Man, the Fyre Festival really is the gift that keeps on giving. Every moment you think the revelations are done, and that there was nothing else to learn from this utterly disastrous ‘Hunger Games for rich Instagram models’ situation, it manages to provide more and more. At this point I really cannot imagine next year’s festival happening. I know. Big call.
Today’s revelation is the fact that – shock horror – the organisers might have had an inkling that the entire thing was about to go to shit. Mic obtained a stack of internal emails which point to an operation that was very much in the toilet long before the rich, bronzed Insta-teens caught so much as a glance of their terrible hell island.
It’s seriously a cringe nightmare reading through these threads – many of which centred around the organisers’ vain attempts to work out how many toilets and showers they needed to accommodate an estimated 2,500 people. Fyre Festival president Conall Arora was really not keen on the estimated $400,000 it would take to ship bathroom facilities over to the island.
He argues with Lyly Villanueva, executive producer of the festival, about trying to halve the number of bathrooms. “If we cut it in half, we would just have double the line wait? I’m seeing some sites that say we could get away with 75 toilets,” he said in an email, linking to several sites to back up his claim.
His brainstorm wasn’t well received, with Villanueva pointing out that those calculations were for portaloos for music festival events which only lasted a few hours:
Please keep in mind those are calculations are for events lasting 8-10 hours with portapotties in grassy fields. This is a ‘luxury’ campsite where people will be using this as [their] only source of relief for 5 consecutive days […] Ultimately its your call, but please consider the backlash of nasty bathrooms and showers. We have to move quick on this or we are in a shitty place, lol. Sorry.
The portaloo problem was one of the biggest issues attendees had with the festival, with a lawsuit filed in May by Matthew Herlihy and Anthony Lauriello pointing out the serious lack of bathroom amenities.
Another email points out severe housing shortages, with organisers coming to the realisation that about 593 people – including staff, security and attendees – would literally not have any kind of accommodation. Any. They planned to jettison a few hundred of the ‘lowest paying’ attendees purely so they would have room to fit basic staff.
Overall… very good. You can read the full leaked emails over at Mic.
Source: Mic.
Photo: Instagram.
