The 50th anniversary Vale Earth Fair was dramatically saved at the last minute by organisers and volunteers after high winds forced the cancellation of the event as planned at Vale Castle.
Volunteers had spent a week erecting the stages at the castle, but high winds on Saturday afternoon, with a strongest gust of 40 knots, meant they had to be taken down. And organisers then realised that they could no longer stage the event safely.
Cue frantic phone calls for a few hours and by 10pm, the event was being re-staged with its main stage at Beau Sejour and other line-ups playing from town pubs.
‘We’d been up at the castle all week putting up stages, the scaffolding, painting boards and getting all our equipment up there,’ said lead organiser Rob Roussel.
It was at around 2pm the day before the festival that he began to realise they were running into a significant issue.
‘The bar tent started moving,’ he said. ‘It became unsafe.’
The team was forced to strip down all the tents and stages they had spent the week building.
‘There just simply wasn’t going to be enough time to put it all back up. And then we had that risk of the wind getting up again this [Sunday] evening,’ he added.
Mr Roussel decided to abandon the castle and instead start piecing together a plan for how it could be relocated to safer indoor venues across town.
‘One of our biggest considerations was being able to run the full programme at the same time, pretty much as we would normally across multiple venues,’ said Mr Roussel.
He managed to get the event hosted at Beau Sejour, The Yacht, The Drunken Duck, Fermain Tavern and The Albion.
‘It was lots of phone calls, lots of favours, lots of extremely helpful people bending over backwards to help us,’ he said.
The event did lose two of its musical acts from Jersey due to ferry cancellations, and headliners The Orb were lost yesterday afternoon due to logistical issues.
Before announcing the change of plans, ticket sales had been looking promising for the event and were nearing the 1,500-mark.
Organisers knew that they would face demands for refunds and will deal with that this week.
‘We’re not going to have a clue for a while,’ said Mr Roussel, asked about the impact on the event’s fundraising.
‘We’ll be looking at refunds for people who are disgruntled and can’t make it. But we hope that most will understand. We are a charity after all.’
As the first people collected their passes for the various venues, he praised the ‘fantastic’ response from the public so far.
Long-time attendees Pete De Mouilpied and Mike Bonsall were not put off.
‘We weren’t discouraged. Far from it,’ said Mr Bonsall. ‘I think it’s amazing what they’ve been able to do. It shows the amazing spirit of the festival.’
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