“The area is farmland,” says W.O.A. founder Thomas Jensen. “We learned how fast the ground structure is changing. Even our farmers learned a lot this year. We had over 100 tractors pulling.” Still, he believes that temporary setbacks come with the territory of running an outdoor festival. “Going back to Woodstock, this is what it’s all about. They had heavy, heavy weather.” Even Jimi Hendrix’s final gig, in Fehmarn, Germany, was plagued with rain; for Jensen, the mud is simply part of the mythology.
“I jokingly tell people that I’ve become a meteorologist,” says Mikołaj Ziółkowski, founder of Poland’s Open’er festival, held every summer at a windswept spot barely a mile from the shore of the Baltic Sea. Over the course of a four-day program, with six days of camping, it’s rare that it doesn’t rain at least once during Open’er. “But storms are the most difficult, and in the last two or three decades, they’ve become more extreme,” Ziółkowski says. Last year, on the third day of the festival, the main stage registered wind speeds of 63 miles per hour, forcing Ziółkowski to make the difficult decision to evacuate all 60,000 people on site. “It was literally the biggest evacuation in Poland in three decades,” he notes. But staffers successfully got everyone off site and away from vulnerable structures, and after three hours—including extensive rig checks—they were able to start up again, save for Dua Lipa’s headlining set.
Fortunately, the team was prepared: The day before the festival each year, they run a full trial evacuation of the site, a process he believes should be standard. “If you’re a responsible promoter, safety is the most important thing,” Ziółkowski stresses. Just as importantly, he stresses, it can’t be an economic decision. “We pay for insurance to help us make the right decisions.”
Even so, losses incurred during a temporary shutdown like Open’er’s—i.e., revenue from the bar, merch sales, and artist fees to acts who never perform—are increasingly mitigated from most insurance policies, says Paul Bassman, a Dallas insurance broker who works with festivals like Riot Fest, Live Is Beautiful, and Pitchfork Music Festival. (“I had a lot more before Live Nation and AEG started buying them all up,” he laughs.) Though a typical cancellation policy will cover many weather-related events, most policies today carry a deductible of five or even 10 percent of the entire festival budget. Bassman says, “If the festival was shut down for three hours and a couple of artists don’t get to play, and you lose concession revenue, making claims on that is just not practical anymore, because that loss is typically within the deductible.”
