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Leaked emails show many red flags raised ahead of disastrous Fyre Festival event

By | Published on Tuesday 6 June 2017

Fyre Festival

Following claims from some ex-staffers at the failed Fyre Festival that management of the disastrous event had plenty of warning of the calamity ahead, Mic has got its hands on thousands of emails sent between people working on the festival confirming that many red flags were raised in the weeks and days before kick off.

Co-founder Billy McFarland and Fyre Media President Conall Arora are included in many of the conversations and seemingly ignored the warnings.

Email exchanges already published by Mic include concerns being raised about accommodation on the island in the Bahamas where Fyre was due to take place, and a conversation about the costs associated with providing enough toilets for festival-goers. In the latter conversation, Arora asks one team member to reduce the costs of toilet provision, linking to websites which he said offered cheaper solutions.

His colleague then responds: “Please keep in mind those are calculations for events lasting eight to ten hours with portapotties in grassy fields. This is a ‘luxury’ campsite where people will be using this as [their] only source of relief for five consecutive days. Ultimately it’s 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”.

Arora then responds by asking his colleague to continue to find cheaper solutions, also noting that, surely fewer toilets would just mean longer queues.

Another set of emails, sent just a week before the first weekend of the luxury festival was due to take place, discusses accommodation issues, at one point apparently stating that up to 593 of the people due to attend the event could not be housed. A consultant working on the festival proposed renting a cruise ship to house 225 people and suggested management hire more locally-based staff to reduce the number of employees that needed to be put up.

He also suggested that some ticketholders for the first weekend of the event be asked to attend the second weekend instead and that the social media influencers who had played such a key role in promoting the festival be warned to expect accommodation much more basic than they had been promised.

Mic is now working its way through the mountain of emails that have been leaked to it, which have apparently been verified as genuine by multiple ex-Fyre employees. No doubt the contents of the emails will be of much interest to the plethora of ticket-buyers and suppliers already suing the Fyre companies, and founders McFarland and Ja Rule.



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