Melanie Diaz and her friend Antonia Salazar said they were looking forward to Saturday night at the Stagecoach Country Music Festival because the middle of the three-day event typically calls for a good time, and festivalgoers are more willing to let loose.
However, this Stagecoach Saturday had different plans for the two friends traveling from Studio City.
At 7:46 p.m., attendees received a shelter-in-place notification, but then the stage monitors flashed to a red screen with a message directing everyone to the nearest emergency exits due to severe winds.
“I was disappointed when they started telling us to leave because Saturday is literally the best day every time we come out here,” Salazar said.
The two cowgirls held on to their hats and slowly made their way through the rest of the crowd, inching toward the parking lots and shuttle locations, but before they got back to their cars, they received another app notification telling them to hang tight and that the fest was back on.
“It was really annoying because security was pushing us all out,” Salzar said, “and by the time we got close to our car, we had to turn all the way around.”
“We were annoyed but low-key happy we could come back and that Pitbull still played because we really wanted to see him when we found out he was going to be here,” Diaz said.
Diaz added that there was still a sizable crowd for everything that had occurred, especially late at the Miami-based rapper’s set.
Jessica Lin of Orange said that when she first saw the evacuation signs, she was confused, and it took her a little while to get moving, but she was able to shelter in place on her way out. She then got the notification that the festival would resume, but she was still confused about what that meant for the remaining acts.
“Even though I stuck around, the schedule wasn’t released initially, and I had just been waiting around for a couple of hours,” Lin said. “I ended up leaving and then missing Pitbull, which I was bummed about because he ended up being pushed back even later to midnight, so I just didn’t know with the shuttles if I’d be able to get a ride back to my hotel if I waited for him, so I just watched him from my hotel on my phone.”
Fans like Devin Moore and his brother, Aiden, who traveled from Colorado and hoped to watch Riley Green, said they were frustrated by the evacuation and would have preferred clearer guidance on whether they could return.
The brothers couldn’t get any reception, but began getting notifications once they were already on their way out of the parking lot, only to get jammed up in traffic trying to come back in. They eventually made it back in, but by then, they saw there would be no performance by Green.
“We at least got to see him come out for one song with Lainey Wilson, which was really cool of her to do, but it doesn’t really make up for the whole headache of the whole night.” Aiden Moore said.
At Bandit’s Bandanas, merchandise was moving in both good and bad ways, according to co-founders Nichole and Connor Humphreys.
“There was like 30 minutes when it felt like chaos,” Nichole Humphreys said Sunday. “The booth was blowing over last night. The sides of our booth were just really blown back. But everyone needed a bandana, so the Bandits were flying off the shelves.”
They weren’t worried about the winds coming back on Sunday night.
“Everything’s extra tied-down,” said Connor Humphreys.
Guy Fieri’s Stagecoach Smokehouse, where pitmasters smoke meat over open flames, never posed any threat, according to Adrian Garcia, festival food and beverage director. He said the fires were put out after Fieri’s last demo on Saturday, which ended about 6 p.m.
Merchants in tents in a retail area called the Rodeo had a rough night with the wind knocking over their inventory, followed by the cleanup.
“I’ve been doing shows for 17 years now. I’ve never had winds like that,” said Julie Craig of Countryfied, based in Norco. She sells garments and home decor.
She has lived through much worse. She is a survivor of Route 91 Harvest, a 2017 country music festival in Las Vegas where a lone gunman killed 58 attendees and wounded more than 500. Craig was trapped at the venue until it was safe to evacuate.
That tragedy was followed by the Borderline Bar & Grill shootings of 2018.
Since then, fellow survivors have made their way to Craig’s stand at Stagecoach. Some of them were there when the winds came up, sending her merchandise flying. But the most damage was to the EZ Up canopy tent in the back, which she was using for storage.
“It was perfectly fine. I don’t even know what time it was. It came out of nowhere,” Craig said.
“Stuff was flying. Our EZ Up was falling apart. I had some survivors from Route 91 visiting, so they went back with my husband and started holding it down.”
“At one point, there were like a hundred hats on the ground, and I just started crying. People were stepping on them.”
She didn’t get much sleep that night, staying until 1 a.m. and then coming back at 8 a.m. But her space was restored.
The event brought back some of the trauma of Route 91.
“I think that’s why I got emotional and started crying,” she said.