This April, I went to Stagecoach Festival with a group of friends, and what happened while we were there was definitely far from what I expected.

For the most part, everything was going great. The first day featured performers like Ella Langley (who was BEYOND amazing), BigXthaPlug, Cody Johnson, and Noah Cyrus. It was exactly what you would expect from Stagecoach: great music, overpriced hot dogs, $13 lemonades, and thousands of people in cowboy boots slowly realizing those shoes are not built for 20,000 steps a day as their feet slowly gave out. Yeah—just about normal.

But the second day? The second day was the one everybody had been waiting for, and honestly, for one reason only: Pitbull. I would like to add that I am a bit biased, though. Of course, there were other huge artists performing too, like Lainey Wilson, Journey, and Treaty Oak Revival, but personally, I could not wait for Pitbull’s set at 11 p.m.

However, the second we arrived that day, my friends and I noticed something felt…off. The wind was intense—palm trees were bending sideways, and dust was blowing everywhere. At first, we brushed it off as normal desert conditions, but it quickly became clear we weren’t the only ones a little concerned. We kept overhearing longtime festival-goers saying they’d been coming to Stagecoach Festival for years and had never experienced winds this strong before.

Still, nobody honestly really cared at first. Everyone just kept dancing and singing like normal. In fact, people were almost romanticizing it. During Bush’s set, lead singer Gavin Rossdale even told the crowd, “This desert wind is so wild, so beautiful,” while his hair whipped directly into his face.

Unfortunately, the wind quickly became the opposite of beautiful.

At 7:48 p.m., while I was inside Diplo’s Honky Tonk-—the designated DJ stage—listening to Marshmello’s set, announcements suddenly blasted over the speakers, saying the festival had been postponed until further notice and everyone needed to evacuate immediately. Then giant messages appeared across the main stage screens reading: “Emergency evacuation. Please move quickly and calmly to the nearest exit.” When I say this felt scarier in real life than it sounds, I mean it.

The entire atmosphere changed almost instantly. One second, everybody was dancing and screaming lyrics, and the next, thousands of people were rushing toward exits while rumors spread everywhere. People were yelling that there was a shooter. Others were screaming about a fire. Neither rumor was true, and in reality, it was actually just because the high winds reaching 60-65 mph had become dangerous. However, in moments like that, all of the anxious energy feeds off each other and becomes unbearable. It felt weirdly apocalyptic with everyone rushing out and with the repeated warnings in the background.

The evacuation itself was also overwhelming because one of the emergency exits was closed, which made the entire experience all the more chaotic.

When around 80,000 anxious people are trying to leave a festival at the same time, it is not exactly calm and orderly. There were people panicked, trying to find their friends, others trying to figure out where to even go, and in the middle of it all, I even saw many trying to sell their wristbands! Out of all of this, though, I do have to say that the worst of it all was the traffic. It genuinely wasn’t even moving, which is a terrible combination with people who are upset, aching, and exhausted—all while having zero service. I have never heard that many car honks in a row.

Thankfully, about an hour later (which felt like either 10 minutes or five hours), Stagecoach sent out a notification saying performances would continue because the winds had settled down. For people taking shuttles, the lines were so long that many never even left the festival grounds, which ended up working in their favor because they got the best barricade spots for Pitbull later that night.

Luckily, where I was staying was close enough that I was able to walk back just in time for Pitbull’s set—which, yes, absolutely liup exceeded my expectations. (You should definitely read my full review on it!)

Still, I can only imagine how frustrating it was for people who had already driven far away or fully left the area before the reopening announcement. In fact, while walking out, I heard people mumbling about desired refunds and missed performances.

In the end, though, the festival somehow recovered from those few hours of complete mayhem. By midnight thousands of people were back together, screaming Pitbull lyrics as if it had never happened at all. Despite all this, the festival continued into day three and flipped back into a success!