Eve

PREPARE FOR THE WORST, HOPE FOR THE BEST

Eve Trakway advises UK festival organisers to gear up for bad weather. Festival season in the UK has a degree of cynicism attached to it, on one hand there is the excitement it brings, camping with friends and watching a line-up of World-class bands, and then, on the other, there is the typically bad weather and inevitable mud!

Eve Trakway knows only too well how the latter can affect the festival season. Over the past 40 years it has supplied barriers, fencing, roadways and walkways to high-profile events such as Glastonbury, the V Festivals and more recently Bestival. Over the years, Eve Trakway has seen the requirements of its festival clients grow, as a result of the changing weather conditions in the summer months. There has been an increase in the demand for trakway to ensure that sites are as accessible as possible and in addition to this the company has seen increased demand for other ground protection products such as its plastic floor coverings.

Geoff Gorringe, key account manager for the festivals sector at Eve Trakway, explains: “Year-on-year the weather at festivals is as well reported as the live bands, and seeing mud-clad celebrities in their wellies going from gig to gig has become commonplace. Although there is a comical element to it, the reality is a costly and logistical nightmare for the promoters and organisers running these events.

“Wet weather brings with it a whole host of problems and organisers who are not sufficiently prepared for it not only risk cancellation of the festival, but could also hamper potential insurance claims and create health and safety issues with regards to access for the emergency services and pedestrians.

“We are therefore advising our clients this year to plan and contact us early in case of bad weather to ensure we have ample stock and capacity to help with demand. As we say in the trade, ‘it’s better to prepare for the worst and hope for the best’.”

Last year, Bestival ran on the Isle of Wight from 5-7 September. As one of the UK’s high profile festivals of the summer, event planners were well prepared to ensure all the necessary security and safety requirements were taken care of, in advance of the event, so that the 40,000 festival-goers could enjoy their weekend, without interruptions.

Bestival had put an array of access equipment in place, to ensure the safe movement of people in and around the festival. Eve Trakway’s initial order for Bestival included a wide range of the company’s portfolio of products: temporary roadways and walkways; mesh and hi-hoard fencing; crowd control barriers; and, lookout towers.

Despite all the planning and precautions, disaster struck when a high category weather warning was broadcast two days before the show. In an attempt to minimise the impact of 10 inches of rain in a 48-hour period, the organisers turned to Eve Trakway in order to help implement additional safety measures, which would prevent a mud bath at the site and ensure the safety of attendees. The low-lying ground in front of the stage became dangerously waterlogged and as a result, Eve Trakway resurfaced, during the night, the entire main stage area and introduced additional temporary road and walkways in problem areas. An additional 5500 sq metres of Terraplas and Supa-Trac ground protection systems were laid on the site, to make it stable and enable visitors to see the planned gigs on the main stage.

Commenting, Jim King, director from Loud Sound, one of the producers responsible for Bestival, said: “We decided a few days before the festival that we wanted to take further precautionary measures to protect the customer experience. One of these involved laying a huge amount of plastic flooring in front of the main stage to ensure that this area would cope with the horrific amount of water that we were expecting. Eve Trakway’s input and expertise was first class, as they came in and transformed the area in a very short space of time and ultimately helped ensure this area was a usable space throughout the whole weekend.”

Without Eve Trakway’s rapid service and standby crew on hand to help, Bestival would have struggled to cope with the rain’s impact. Mark Boddice, Eve Trakway’s project manager at Bestival, commented: “At a lot of our larger events we place a standby crew on site to facilitate any last minute or ongoing changes to the layout to ensure that they are carried out immediately, where feasible.

“With Bestival, by having crews on hand at the event ground, we could assess the situation and immediately mobilise a team to implement the contingency plan of bringing in plastic flooring. Without the budget in place to implement that plan and the speed in which we worked throughout the day and night, 2008’s Bestival could have faced serious disruption from the bad weather!”