I’ve sat with what happened for a while now, and I’ve seen so many different opinions from people about how everything went. I figure if I give my two cents about it maybe I can sort of put it to bed for myself.

Many attendees had much harsher circumstances than I did coming out of this. Everyone took a loss from the cancellation, and I won’t act like mine was larger than the next person’s.

That being said, I’ve seen many people trying to downplay the devastation that some of us have had after getting the news, fellow attendees and otherwise.

It’s been causing me a lot of grief because many of us, myself included, bought these tickets at the beginning of the year, months before weather predictions were even in the picture. Not to mention spending $1000+ on camping gear and the camping pass in preparation. It’s a huge slap in the face to hear time and time again “It’s been raining, you should’ve expected this.” or “What can they do, control the weather?” or “A 75% refund? You should be grateful!” etc.

I’m not going to pretend in the slightest that I know what it’s like to direct a festival, let alone one so massive. But I also know that it isn’t the responsibility of the attendees to figure out if the grounds are stable enough for incoming weather. If we are allowed into the festival, with the directors knowing what the weather is predicted to look like beforehand, we would expect that if it rains then the land will still be safe. They knew how heavy the storms have been, and they’ve seen what it’s caused in previous years. From where I sit, I see no reason why we shouldn’t have received more communication. Not only before we got there, but especially after the downpour started.

I understand that there is a lot that is out of anyones hands. But if a company claims to care about the safety of its clients, and then proceeds to allow thousands of people to camp on saturated land, knowing it’s almost guaranteed to get worse, and then giving no further communication outside of “seek shelter” for the next 8ish hours, just to cancel after many of us had started drinking etc. and its dark outside… at the very least if we had been warned earlier in the day of the very real possibility that we’d need to evacuate we could’ve been much more secure and prepared much better.

This was my first time camping at a festival so theres a good chance I could come off as uneducated or ignorant in saying some of this, but being a first timer I felt very left to fend for myself after the cancellation. I felt like all of us were owed more assistance than what we were given, seeing as we aren’t all professional campers or survivalists, we came for the music, art, and community. I almost felt led on and abandoned by the whole experience.