Check out the reports from this weekend’s Pemberton Festival in Whistler, BC.

CBC:

Complaints about ever-present dust, overflowing toilets, chaotic parking lots and lax security were as pervasive as talk about the music on Sunday, the third and final day of British Columbia’s inaugural Pemberton Festival.

From the very start, Canada’s largest outdoor summer concert in recent memory has not been without its birthing pains.

On Friday, more than 40,000 fans made the bumper-to-bumper trek up B.C.‘s Sea-to-Sky Highway for the three-day rock music extravaganza. By Friday afternoon, the highway approaching the village of Pemberton was backed up, and fans were greeted with lineups, confusion and dust kicked up by crowds in the farmer’s field that has been converted into the festival site.

“Getting here from Whistler was a nightmare,” Adelle Papp told CBC News. “Then we paid $90 for parking, and we just stumbled on it. There was no one directing traffic, nothing.”

The confusion and dust continued into Saturday and Sunday. Organizers have had their hands full directing the 20,000 people who are camping in the fields surrounding the concert site. And fans have been resorting to covering their faces with scarves so as not to inhale the dust.

Although organizers promised tight security measures that would keep alcohol, weapons and drugs out of the camping area, festival-goers said security was lax.

“Security was giving up,” Chris Betts told the Canadian Press. “There were no checks and no one seemed to know who was in charge.”

“It was kind of like going to a war zone,” Colin Horgan said. “It feels like entering a refugee camp: tents, blowing dust and bright lights.”

Vancouver Sun:

The Pemberton Festival’s medical team have been treating about a thousand people a day during the dusty, hot and raucous first days of the party. Some were routed to hospitals in the Vancouver area.

Dr. Samuel Gutman, the festival’s medical director, said the 14-bed main medical tent has seen about 250 cases a day, while the first aid posts and roving response teams have taken care of about 600 to 800 people every day.

“To give you a persective, at Lion’s Gate, which is a main trauma recieving hospital, we’d see 120 a day,” Gutman said Sunday afternoon.

“Friday we did over a hundred IVs. We actually completely exceeded our stock,” he said. “That’s because we had a hot day.”

He said the ubiquitous dust and hay have been particularly agravating for some people.
“With the dust, we’ve seen lots of respiratory illnesses, and lots of hay fever, which makes sense, given the floor is spread with hay,” he said.

Ambulances have transported “a handful” of people to Vancouver-area hospitals, some suffering from substance abuse. But Gutman said they’ve all had positive outcomes.