Chapter 12 - Mass Gathering Events: Music Concerts and Festivals

Summary

While all mass gatherings create significant challenges for delivering optimal medical care, music concerts and festivals engender additional concerns ranging from a higher likelihood of toxicological, topographical, meteorological and sociological risks to additional threats from violence, injury and even food-borne illness. Locating patients can pose challenges among packed audiences in the dark and din of massive crowds and blaring entertainment. Multi-day music-related festivals, particularly those including on-site overnight camping, can pose additional and often escalating risks day-by-day.

Planning risk assessments can be multi-variate and dynamic in nature. Medical planners may first tailor plans based on historical experiences, evolving new intelligence or even developing external threats, but available tools for calculating risk for each type of threat can better quantify concerns and justify additional funding and resources for the best possible medical care and health security. Beyond basic considerations such as estimated crowd size and density, location of the venue, and event-specific medical considerations, mass gathering medicine clinicians and planners need to navigate some variable considerations including climate, weather, type of event, specific site structures, the organizers’ expectations and even typically unanticipated types of events such as terrorism, stampedes, contaminated food and some previously-unrecognized lethal drugs being passed around to attendees.