Planning for the National Folk Festival.
Sep. 11th, 2007 10:11 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
dalesqlI'm goign to be attending and working on the National Folk Festival in Richmond, VA next month. For the non-folkies reading this, imagine a really big science fiction convtion. It attacted people in costumes, people selling stuff, there is arts and crafts on display, performances and exhibitions and food vendors.
Except instead of being in a hotel or convention center, it's all outdoors. Attendance will comfortably exceed 100,000 people. And it's all free, open to the public. This will be the third and last year the national Folk Festival will be in Richmond. It will be wending it's way to Butte, Montana, for a three year tour, then on to another place after that.
We come in, set up tents. Lots of tents. Biiiiig tents. Then stages get built in the big tents. I'm one of the lead electricians for the festival. We got to bring in generators for the places we don't have electricity available, and bring power to all those tents. All 200 or so of them. Then, of course, they will need lights too. Set them up, plug them in, replace all the blown bulbs, and move on to the next tent. Oh yeah, gotta put lights in the portapotties, people(mostly guys) can't aim in the dark, and the ladies like to be able to see if they need to wipe the seat down. There are 200 or so portapotties around the site. More extension cords and poking christmas tree lights through the vent grids of the portapotties. Hopefully we get to them before they start to get used.
The beer garden has a fence around it. They want rope lights strung alond the top of the fence so that the guards can watch to see if people are passing beers out to their underage friends. Can you put some floodlights on that pathway, it's awfully dark at night there. And it all has to be put in, in such a way as to not pose a hazard to the public, and all be picked back up again and packed away for next year.
Oh yeah, you need to run the phone lines too. Couple over to the office trailer here. Some more over to the CD sales tents for their credit card machines, and one up to that stage at the other end of the site so a radio station can do a live broadcast.
By the way, can you go run the water line for the food vendors. It's in the back of that truck, no not the pickup truck, all those spools of black PVC pipe in the box truck. Oh, I forgot to mention that the pipe run is 2400 feet long? oops.
It's a blast. I'll be volunteering again next year.
www.nationalfolkfestival.com
Except instead of being in a hotel or convention center, it's all outdoors. Attendance will comfortably exceed 100,000 people. And it's all free, open to the public. This will be the third and last year the national Folk Festival will be in Richmond. It will be wending it's way to Butte, Montana, for a three year tour, then on to another place after that.
We come in, set up tents. Lots of tents. Biiiiig tents. Then stages get built in the big tents. I'm one of the lead electricians for the festival. We got to bring in generators for the places we don't have electricity available, and bring power to all those tents. All 200 or so of them. Then, of course, they will need lights too. Set them up, plug them in, replace all the blown bulbs, and move on to the next tent. Oh yeah, gotta put lights in the portapotties, people(mostly guys) can't aim in the dark, and the ladies like to be able to see if they need to wipe the seat down. There are 200 or so portapotties around the site. More extension cords and poking christmas tree lights through the vent grids of the portapotties. Hopefully we get to them before they start to get used.
The beer garden has a fence around it. They want rope lights strung alond the top of the fence so that the guards can watch to see if people are passing beers out to their underage friends. Can you put some floodlights on that pathway, it's awfully dark at night there. And it all has to be put in, in such a way as to not pose a hazard to the public, and all be picked back up again and packed away for next year.
Oh yeah, you need to run the phone lines too. Couple over to the office trailer here. Some more over to the CD sales tents for their credit card machines, and one up to that stage at the other end of the site so a radio station can do a live broadcast.
By the way, can you go run the water line for the food vendors. It's in the back of that truck, no not the pickup truck, all those spools of black PVC pipe in the box truck. Oh, I forgot to mention that the pipe run is 2400 feet long? oops.
It's a blast. I'll be volunteering again next year.
www.nationalfolkfestival.com
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no subject
Date: 2007-09-12 04:30 am (UTC)That's the key! Big fun, lots of satisfaction.
What a lot to keep track of. How big a team do you have doing all that electrical work?
no subject
Date: 2007-09-14 02:20 am (UTC)But there is a *lot* of lugging. A fifty foot length of 4/0 feeder cable weighs something like 100-150 pounds, and each circuit of it requires five separate pieces of it laying out in parallel. And few of our cable runs are as short as 50 feet.
Are we still on for coming out and rewiring your garden saturday? I'll probably be out there after lunchtime. My usual saturday routine involves sleeping in to make up sleep deficit from the week, and I don't recall how long a drive it is out there. Also, directions please. I had them once, but my e-mail crash has left my E-life in disarray.