Here at Honey Bucket, we’ve wrapped up our largest event of the year: Watershed Music Festival.

While Watershed has only been around a few years, it has exploded in that short amount of time. It is held at the Gorge Amphitheater which is also home to other massive music events including Sasquatch Music Festival, Paradiso Festival, and the Dave Matthews Band. The country music culture in the Pacific Northwest was an untapped niche that has latched onto Watershed like belt-buckles to boot-cut jeans.

Statistics

Here are a few statistics that should paint a rough picture to the immensity of this event:

The equipment we brought:

• 1,150   Restrooms (Standard and ADA Accessible), Holding Tanks and Sinks
• 2 Suite Comfort Stations (Luxury Restrooms)
• 3 Shower trailers
• Over a mile of temporary fencing
• 2,000 feet of personal barricade
• 1 Food Vendor Sink trailer
  

  Staying cool in between shifts.

We also brought down 11 pump trucks, 6 pickups and a few trailers to help distribute equipment. It took 30 people to get all the work done. 5 of those 30 were from FloHawks, our sister company who specializes in plumbing and septic services. They were a huge help when it came to the task of pumping in large volumes.

We accomplished 6,400 services (cleaning and restocking) of all these restrooms over the course of the weekend.

24 Hours a Day

We were up 24 hours a day rotating through all of the restrooms over the entire venue. The Amphitheater restrooms, for example, had to be serviced between 2am and 6am so that we never were in the way of attendees enjoying the show. The campgrounds were serviced twice a day to keep up with the amount of traffic; once in the morning and once in the afternoon.

Challenges

Here are a few bumps we ran into this year.

More Campers!

There were so many campers this year that they had to open up an additional field just to hold them all! This meant even more restrooms and sinks than we had originally anticipated. We were happy to do the work, but some additional planning and adjustment was required.

Auto Trouble:

Three of our trucks broke down on Saturday, which also happens to be our busiest day of the entire event. We had to wake up a local truck repair shop in addition to having one of our in-house mechanics drive over 3 hours one way to deliver the parts we needed.

Heat

This was by far the hottest year we have encountered at Watershed. Making sure everyone was protected and working safely was imperative with the threat of dehydration and heat stroke looming. Fortunately, we were able to keep everyone well hydrated and didn’t run into any problems.

Lightning/Thunderstorm

Saturday evening was a little scary in that everyone was in an open field in a lightning storm! The rides were shut down for a time, but there were no serious incidents. Mother Nature gave us quite a show.

Logistics

As one could imagine, with that many people all trying to arrive and eventually leave at the same time, moving about the campgrounds was occasionally a bit challenging.

The aftermath with Zero Graffiti.

Highlights

Zero Graffiti!

We were pleasantly surprised to find zero graffiti on all of our equipment this year. We had a few tip-overs, but nothing major. We always expect a few bad apples with an event of this size, but Watershed proved us wrong! Thank you to all the attendees!

Patriotism

Flags everywhere!

We have never, in all the years we’ve worked events at the Gorge, ever seen such an incredible display of the Stars and Stripes. Everywhere we looked was red, white, and blue boots, hats, bikinis, belts, etc. The campgrounds were covered in American flags as far as the eye could see (with the occasional maple leaf).

As exciting as it was this year, we’re always looking forward to the next. The lessons we learned we will put to good use as we plan to come back next year to be even more efficient and provide even better service.

Thank you Watershed! We’ll see you next year.