Sanitizing the Crowd: Spectators Become Unwilling Participants in Biohazard Cleanup

It's festival season again, where flower crown-wearing neon lovers gather around stages to swivel their hips and lose inhibition under the bright lights and thumping bass lines. Yet it goes without saying, there's something distinctly different about this scene. A new element has introduced itself into this year's festivities. Call it goodwill, call it budget-saving creativity, call it complete blundering ineptitude; the brilliant minds behind this year's Bacchanalia Festival have astoundingly managed to confuse UV sterilization lamps for stage lights.

In what can only be described as a tragic comedy of errors, the festival attendees, sold on the promise of a brilliant light show and eardrum damaging bass drops, found themselves unwitting participants in what could only be described as Dystopia's health and safety campaign. The UV sterilisation lights typically used to eradicate feisty microbes in hospitals and biohazard facilities were, in this case, a gaudy replacement for your typical color strobes and flame jets.

In mid-summer, these burns typically don't become apparent for a while. Often, festival goers will traipse from stage to stage, clamoring over innuendo-laden acronyms and vowels in an alphabet soup of a lineup. They'll merrily toast each other with sixteen dollar Bud Lights, their skin crisping first in the UV, then in the assembling clouds of barbecued mist.

Later that evening, attendees noticed a marked difference in the selfies that they were posting. Instead of the usual sun baked tan resulting from a day outdoors, festival-goers were left looking more like lobsters served on a platter at a budget seafood restaurant. It sounded the alarm among selfie-taking teens and wannabe influencers, all of whom rapidly took to social media to vent their concern.

Yet, these poor souls were arguably luckier compared to those party animals who found themselves stuck at the front row, getting a full blast of the sterilizing light show. One enthusiastic raver, dubbed as "trance terminator" on twitter, danced so hard to these light beams that he actually ended up with a spectacularly sterilized tattoo area where his clothes used to be.

What followed could only be described as pandemonium — uproar from the crowd, laughter from those watching the live stream at home, and utter confusion from the performers on stage, who were probably high enough to think that they were playing at some avant-garde skin sterilization-themed festival. Suddenly, the hula hoop girls who had royally giggled themselves into oblivion under the UV sterilization light show became unintentionally trippy art at a festival whose tag line was, admittedly, “Experience the Unexpected.”

In the end, one could say that those burnt festival-goers didn't just get a suntan, they got a life experience. For the cautious and paranoid among us, perhaps we can look upon this incident as a warning. A concerning peek into the future of mega-festivals where hygienically-obsessed event organizers might actually think sanitizing the whole crowd is killer idea. So next time you buy those VIP access passes, just remember: being up close and personal with the stage might mean getting a lot more out of the show than what you bargained for.