Music Festival News

The organiser of Reading and Leeds has vowed to make next year a safer festival for everyone however i don’t feel they addressed the most serious of incidents.

After a health and safety officer attended reading festival with his wife and son he had a meeting to air his concerns with the boss Melvin Benn. His main concerns were crowd control, there was a situation when the crowd surged on the Saturday night at the reading leg of the festival which hasn’t provided enough run of areas for this kind of situation, the toilets were another concern as people entered and left through the same exit which made them very congested. There was also an incident on the Saturday at reading with people not leaving the main stage area. The boss has also had ideas for spotters to be placed in the crowd that could be used to spot potential dangers and relay them to other ground staff.

This is all well and good but in the article that was published they brushed away the campsite fire as being caused because the people camping were getting younger and it caused problems. It seems that the police force from different area’s vary massively on the conditions they place on event licences. For example, Global Gathering this year had conditions such as nobody is aloud to bring any drinkable liquid into the event and and stoves or BBQ’s were strictly prohibited. Creamfields had to enforce a much earlier curfew and had to reduce the official capacity to be granted this years licence.

Festivals such as Leeds and reading on the other hand seem to have very different conditions to the licence, all the trouble reported seems to boil down to letting so many people into certain area’s, letting people use naked flame’s in a packed camp site etc,

Having to many restrictions does put a bit of a dampener on festivals and can make them more expensive having to buy all your food on site, however Reading festival had a lucky escape in my eyes with the campsite fire, which could easily have had casualties, maybe basic rules like fire and flammable tents should be enforced!

Were you there? what do you think?