Lantern festival marred by hours-long bus woes

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.”

Savannah Ward, 27, attended the festival with her husband and two friends. She disputed the event coordinators’ timeline, saying that when she boarded at about 2 a.m., there were still hundreds of people waiting.

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.

“I know it felt under-manned for some people,” Hill said.

RiSE attendee Stacey Lambert created a the “Boycott RISE Festival” group on Facebook, which had garnered 60 “likes” nine hours after it was created. There, a few people expressed their disdain toward the festival’s organization.

“I agree with the founders comments, but their supposed staff was not present when they were needed most: to control the crowds and get everyone back on a shuttle home as quickly and as safely as possible,” Lambert said in an email to the Review-Journal.

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.

AWG Ambassador, the bus company RiSE hired, has worked for other large-scale Las Vegas Valley events such as Electric Daisy Carnival.

The delay was caused by bottle-necked buses: Every time a bus would enter the event’s turnaround bus route, crowds would surge toward the pick-up point. Because of that, buses had to push further into the opposite lane, making it impossible for the next bus to get off of the road and turn around until the first bus left.

Some RiSE attendees were so frustrated with the delays that they reportedly walked the five to six miles back to their hotels.

There was no communication between organizers and visitors, Ward said. Attendees were left in the dark about direction, adding that it was not even clear where the official bus line was. That was when attendees, many of them with children, became agitated and when some yelling occurred, Ward said.

AWG used out-of-state buses whose contracts “timed out” at 11 p.m., Hill said. Crowds stood watching as empty buses left the event because their contracts had expired.

“When we recognized AWG did not have an appropriate amount buses or manpower on site, we authorized law enforcement to help us source more buses,” RiSE’s Sunday statement said.

“The intention is to make this an annual event,” Hill said, “but our immediate concern is dealing with last night’s event.”

Hill said he believes the lantern-lighting itself, which started at 8:30 p.m. and went on for about two hours, made for a wonderful event. “But clearly we have some logistical issues to work through,” he said.

The release of the lanterns was something “you need to experience,” Ward said. She described it as a feeling of letting go. “We would like to see them come back, but they have to be more organized.”

Review-Journal writers Ricardo Torres and Annalise Little contributed to this report.

Contact Kimber Laux at klaux@reviewjournal.com or 702-383-0381. Find her on Twitter: @lauxkimber