Journal.
Hill and Gehring, who took full ownership of the event s transportation breakdown, said they patagonia new york citywere doing everything they could to comfort waiting crowds, from cutting open wool blankets that vendors were originally selling to handing out water bottles left over from caterers.
The original plan was to hpatagonia discount code partyave patagonia discount code qualityeveryone out in 30 to 45 minutes, according to Hill, who has planned and produced events for ten years.
Despite monpatagonia dresses onlineths of planning with our bussing logistics company AWG, we had an unacceptable breakdown in operations, epatagonia everlong review freevent organizers said in a written statement Sunday.
AWG Ambassador, the bus company RiSE hired, has worked for other large scale Las Vegas Valley events such as Electric Daisy Carnival.
The delay was caused by bottle necked buses: Every time a bus would enter the evenpatagonia new york city2t s turnaround bus route, crowds would surge toward the pick up point. Because of that, buses had to push further into the opposite lane, making it impossible for thpatagonia guide jacket grafte next bus to get off of the road and turn around until the first bus left.
Some RiSE apatagonia new york city1ttendepatagonia guide jacket quiltinges were so frustrated with the delays that they reportedly walked the five to six miles back to their hotels.
There was no communication between organizers and visitors, Ward said. Attendees were left in the dark about direction, adpatagonia new york city3ding that it was not even clear where the official bus line was. That was when attendees, many of them with children, became agitated and when some yelling occurred, Ward said.
The intention is to make this an annual event, Hill said, but our immediate concern is dealing with last night s event.
