Courtesy of Insomniac Events
It was night 1 of Insomniac’s two-day Nocturnal Wonderland festival in Southern California when the event company’s CEO Pasquale Rotella got the call.
One of his event partners from EDC Orlando was working with the Love and Life Foundation charitable organization to bring resources and supplies to the Bahamian victims of Hurricane Dorian. The storm caused $7 million in damages, killed at least 56 people, with 600 still missing, and left at least 70,000 people homeless. About 13,000 homes were destroyed, equating to 45 percent of the homes on the islands of Abacos and Grand Bahama, but that didn’t account for the remaining homes left unlivable by flooding, mold and destructive winds.
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The Orlando contact knew Insomniac used high-grade shelters called Shiftpods to create safe and comfortable camp sites at its flagship Electric Daisy Carnival in Las Vegas. Love and Life Foundation hoped to get the maker contact in order to erect similar communities for the displaced. Rotella said he’d do one better and send nearly 1,000 Camp EDC Shiftpod2 Advanced Shelter Systems to the Bahamas immediately, as well as a team of Insomniac employees to help instruct Bahamians on how to use them.
Now, it’s asking dance music fans to help in the cause by raising $100,000 for Bahamian residents in a GoFundMe.
“Pasquale, if you know anything about him, has got probably the biggest heart I’ve ever seen in my entire life,” says Insomniac’s executive director of production, Alyxzander Bear. “He didn’t say ‘How much is it going to cost?’ or ‘What’s the impact on Vegas?’ He just said, ‘Send them a thousand shift pods.'”
Bear was a head staffer on the ground. He wrapped Nocturnal Wonderland on Sunday night and flew straight to Opa Locka airport in south Florida to meet truckloads of Shiftpods for transport. He and the team arrived in the Bahamas’ Marsh Harbor with supplies on Monday, and though he’s seen some “really gnarly situations,” including war-torn areas of Beirut and Southwest Africa, what he found on the islands was mind-numbing.
“This reminds me of the photographs of Nagasaki or Hiroshima,” he says. “I saw satellite pictures of the neighborhoods before the hurricane. It’s lush jungle and beautiful neighborhoods, and what I’m looking at is buildings are gone. Homes are gone down to the foundations. Trees are stripped, there’s only a few twigs left. It looked literally like the end of the world.”
Hurricane Dorian was classified as a Category 5 storm, only because there is no classification for a Category 6. It was the strongest storm to ever hit the Bahamian islands with sustained winds of 185 mph. It made direct contact with the Bahamas, meaning the eye of its storm struck the land, which in turn means the island was hit by the front end of the storm and the more damaging winds of the back end. The storm hovered over the island for two days.
“I saw full-on metal ships and expensive yachts pulled out of the water [that settled] two and three blocks away, upside down,” Bear says. “Floodwaters came up to 6 feet in some areas, and everything that was loose came up with that water, including the sewage … there were cars in every conceivable direction. It looked like someone had put something in a giant jar, shook it and then rolled it out like you would play dice or something.”
Bear and the team immediately set to constructing a series of fully functioning family shelter communities, exactly as they would with EDC Las Vegas camp facilities. Each pod is measured with a 12.5-square-foot base with a height of 6.5 feet. Pods are designed for harsh conditions with seven-layer insulation and total black-out capabilities when zipped closed. It can sustain winds of about 60 to 70 mph, which would mean they’d have to be taken down in the case of another hurricane, but it takes about four minutes to construct or deconstruct, leaving families plenty of time to prepare at least that much.
One pod can fit six people, and while family sizes will fluctuate, Insomniac staff estimates that about 5,000 people can find shelter in these communities. With funds raised by music lovers like you, Insomniac hopes to outfit the area with miles of artificial turf as well as food services, entertainment, on-site medical locations, sanitation and shower units, and working electricity.
“Everything that we do at EDC is essential to what they need on the ground,” Bear says. “We’ve got 100 percent expertise in that, and we create a safe environment for our attendees. It’s so essential because these people can’t go in what’s left of their homes if they have them. They’re completely unlivable even if they were standing. They’ve got to have something to live in for the next six months, a year or whatever it’s going to take for the government and the other NGO people to put something together.”
Bear returned to the United States after a couple days on the ground, but Insomniac’s mission to help the Bahamian people is far from over. The company now asks its “headliner community” of festival fans and attendees to help raise $100,000 in a specialized GoFundMe. Money raised will go toward purchasing generators, water purification devices, bedding, toiletries and other supplies for sustainable living.
By press time, the GoFundMe has raised $12,343.
“These people lost everything,” Bear says. “It’s going to take decades for this to recover if ever the way it was.”
Donate to the Insomniac Cares Bahamas Relief fund now.