By Steve Rhodes
“‘We got lucky with the weather tonight, didn’t we?’ Jack White asked from the stage Sunday night as he closed out Lollapalooza 2012, the eighth edition of the giant corporate concert that’s become Walmart on the Lake,” Jim Derogatis reports on his WBEZ blog.
“In fact, Austin, Texas-based concert promoters C3 Presents and city officials are the ones who should be counting their blessings after a severe-weather evacuation Saturday afternoon shunted more than 60,000 people out of Grant Park on to Michigan Avenue as a torrential downpour, intense lightning and winds up to 60 miles per hour descended on the lakefront. As WBEZ’s Kate Dries observed, ‘It’s pure luck that things went as smoothly as they did.'”
Indeed.
DeRo’s post – headlined “The Lessons of Lollapalooza 2012” – is the wrap-up I was hoping for in terms of the festival’s emergency safety plan (there may be more) and a must-read from start to finish, so please click through.
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And now, here’s a first-person account from Beachwood newsletter editor Nikki Golden:
“As an attendee of Saturday’s debacle, I can tell you for sure that while I agree absolutely that the park had to be evacuated, I did not agree that this so-called plan they’d been working on forever should be kept so secret squirrel.
“It was utter chaos. And for the people on the tail end of getting out of there, the bars in the Loop were either too full to let them in or were locking their doors to keep them out.
“If they had an emergency plan, they had plenty of ways to communicate that plan ahead of time to concert-goers. Trust me when I say that I’m an anal-retentive concert-goer, with my map printed out ahead of time and all bathrooms and water stations circled. I had all three days of the schedule printed, plus written out schedule of who I wanted to see. If they had prepared an evacuation plan ahead of time, I would have had it on me. Probably memorized.
“I also had the Lolla app downloaded on my phone, and I am looking at the push notifications now. If they sent a push notification with instructions on what I was supposed to do Saturday, I would have it here. But I don’t, because there wasn’t one. Instead, I have several reminding me to drink water and hydrate.
“The throngs of management personnel, police, Office of Emergency Management personnel were just standing around looking blank as waves of people exited the park. Maybe if you were at a stage, you were told to evacuate and there were screens, but a) they didn’t tell you where to go and b) they didn’t help the vast majority of people milling about, standing in line for beer/food, using the bathroom, etc.
“My mom had more info watching the news at home than I did wandering around the Loop.
“And again, I give them kudos for figuring out a way for the concert to go on, but I didn’t find out about it except for my friend getting a text from a friend in California. I checked the app. Nothing. I checked Facebook. They had the news and new lineup posted at 7 something.
‘It was irritating, to say the least.
“Quite honestly, they were very lucky that so many of the buildings in the area have covered entrances to walk/sit under or else I could see people being injured out on the streets during that storm. We were on the Brown Line platform at Adams and Wells, I think, when the sky turned black and the wind picked up, and we actually thought twice of getting on the El because of that. It was like tornado from Wizard of Oz scary.”
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And the video. You can hear someone yelling repeatedly “Seek shelter!” but with no instructions on just where shelter is.
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Comments welcome.
Posted on August 7, 2012