ATLANTA — Backbone International, which worked with SFX Entertainment and ID&T to create an American version of ID&T’s standout Tomorrowland EDM festival in Boom, Belgium, had spent months preparing for the inaugural TomorrowWorld EDM festival to take place in Chattahoochee Hills, GA, outside Atlanta, from Sept. 26-29.
Then, just weeks before TomorrowWorld’s big debut, reports of EDM party drug overdoses started circulating, including fatalities among revelers at E-Zoo in NYC and elsewhere on the East Coast. Fears of dangerous new variant of decades-old Ecstasy — now called MDMA or Molly — prompted other EDM organizers to pull the plug on their autumn events.
TomorrowWorld’s organizers had already taken the precaution of limiting admission to those aged 21 and older, even though a large portion of EDM festival revelers elsewhere are in the 18-to-20 age bracket. The lineup of nearly 300 artists, including Calvin Harris, AfroJack, David Guetta, Steve Aoki and Armin van Buuren, still drew big crowds, however.
To help keep the crowds of up to 45,000 revelers safe, Backbone International relied on 146 meters of aluminum stage barricades from Mojo Barriers. Mojo’s crowd control professionals designed a configuration that included an unobtrusive thrust from the center of the main stage barricade line, offering added protection.
As Mojo Barriers’ project manager Jordi van Berkum noted, “a thrust works by breaking up the crowd, easing pressure, which was vital for this event where everyone was going to be dancing and moving around a lot.” He added that Mojo also deployed an additional 80 meters of barricade “to safely section off the camera platforms and front-of-house tower.”
In total, Mojo Barriers installed equipment across 20 different areas of the 3,800 festival site, which was located in the rolling hills of Bouckaert Farm along the Chattahoochee River in Georgia.
“A large part of this project was also our bar barriers,” van Berkum continued. “We installed over 315 meters for food and drink vendors alongside the main stage configuration. It was huge logistical undertaking, with the site being so spread out. Careful attention and planning was needed.”
Backbone International have since contracted Mojo Barriers’ U.S. to deliver crowd control products and services to all of its North American and Canadian ‘Sensation’ events, a global series of events bringing together dance fans — with an all-white dress code — again with some of the most prominent names in the EDM genre.
“The organizers of TomorrowWorld put a tremendous amount of effort into creating something you’ve never experienced before, with out-of-this world decor, entertainment and experiences,” van Berkum concluded. “It’s fantastic to be involved with such an exciting event and we look forward to seeing how it grows in the future, and working with them across their wider portfolio.”
