Permit hopes rise with lantern festival test launch

JEAN — Promoters of the RiSE Festival cleared one of their last hurdles Tuesday night with the successful test launch of dozens of sky lanterns before an audience of public lands officials.

Bureau of Land Management staff plans to issue festival co-founder Dan Hill and his Salt Lake City-based outfit a permit allowing 10,000 paying customers to release 20,000 of the flaming lanterns Oct. 18 on a dry lake bed, 35 miles south of Las Vegas.

BLM spokeswoman Kirsten Cannon said Tuesday, “Our goal is still to release 200 lanterns tonight, but based on the 36 so far, we feel the permit will be issued by the end of the week.”

“It’s unbelievable. This is so beautiful,” Hill, 34, said as the first sky lanterns ascended into the darkness at 6:30 p.m., hours after a stagnant, overcast sky had covered the barren Jean dry lake bed for most of the day. At launch time there was a 6 mph westerly wind that carried the lanterns to the edge of the lake bed as the flames went out. If winds exceed 10 mph, lantern launching will be curtailed until the winds subside, Cannon said.

“So far all of the lanterns have come down cold to the touch,” Hill said.

The festival is billed as an experience for participants to enjoy an evening of music and renewed hope, with missives about dreams and wishes carried on lanterns that are expected to rise to about 1,000 feet before their fuel blocks of wax and cellophane expire after 6½ minutes.

But some who weighed in on the BLM’s environmental assessment expressed concerns about fire hazards and litter.

Possible interference with air traffic on the approach to McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas was a concern at the onset of the planning process. But after the Federal Aviation Administration got involved, the BLM and promoters “addressed all our concerns,” FAA spokesman Ian Gregor said. The FAA issued a letter Sept. 10 concluding that the project poses no unacceptable risk.

A finding by the BLM of no significant impact cleared up other concerns that had been expressed earlier about the possibility of sky lanterns landing on Interstate 15, and igniting wildfires. It also addressed worries about copycats who would want to release sky lanterns, “which could result in increased, human-caused wildfires on BLM public lands,” according to the assessment.

A Florida man who commented on the plan, Tom Pitchford, said the event and others like it raise global issues such as litter and fire hazards.

“My experience is that collision between one or more lanterns on ascent is a factor in failure leading to early descent where the fuel cell may still be lit,” Pitchford wrote in his comments to the BLM.

A website, balloonsblow.org, also bemoans the use of sky lanterns, saying, “Please don’t let flaming litter fly. … Sky lanterns fall back to Earth as harmful litter. Even things marketed as ‘biodegradable’ should not be released into the environment.”

Hill counters the notion of litter, saying, “Our mantra has always been leave it better than we found it.”

He said cleanup crews will search a 3-mile area much larger than where the lanterns are expected to fall down on the lake bed. “Our goal is to pull away as much litter as lanterns.”

Hill said the actual flight time is 4 minutes, 30 seconds because it take two minutes after ignition to fill the bag that makes each lantern rise.

After two years of planning, this is Hill’s production company’s first event, although it helped with an event in Thailand last year.

For tickets ranging from $50 to $79, event guests get a yoga mat and two sky lanterns to release. The event is almost sold out, Hill said, with only 600 of the higher-priced tickets left.

He said about $120,000 goes directly to the BLM primarily for its labor, equipment and administrative costs associated with the test launch and preparing the environmental assessment.

“They have a standard fee based on ticket sales,” he said. Another $200,000 was spent on engineering for the sky lanterns.