“It has never been as bad as this year,” says Lukas Wilkes. The 30-year-old lives in Gribbohm, a 500-strong community near Wacken, and looks out of his window directly onto a parking lot at the world’s largest heavy metal festival.
It has been raining in the Steinburg district for days, almost continuously and sometimes torrentially. The organizers of the festival therefore pulled the emergency brake on Monday: Those who can should refrain from traveling to Wacken early and look for temporary accommodation on the way until the situation has improved (stern reported).
Because the soil of the fields on which around 85,000 visitors are to camp are completely sodden. “The water is on the meadows and doesn’t seep away,” says Wilkes, who, as a resident, is allowed onto the site free of charge and got an idea of the situation on site. “In some places you sink so deep in the mud that you walk into your rubber boots from above.” Only some of the camping areas are located a little higher, where the water runs off to some extent.
“Because of the extremely high rainfall, we may not be able to use all of the planned camping areas later,” write the organizers. “So that all metalheads can find accommodation, we ask you to use and fill the available areas as well as possible.”
But first the visitors have to get to the site at all. “Around 20 kilometers around Wacken, traffic has almost completely come to a standstill,” describes Wilkes, based on descriptions from acquaintances. As a result, villagers sometimes have to accept considerable detours or plan significantly more time to go about their everyday lives. The police spoke in a first interim report of a “traffic chaos”. Wilkes himself has withdrawn to his home office for the duration of the festival. The volume of traffic has increased in recent years and the 30-year-old suspects that this is contributing to the fact that significantly more music fans are now traveling with mobile homes or trailers than in the past. “There used to be more camping.”
In order to help those who made it to Wacken on the festival grounds, farmers from the region are in constant use, sometimes for 20 hours. They use tractors to pull the vehicles one by one onto the muddy areas. Festival-goers should arrive in Wacken already with the towing eyes screwed on.
Despite all the adversities that the Wacken Open Air 2023 has brought with it so far, the mood is good, says Wilkes – among visitors and residents. “Anyone who has made it to Gribbohm knows that they will be on site in an hour or two.”
In any case, the days of the festival are a very special time for the locals every year – this year there is also extreme rain. Residents provided those arriving with coffee or parking spaces and made it possible for them to go to the toilet, and many people also offered music fans temporary accommodation via social networks. Meanwhile, the organizers of the festival are convinced: “Together we can do it again this year.” And Wilkes says, typically North German: “Everyone makes the best of the situation.”
