This weekend was the inaugural Fyre Festival. It was supposed to be the Coachella of the Bahamas. It was supposed to be a VIP experience.
Instead it was Millennial Armageddon.
Tickets cost anywhere from $1,000 to $12,000 and promised a flight from Miami, activities like kayaking and yoga, and a stay in a geodesic dome. What actually happened was anything but, and now the Internet buzz with horror stories.
No food, no water, no luxury tents
First, those “luxury tents” that were promised turned out to be…not that at all. As Thomas Pierce, owner of entertainment marketing company PMA told E! News about his friends who are still stuck in what they described as a first-world apocalypse, “When they landed, they saw emergency tents with wet mattresses. The so-called private plane was a retired commercial airplane.”
According to Taylor Wiederhorn, an unlucky festival goer, the weekend’s organizers first tried to distract attendees from the lack of luxury tents by providing free alcohol. “Six hours later, they took us to the festival grounds,” he told E! News. “The tents had no floors, it was just dirt. No beds and port-a-potties. Everyone’s luggage was being held in these 20-foot shipping containers. I had to physically fight my way to the cargo containers to get my luggage, which they had been holding. I then tried getting a hotel room but every hotel was booked out because there is a separate festival going on for locals. So there isn’t anywhere else to stay.”
The food, was terrible. The food they could get their hands on, that is. A paparazzi photographer, who was in possession of a VIP pass for the weekend, said that food was “slow and scarce.” All they were offered initially was bread and cheese, and then all that was left was Doritos. There was talk of the occasional mystical sightings of chicken and pasta, “but you had to fight for it.”
This is how Fyre Fest handles luggage. Just drop it out of a shipping container. At night. With no lights. #fyrefestival pic.twitter.com/X5CdZRyJWo
— William N. Finley IV (@WNFIV) April 28, 2017
Once darkness fell on the first night, it got even worse. Reports began flooding in that there was no electricity, no lighting, and that the camp descended into total anarchy. As you can see in the below video, attendees were practically screaming for food, swarming trucks in the darkness. Those who hadn’t escaped immediately upon seeing the disaster tents began to run for the hills—or, rather, the airport.
“Once I got my bags, I paid a local to drive me to the airport where 100 people were sleeping on the floor,” Wiederhorn told E! “I was fortunate enough to realize early on I needed to get my stuff and get out of there. There was just no organization. Once we saw the tents—which were FEMA tents—and the port-a-potties, I knew it was time to get out of there.”
But getting out would prove to be far more difficult. The lucky members of the first wave of evacuations waited about 12 hours for a flight back to the mainland, but plenty others are live-Tweeting from a waiting hell at the airport. There are reports of passengers being kept on the tarmac for hours, or being stuffed into tiny rooms with access to the open bars and upscale snacks they expected to be indulging in during the weekend.
And Pierce tells E! News that there are “thousands” of people still on the festival grounds. “The employees are working under stressful conditions with no sleep,” he said. “It’s hot and humid and rainy and I’m worried for my friend who’s still there working.”
Wiederhorn echoed that sentiment: “I still have friends stranded. They’re trying to figure out how to get to the airport and get home. I can’t even tell you how many people are still stuck there. It was the biggest disaster I’ve ever seen.”
Source: E! News
