The idiom ‘Don’t Play With Fire’ doesn’t just apply to people, it should also apply to the grand pyrotechnics of music festivals.
Just take a look at the rogue flare that disrupted Vampire Weekend’s New Year’s set at the recent Falls Festival, and now there’s news of another fiery festival incident.
A Colombian music festival whose three-day run was brought to a disastrous conclusion last Sunday (5th January) after four patrons suffered minor injuries from a fireworks malfunction.
The Summerland dance music festival, held in Cartagena on the Colombian north coast, played host to a 40+ sized bill of DJs and electronic acts, including Afrojack, Armin Van Buuren, Nervo, and Dash Berlin, while Dutch house music producer Nicky Romero being the penultimate act on the final day of the EDM event.
Romero’s late night set was interrupted, as fan footage shows, by a part of the main stage rigging catching fire after a fireworks display malfunctioned and triggered the blaze, as Contact Music reports.
Nicky Romero, who was performing on the eve of of his 25th birthday, was forced to cut his set short so that festival staff could deal with the fire. The Dutchman was unharmed by the fire, but some of his contemporaries weren’t so fortunate.
Electronic duo Wolfpack and DJ Dimitri Vegas, who was set to close the festival from 1am with his musical partner Like Mike, were onstage at the time of the botched firework incident and members of their entourage were injured as a result of the blaze, as revealed in a series of tweets.
“Half my crew & [Wolf Pack] got impact burns all over their bodies & 2 even got rocketexplosion on the ear (sic),” tweeted Dimitri Vegas.
Despite the incident and injuries, organisers pushed ahead with the final act of the night, local DJ Moska, who returned to the main stage after the fire was extinguished.
The botched fireworks display wasn’t the only issue at the three-day dance music event. According to reports from Colombian media, more than 100 people required medical treatment on the opening date of the festival due to ill effects allegedly caused by illicit drugs.
Cartagena City official Mary Velez told El Tiempo that “in areas arranged for emergency care more than a hundred people were treated for consuming hallucinogenic substances or a combination of drinks with pills were recorded.”
Summerland Festival promoter Javier Alfonso Guevara has disputed these claims however. “Not all of the intoxications were due to hallucinogens,” Mr Guevara told El Universal. “Many people who came to medical treatment points did so because of dehydration, because they were moving constantly and had not ingested the necessary liquids.”
