Festival goers experienced the worst queue yet in BoomTownFair music festival as the people lined up moving forward in an average of 20 meters per two hours. The chaos caused visitors to be angry and the tiresome queue resulted to complain and controversies directed to the organizers and town officers. BoomTown Fairs are popular since it was founded on 2009, with charity efforts and workshops for children aside from the music shows for all genres.
On August 10, the first day of the said festival was faced with technical problems involving their ticket scanner as reported by The Guardian. But the problem arose when the gates were opened three hours behind schedule, in which the organizers explained for the slippery conditions in the area. With the slow movement of people able to go in, it took almost 7 hours to wait in line, due to the manual identification of tickets.
People said that the hot weather that day at the Matterley Estate in Hampshire was coupled with a lot of people in one place causing great distress to most of them. Water and toilet facilities were made available in an announcement by the official BoomTown Fair account in Twitter as reported by Independent. However, these are all accessible only upon entry to the gates which were the first thing the people confronted on that day.
In response to the untoward situation, water bottles were springing from everywhere just so a lot of people can get hold on it and that Hampshire police is already assisting the organizers to control the crowd. However, for those who arrived early or before the gates were opened, the lines had no barriers between to organize the queue and there were already fights among them. Nevertheless, some festival goers patiently waited for their turn and went through the tight security process.