From the LVRJ:
Saturday night’s RiSE Lantern Festival was two hours of awe followed by nearly four hours of transportation woes at Jean Dry Lake.
According to the event’s plans, the last bus from the festival back to the casinos where attendees parked was supposed to depart the lake bed at 11 p.m.
The last bus left at about 2 a.m., according to event coordinators.
“We literally had our best, our A-team and top staff trying to alleviate the busing issue,” said Jeff Gehring, president and co-owner of RiSE.
The issue was transportation, which some of the event’s nearly 10,000 participants were vocal about the next morning.
“Who else was there with the other 10,000 angry people that was stranded in the middle of the desert, waiting for a shuttle?” one crowd member asked on Yelp. “That had to have been one of the worst managed events I have ever been to.”...
Wait times were a combination of poor planning, poor execution and anxious crowds, according to Dan Hill, who is one of three founders and five owners of RiSE.
Hill said that nearly 500 staff, about 150 of whom were paid and 350 were volunteers, were working to direct buses and crowds for RiSE’s first festival. That staff doesn’t include the 75-100 law enforcement workers Hill said were on hand....
Hill and Gehring, who took full ownership of the event’s transportation breakdown, said they were doing everything they could to comfort waiting crowds, from cutting open wool blankets that vendors were originally selling to handing out water bottles left over from caterers.
The original plan was to have everyone out in 30 to 45 minutes, according to Hill, who has planned and produced events for ten years.
“Despite months of planning with our bussing-logistics company AWG, we had an unacceptable breakdown in operations,” event organizers said in a written statement Sunday. http://www.reviewjournal.com/news/las-vegas/lantern-festival-marred-hours-long-bus-woes
To move 10,000 people out of the desert, they would need a total of 166 bus trips, if there are 60 people on a bus. And if their goal was to empty the desert in 45 minutes, they would need to move a bus every 20 seconds or less and that isn't happening. If they wanted it done in 30 minutes, they would need to move the buses every 12 seconds.
So, it looks like the organizers tried to do things on the cheap and on the stupid.
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