A festival has been cancelled due to safety concerns after heavy rain, prompting complaints that organisers had failed to prepare for the realities of British summer time.
Y Not festival in Derbyshire was called off on Sunday after acts had already been forced to abandon their performances due to dangerous conditions.
Headliners The Vaccines had their set cancelled on Friday, apologising to fans on social media and saying they had been told it was unsafe. The soggy weekend also saw performances from Stereophonics and Jake Bugg rearranged, with acts reportedly playing under gazebos on stage to stay dry.
Pictures shared online showed waterlogged tents and festivalgoers wading through deep mud. “Paying £140+ to watch ONE act, kill your legs & be dripping in mud; probably returning with pneumonia, is not my ideal weekend,” tweeted one disgruntled visitor.
Summing up YNOT in a pic pic.twitter.com/ep2oR8rasm
— kaylaa (@kaylaloria) July 28, 2017
The festival’s organisers said: “Unfortunately we’ve had to take the difficult decision to cancel Sunday due to the adverse weather conditions across the weekend, after consulting all the relevant authorities.
“The safety of our guests, performers and crew is our primary concern and the potential risk was too severe for Sunday to go ahead. We are very sorry for the disappointment and disruption caused to everyone who was looking forward to the final day of the festival.
“We understand that people will have questions about refunds. We will be giving all our guests further information about this over the coming days.”
One of many festivalgoers to complain on Facebook was Amy Osborne. “I’m absolutely devastated,” she wrote. “There were so many bands I wanted to see today and have been looking forward to for a long long time. We’ve saved hard for this weekend and given up a lot to come. This was my first festival for nine years and I can safely say I will never come back. You have totally ruined my weekend. I expect a refund.”
Rachel and Mathew Dimbleby from Stoke-on-Trent said they had been going to festivals since the early 1990s, but that this was the most poorly organised they had ever seen. “We survived Glastonbury 2005 and Glastonbury 2007 with some of the worst conditions ever and we know how to deal with mud,” said Rachel, who runs a ceramics business with her husband.
The couple said there was very little hay or woodchip being put down to soak up the mud, as is normally done at music festivals when it rains. They complained security was poor, with reports of people having belongings stolen from their tents, and that festivalgoers had injured themselves slipping in the mud.
“It was absolute carnage and a lot of people are very upset,” said Rachel, who added the site looked “apocalyptic” on Sunday afternoon as people attempted to leave.
In October last year, Y Not was acquired by the company Global, which runs 17 music festivals across the world. In September 2016, there were calls for an inquiry after 200 people attending the Welsh event Festival No 6 – owned by Global – were left stranded after a park-and-ride site was put on a known flood plain.
John Drape, managing director of the company Ground Control, which was running Y Not festival, told the BBC that organisers had not been caught out by the conditions and that they had 80 tonnes of woodchip to firm up soggy ground.
“We have meetings every six hours to discuss things like weather conditions and ground conditions,” he said. “On Saturday night it became increasingly clear conditions were deteriorating and at midnight there was not one agency which felt it was safe to continue.”
