OCEAN CITY, Md. -- Ocean City felt a little empty today compared to this past weekend. 50,000 people packed the boardwalk and inlet for the Oceans Calling festival.
Now that the festival is over, it's time to address any issues and plan for the future. For businesses in the festivals footprint, which stretched from North Division Street down to the inlet, the weekend was incredible.
Erin Soriano with Fisher's Popcorn said there was a bit of calm before the storm, but once the flood gates opened, business was booming.
"When the festival first opened everybody wanted to rush to get to where they wanted to get to," said Soriano. "Then you saw people coming back off the beach to get concessions, drinks, popcorn, you name it."
The one hiccup we did hear about were the buses, which picked up festival goers at the end of each night. The buses sat along Baltimore Avenue, and with so many people leaving the Oceans Calling grounds all at once, it was a learning experience for future festivals.
Ocean City's mayor, Rick Meehan, said it's something the town took notice of and will work on for next year.
"We ran into some small transportation problems on Friday, fixed them Saturday, we're looking at ways to improve that," said Meehan.
Robert Shearman, Ocean City's Transit Director, said he and his crew met on Tuesday morning for an after-action assessment. Shearman provided WBOC with the following statement:
"Even with a year and a half to plan, with great communication between the Town and Festival organizers, there were some aspects of the Oceans Calling ridership patterns that we did not anticipate. We wound up deploying more buses each day than we have since Sunfest in 2019. Given that, plus our experience with big events like the OC Air Show and Independence Day celebrations, we felt ready. However, the large number of first-time visitors to the city with this event resulted in ridership patterns different than what we were used to. By mid-afternoon Friday we were at our functional capacity. Some bursts of rain further complicated matters, but to be fair we were already off of our game plan by then. We never quite recovered Friday evening, which negated all of the strategies we had in place to be ready for the ends of the bigger performances. We carried over 32,000 people on Friday, compared to around 21,000 this past Air Show Saturday and 22,000 this past July 4th."
Shearman said they were able to make adjustments overnight on Friday and early on Saturday morning. It included moving equipment around to anticipate spikes in demand and repositioning queuing and re-boarding areas at pickup and drop off points. It helped with crowd control and orderly movement, according to Shearman.
Festival attendees also made a few changes of their own, making other arrangements to get to and from the Inlet area and adjusting schedules to avoid peak travel periods.
Shearman also added a huge thanks to the bus drivers, road supervisors, dispatch, vehicle tech units and boardwalk tram staff for working long hours to help overcome and challenges.
But overall, between festival goers, businesses and town officials, there was very little complaining to go around.
"What they[C3, festivals promoters] were able to do down here, right on the beach and the boardwalk of Ocean City, it was an unbelievable venue, it was an unbelievable experience," said Meehan.
Erin Bear, an Oceans Calling attendee, was pleasantly surprised.
"Been to many festivals, and I have to say as fast as they had to put this all together it ran very smoothly," said Bear.
Bear's favorite part of the weekend?
"Well the music," said Bear. "The music and the people, I mean everybody was like one big giant happy family, music heals you know, that's a given."
Danny King, owner of Kings Cotton Candy said it felt like summer all over again.
"Here it is, the end of September, you know you're only supposed to get a little bit[of business], you're not supposed to get a really 'hit em' hard', so I'm stoked out," said King.
Because of this years success, Meehan said the town will absolutely look into hosting back-to-back festivals starting next year.
"Once the infrastructure is put in place you know it really makes sense to utilize that for that period of time, so we're going to look at everything, get some input from everybody that was involved," said Meehan.
Mother Nature held of this year, leading to what many feel was an outstanding three-day festival.