Too folkin’ hot: How heat affects the experience at Newport’s summer music festivals

Newport’s annual folk and jazz festivals at Fort Adams are hugely popular draws, not only for Aquidneck Island locals but for musicians and music fans from around the world. This year, the triumphant return of both festivals in full after two years of COVID-19 related cancellations and restrictions, a lot of attendees used the same word to describe their festival experience: hot.

Dennis Callahan, an engineer who works in Newport and lives in Tiverton, has been attending the folk festival every year since 2016. He and his wife prefer to attend all three days of the festival, which is no small endeavor when temperatures climb into the 90s. Reflecting on this year’s experience he said, “It was brutal – we’ve been every year for a while now, so we’re kind of used to it because it’s usually hot, but this year was particularly bad.”

He added that his wife had once passed out due to the heat at a previous year’s festival, and while he praised the efficient and effective response of the medical staff when it happened, “it was still scary.”

They now make sure to bring a cooler with lots of water and Gatorade, wet towels to cool themselves, and handheld fans. Even with all of that preparation, at this year’s festival they had to take a break from the music at one point and walk fairly far away to find some shade and regroup.

"Saturday at Folk Fest was particularly rough out there," Callahan said. "All it takes is no breeze and you’re hitting those high 80s, and it’s a long day. We were there the whole time, all three days, so it was a long weekend.”

Safety is a team effort

Mark Simoes, Newport’s deputy fire chief, agreed with Callahan’s assessment that this year’s festival was hot even by the standards of an event that is always held during the hottest time of the year.

“This year was abnormally hot for both festivals, but it’s not unusual for both to be in the high 80s to low 90s…I’d say over the last handful of years this is probably the warmest it has been,” Simoes said.

He explained, however, that the festival was very well-planned, and all agencies involved in securing the health and safety of those in attendance were well aware of the risks posed by extremely hot weather.

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According to Simoes, the Newport Festival Foundation starts having meetings as early as four to six months in advance, and all participating agencies are involved – Newport fire and police, state police, Rhode Island Disaster Medical Assistance Team, RI Emergency Management Agency, and the state Department of Environmental Management.

“DEM law enforcement is usually the lead agency who coordinates everything and makes all the decisions because the festivals are held on state property, but from day one we all put our brains together, and wind and weather and meteorological events fall in the high priority as far as planning,” Simoes explained.

In addition to some covered seating in front of each stage, the festivals were equipped with a cooling mist fan for people to stand or walk in front of, several shade tents with seating, shaded areas over otherwise open ground, and four free water bottle filling stations located strategically around the venue.

Some people in the Folk Festival Family group on Facebook complained that some festival attendees were laying out blankets to reserve space in shared shade areas, or putting their bags down to reserve otherwise unoccupied seats.

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Callahan confirmed he did see some of that happening.

“Out in the middle of the quad they added a big triangular shade tarp," Simoes said. "On Friday people would get their food and go eat there at the picnic tables, but by Saturday and Sunday it was just blankets and chairs where people had set up their spots there, which is kind of obnoxious.”

During the opening day of the Jazz Festival on Friday, July 29, temperatures taken with a gauge by a Daily News reporter during the afternoon showed a temperature of 86.2 degrees under a shade tent and 87.4 degrees in a more open area of the festival grounds inside Fort Adams.

According to Accuweather.com, the high temperatures in Newport for the three days of the folk festival were recorded at 88,89 and 85 degrees. During the jazz festival, temperatures reached 85, 85 and 80 degrees.

But those in attendance, especially at the folk festival said it felt much hotter.

'It felt like I was in Austin, Texas'

Bill Bartholomew, a local musician and media personality whose Bartholomewtown podcast airs on WPRO on Saturdays, has not missed a single day of either festival since 2013, and also attended both festivals at intervals throughout the 90s and early 2000s.

“This was definitely, from what I can remember, the most extreme in terms of heat...there’s just something about Fort Adams, the way it’s positioned, that just allows for a very intense heat and sun – something that didn’t really remind of Rhode Island. It felt like I was in Austin, Texas or something like that,” Bartholomew told The Daily News.

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He agreed the festival would most likely need to expand its shade offerings in years to come, but also said, “I think by and large, given the severity of the heat this year, the festivals did a good job of keeping everybody safe.”

Referencing some calls to consider changing the date of the festivals to the fall in order to counter the extreme heat, Bartholomew said, “I think going forward they may want to invest in more shade tents…but I don’t think they should change the dates. I think that generally speaking there is a reason those dates work so well…”

“To move it to the fall would completely change the dynamics of the event. When you think about the jazz and folk festivals there is a lot of residual economic impact that is very important to consider as well, and in some ways that’s part of the trade-off for having the event come to town; there’s millions of dollars of economic impact, and that wouldn’t be the same in the fall because a lot of the things available here in the summer aren’t available in the fall.”

“The Folk Festival was definitely worse in terms of just the brutal heat, and to the festival’s credit, they were able to make some adjustments that did improve the remaining five days, expanding the amount of water stations and shifting a few things around in the layout to make it more bearable,” Bartholomew said in comparing his experience at the two festivals, both of which he attended for all three days.

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Callahan offered a final tip for beer drinkers, pointing out the festivals typically have two beer gardens, one inside the fort’s courtyard and one right on the water, out on the pier. He dismissed the courtyard beer garden as possibly the hottest area of the entire festival grounds, explaining, “The (other) beer tent area is right on the water so you can get a little bit of breeze there. The one out on the pier near the fort stage, you can sit down and hang your feet above the water.”

This article originally appeared on Newport Daily News: Heat affects on Newport Folk, Jazz festivals July 2022