Safe and sound - how we had Glastonbury Festival covered
Working behind the scenes
Every year Glastonbury Festival brings hundreds of thousands of people to Somerset to enjoy five days of music, arts and entertainment. Behind the scenes, our teams are working to keep those people safe. Assistant Chief Fire Officer Gerald Taylor writes about the work that goes on before and during the festival.
The Pilton Palais
More than seven million BBC viewers watched Elton John play live at this year’s Glastonbury Festival, with the broadcaster reporting that more than 21.6 million people tuned in to their overall coverage during the festival weekend.
It is little surprise then that Devon and Somerset Rescue Service’s activity on site, however small, was newsworthy.
The incident that made news was a projector fire in a cinema tent at a venue known as the Pilton Palais. The reason it wasn’t a bigger news story was due to the hard work that goes into making the festival safe.
The fire itself could have been far worse had it not been for a fire point next to the projector room, and stewards trained on how to use the extinguisher equipment.
Planning
The planning for this year’s festival started in the autumn of 2022, and ramped up through 2023. The licence for the festival, which is agreed through the new Somerset Council, requires the Service to approve the festival’s Fire Safety Plan, Major Incident Plan, Command and Control Plan, Crowd Dynamics Plan, Campsite Plan, and its Venues Plan.
This level of detailed planning and engagement, also building in the 2022 debriefing lessons, ensure that we have full understanding of the significant risk presented by a festival that has a licence for 210,000 people. That is 100,000 more than Exeter’s population, on a farm, in Somerset. To illustrate it further: Glastonbury Festival is a city roughly the same size as Southampton and Aberdeen.
Our plans are designed to mitigate the risks posed by the festival, not only on Worthy Farm, but also the Service’s business as usual. We ensure that the resources on site are appropriate but also proportionate.
To make sure the plans set out in the licence are complied with, we have a small team of business safety officers who inspect the festival venues before the site opens to the public, and then again during performances (which means working late and walking miles!).
It is this work that ensured that the arrangements that worked so effectively at the Pilton Palais incident are in place.
We visit a huge variety of sites, ranging from pop-up market stalls to the Pyramid Stage itself, which is not that glamorous from the rear!
Safety and incident prevention
It’s also important that we get safety messages to festival-goers too, and our prevention and communications and engagement teams work in the background to develop safety messaging designed around previous festivals’ incident data that was shared on ours and the festival’s social media channels, as well as on screens around the site.
We have also had members of the prevention team on site. Our teams also spent time engaging with the Gipsy and Traveller communities who arrive on Worthy Farm in the spring to help prepare the fields for the festival.
Additionally, the Yeovil prevention team took a chip pan demonstrator unit all over Worthy Farm, teaching fire safety to many of those working in the markets, food stalls, and entertainment venues.
Collaboration
The response plans are a collaborative arrangement with Glastonbury Fire Safety Ltd who provide that important first level of response, and crew the Fire Desk in the Event Control Centre, and our own team of Marauding Terrorist Attack (MTA) firefighters from Clyst St George.
The command and control element of the festival is based in the high-tech Event Control Centre (ECC) and operates 24/7 starting before the festival opens and ending long after everyone has packed their tents and left.
The early news from the festival organisers is that the 2023 event was a great success, with very positive feedback for the collaborative fire and rescue plans and response.
I would like to thank the small team involved with the festival this year. I know how hard they worked and it is highly valued by the festival organisers.
The festival will be returning next year and so the planning starts again soon.
Gerald Taylor
Assistant Chief Fire Officer and Director of Service Delivery