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Festival No 6 apologises over car park flood “ordeal”
By Andy Malt | Published on Tuesday 20 September 2016
The founder of Festival No 6 has apologised to ticketholders who were left stranded when a nearby river burst its banks, flooding the event’s car park.
Held in the quirky village of Portmeirion in Wales, the festival operates a park and ride scheme, with cars parking at the rugby club in nearby Porthmadog. Although organisers say that they had assessed the site for any risk of flooding beforehand and deemed it unlikely to be an issue, extremely bad weather meant that around 200 people had to seek shelter in a leisure centre over night, while they waited for their cars to be towed out of the mud.
In the wake of various accusations levelled at the festival, and a call for a public inquiry by the local council, organiser Gareth Cooper said in a new statement: “The weather we experienced this year at Festival No 6 was extreme to say the least and it was certainly our most challenging festival to date. The consequent ordeal faced by people at the park and ride was awful and for that we are truly sorry”.
Both Natural Resources Wales and Gwynedd Council have claimed that the festival was warned of the flooding risk prior to the event, but Cooper insisted “we had no way of knowing this would happen”.
He continued: “Despite the rumours and unfounded accusations flying around, we had no way of knowing this would happen and had no warning to that effect until the flood was literally in progress. Why would we knowingly risk people’s property and our reputation? It simply makes no sense”.
In response to complaints by some of those affected about a lack of contact over claims for compensation, he added: “Large scale claims like this can take a while to resolve – we have worked around the clock to push this through at no small cost to ourselves and hopefully we have reached a conclusion in record time that will satisfy everyone affected”.
If only the car parks of Festival No 6 and Boomtown could have been combined this year, all that water could have cancelled out all that fire, and everyone’s festival season would have been much happier.
