Eekels helps keep event venue dry during Rock Werchter in Belgium

Pop and rock festival Rock Werchter is held annually in the Belgian village of Werchter, which lies about 15 kilometres to the north-east of Brussels. This year's music festival will take place during the first weekend in July. Due to the frequent rain showers these past weeks, the festival venue, the surrounding camp sites and the car parks have all been flooded to some extent.

The multi-day event attracts some 90,000 music lovers per day and they obviously all want to keep their feet dry. The same goes for the people camping at the camp sites, which are run by local clubs and associations. The adjacent car park also needs to be kept fully accessible.

Rainwater drainage

To prevent complete inundation of the festival site, the existing camp sites and the downsized car park, the organisers of Rock Werchter called us on 14 June to ask if we could help drain away the rainwater that had already fallen. We supplied several pumps for this task. The first four Betsy 200 polluted water pumps were installed the next day, along with two 750-metre pipe runs. On the 17th and 18th of June, we installed an extra Betsy 125 6” pump set with 660 metres of pipe for the car park, and on Tuesday 21 June, we set up another five Betsy 100 pumps plus 500 metres of pipe to pump water away from the festival venue itself.

Pulling out all the stops

Based on current conditions, our equipment will remain in use until the end of Monday 4 July, which is the day after the music festival ends. To guarantee correct use of the pumps, one employee from our company will be present on site throughout the festival to check and maintain the equipment and coordinate how the different pumps are used. In a letter sent to neighbouring residents recently, the organisers struck an optimistic note: “We are pulling out all the stops to ensure that we can open the festival site and get it in good shape for the tens of thousands of festival-goers.”  In the worst case scenario, two event complexes, the Nekkerhal in nearby Mechelen and the Brabanthal in Leuven, south of Werchter, will be available as emergency locations for use if needed.

This RTL News video gives you a good idea of the conditions: “Wateroverlast Rock Werchter”