Thousands of attendees purchased their tickets months in advance and continued to look forward to the Red West music festival that took place in Salt Lake City, Utah, this past weekend. With the jam-packed lineup of headliners 
Kacey Musgraves, Post Malone, and Noah Kahn, the event was completely sold out. Advertised originally as a “rain or shine” event, the attendees had no worry that the show wouldn’t go on when, the week before, a full day of rain was expected in the forecast for Saturday.
People went into Saturday expecting the same smooth sailing as Friday, performances from the morning, including Hudson Westbrook and Cameron Whitcomb set up the hype surrounding the later performers perfectly. In the middle of Ty Myer’s performance on the main stage he was told to get off stage and attendees were told to move back one hundred feet from the stage. For people who had been there securing their spot since 11am that was just not going to happen.
As the weather quickly escalated fans moved back to the 100-foot mark as the stage started to sway. That wasn’t good enough for the staff who then took barricades to move fans back even further. With plenty of buildings on the grounds no one was expecting to have to evacuate fully but when event staff made all of general admission evacuate while allowing VIP and VIP+ to stay on the grounds.
Thousands fled to their cars and sat in them for updates which were promised on the hour. When the hour came, they posted an update saying they were “optimistic” about the weather, their workers were checking the stages, and
an update would follow soon. One hour went by and then another with no update. When the University of Utah football game against ASU kicked off seven miles away fans assumed it would be fine. Finally, the remainder of the night was cancelled two hours after the previous update saying the weather was still unsafe for fans and performers.
This sparked outrage with the fans who only came for Post Malone. Majority of the one-day ticket holders flew in only for one day and were angry when it was announced all Saturday ticket holders would be allowed in Sunday sparking concerns about making the already sold-out event even busier.
Red West has yet to address ticket holders concerns about refunds for those who couldn’t attend Sunday, those who purchased Three-day tickets and essentially lost a day, and those who feel the way Red West handled the weather when advertised as a “rain or shine” event needs to have some compensation.
