Heavy rains deprive the Wacken metal festival of a third of its spectators

Weighed down by terrible weather, the Wacken Open Air, the biggest metal music festival in the world, started on Wednesday in the mud. Only 60% of the initially planned fans were allowed to join this small municipality in Schleswig-Holstein. The conditions forced the organizers to cap arrivals: around 50,000 visitors, according to the police, were able to be welcomed on the site while 85,000 tickets were sold for this event which was to be held at a sold-out audience.

“We are very sad, but the still difficult weather situation unfortunately leaves us no other choice,” the organizers wrote on their website, speaking of a decision unprecedented since the creation of the festival in 1989. The persistent rains have transformed the 405 hectares of fields and pastures into a gigantic pool of mud. Tractors are deployed on the site to tow the cars to their parking lot and prevent them from getting stuck. The arrivals of metalheads had been stopped on Tuesday. “For the fans already there, we will do our best to ensure that the festival takes place as announced,” they wrote. Scheduled for August 2-5, the festival known as W:O:A is set to host 150 bands on eight different stages, headlined by British legend Iron Maiden, American thrash metal band Megadeth or folk punk band Dropkick Murphys.

Wearing rubber boots, protected by raincoats, the fans mostly kept smiling, beer in hand, making their way through the slush. On the festival's Facebook site, Lene Fuchs, who arrived on Monday, confides her "enormous luck" to be there. The organizers "are really doing a great job", says the young woman, living in Germany, while hundreds of annoyed fans have had to turn back after hours in endless traffic jams. After amounts of rain "about 40 liters per square meter in the last 24 hours", according to the organizers, the forecast for the duration of the event is not much better, thunderstorms being announced. In keeping with tradition, the festival opens with a concert by the Wacken Volunteer Fire Department.

It is also planned to pay tribute to "Lemmy" Kilmister, the former British singer of Motorhead, who died at the end of 2015, and part of whose ashes were transported to the festival grounds. "The tickets will be refunded, it's very clear," assured Thomas Jensen, co-founder of the festival, in an interview with the public channel NDR, specifying that the teams were working on the modalities. “We will find a solution, but all that is yet to come. We are also very sorry."