An EDM festival in Pennsylvania, US has been likened to the infamous Fyre Festival.
Elements Music & Arts Festival, which took place from Friday (September 3) to Monday (September 6), has been described as a “shit show” that is alleged to have left people without basic necessities including water and prevented ticket-holders from ever entering the site despite queuing for hours.
Unlike Fyre Festival, a fraudulent 2017 festival that landed its co-founder in jail, however, the event did run its live performances including from Diplo and Bonobo.
NME has reached out to the organisers of Elements for comment.
Also no access to water, bathrooms, or food in those 14 hours of waiting. We also had to walk a mile to a shuttle spot.
— Hippydippycakes (@kimmycake) September 5, 2021
As EDM.com has reported, many festival-goers reportedly faced “crippling logistical issues and an alarming lack of organisation” when they turned up for the weekend.
A Facebook group titled “Elements Shit Show 2021” was launched at the beginning of the event as people began to discover alarming faults in the running of the festival.
Some of the claims made in the group read as follows: “Since the festival was prohibiting fires, propane grills or camping stoves into the festival, food vendors started running out of food by Friday evening. Since they were also prohibiting anyone to bring more than ‘2 gallons of sealed water’ into the grounds, the lines at the water refill stations stayed borderline inaccessible the whole weekend.”
Another wrote: “Never seen more shit everywhere literally someone pooped next to my car almost stepped in it leaving also people kept shitting on all the toilet seats like it was an activity.”
A Twitter user who filmed a clip of people waiting in long queues wrote: “absolute shit show we waited over 10 hours and never got in.”
absolute shit show we waited over 10 hours and never got in pic.twitter.com/Vtvxwg5k6L
— 𝖋𝖆𝖎𝖗𝖞 ࿐ ˚ . ✦ (@ifakeitsoreal) September 5, 2021
A ticket-holder wrote on the Facebook group: “On top of literally everything we all went through, let’s take a moment to talk about the staff riding around on their golf carts, with empty wagons/trailers behind it literally laughing at everyone struggling and taking pictures of us and saying ‘ha ha good luck guys’.”
EDM.com added that the festival grounds in Wayne County suffered a storm before the event. There has also been speculation that the festival was oversubscribed thanks to the last-minute cancellation of Bonnaroo.