A huge fire at the Unite With Tomorrowland Music Festival in Barcelona, Spain, forced the evacuation of nearly 22,000 concert-goers and incinerated the festival's main event stage, government officials said Sunday.
The Saturday night fire consumed the large outdoor stage at the Tomorrowland EDM festival held at Parc de Can Zam. Twelve firefighting units needed around an hour to extinguish the flames just before midnight.
Firefighters said they were investigating the cause. Tomorrowland published a statement on Facebook saying the "stage caught fire due to a technical malfunction."
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Barcelona firefighters said there were no serious injuries during the evacuation but the event's private security treated 20 people for minor injuries or anxiety.
Video images show the fire starting at the top of a tall temporary structure erected on the stage where a large screen showed a performer singing. The towering flames quickly spread until they engulfed the entire stage.
In a statement, regional authorities said the fire "completely destroyed the stage" and that its charred remains "run the risk of collapsing."
The festival in Barcelona was one of several international offshoots of the main Tomorrowland festival in Belgium. Organizers said the Barcelona event was canceled following the fire. Other venues continued the worldwide festival on Sunday.
The Tomorrowland festival series is directly tied to the TomorrowWorld Music Festivals held in September 2013 through 2015 in Chattahoochee Hills.
In 2013, organizers of the original Tomorrowland festivals in Belgium wanted to create an American spin-off of their wildly successful electronic dance music festival series. The south Fulton County location was selected because of its resemblance to the rolling hills of Belgium near Antwerp, where Tomorrowland is traditionally held each year.
More than 300 EDM artists were signed to play the three-day weekend at the end of September 2013, before more than 140,000 visitors at was viewed as a wildly successful festival. More than 30,000 visitors stayed at a makeshift campground on-site. The following year, attendance grew to more than 150,000.
The weekend the festival was held in September 2015, severe thunderstorms and torrential rains pelted much of Georgia on the second day of the festival, turning the grounds in and around the venue into a muddy mess. The roads leading into and out of the venue were difficult to navigate at best, given that some of them were not passable or washed out due to torrential rains and rising flood waters.
Many concert-goers who had not already made arrangements to camp on-site were stranded without accommodations. In addition, for those who were able to hike the several miles to a main road, exorbitant taxi and Uber prices back to Atlanta were the order of the day.
Concert organizers limited the third day of the festival only to those who had remained on-site, and that refunds would be provided to those who experienced transportation problems, or who had purchased tickets for the third day and would not be able to attend.
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After the problems experienced by visitors in 2015, followed by the bankruptcy of concert promoter SFX Entertainment the following February, the 2016 edition of TomorrowWorld was canceled.
Tomorrowland has remained a solid presence in Europe and continues to host a presence in Brazil with its Tomorrowland Brasil festivals. In addition, its Unite With Tomorrowland series of festivals has provided venues in other nations.
According to messages from its official Reddit message board, Tomorrowland does indeed plan to resume its Tomorrowland Brasil festival in 2018 and has said it may resume TomorrowWorld in the Chattahoochee Hills venue either 2018 or 2019.
