Letter from a music festival operator with a similar philosophy.
Endorsement of the concept. Our vision is reality based:
Two days ago I had a visit from Dave Frye who is coowner of the Lock’n music festival that plays in central Virginia. Dave inspected the facility and brought immense expertise and contacts to the project.
Following you see his letter with me inserting a few numbers which are site specific.
Dave and I think much alike… we do want to do the best for our community and we are very concerned. We actually feel that the need will be so great that we likely could set up a field at Lock’n serving everything north of Lovingston, Thomas Jefferson Health district (250,000 people) and let Mount Athos Road everything south including greater Lynchburg all the way to the Danville Roanoke regions.
While the anticipated need projections vary greatly – We feel that what we are offering could be a game changer for the way our communities survive the coming onslaught of Covid – 19. However we can not do it without partnering with FEMA – State and some local healthcare providers.
In Italy now that they have experience they are building facilities like ours in Lobardi region. Read More
In the interest of time and transparency I post his letter:
Letter from David Frye ( Lock’n Festival):
I will take the liberty and make a few minor adjustments… but it shows the point of view of a person with extensive experience putting on large scale festivals. We both have a similar vison of what is possible and we see this as a system that could seriously scale at various sites around the counrty. Time is of the essence: “Dear Oliver, I appreciate getting to see your property on Thursday and am writing to share my thoughts concerning the overall logistics and other topics. I also ran a budget based upon actual costs of running the RV sections at Lockn’ that is attached. Please consider the following.
The challenge: 1. To keep the afflicted out of existing hospital system(s) which were not built for, nor are ready for a pandemic. The last place any hospital wants COVID19 is at the hospital, any hospital.
2. To provide safe quarantine area(s) for the afflicted that are remote but also close to population centers. Patients that test positive would quarantine in an RV with an isolated HVAC system, order meals to be delivered from a food canteen, and be monitored by med school interns and nurses under the direction of doctors in a central command medical tent. If a patient worsens they'd be transported to the hospital, but the majority will recover without infecting others and be discharged.
3. Another challenges is that the two insurance brokers I spoke with said it’s going to be “impossible" to secure insurance, they’re all running from anything Covid19. Perhaps this is something that can be bound through the County, the State, or FEMA?
The initiative: 1. What. Work with the authorities and health officials to provide a turn-key solution to implement temporary quarantine field units at (name of your property) and other potential sites. There are over 9M RVs in the US and using them as quarantine units are an effective and cost efficient way to isolate the afflicted regardless of locality, and because the amount of RVs deployed can expand and contract they to most sensible and scalable solution.
2. Where. (Name of your property) and other existing sites, facilities, and locations that can accommodate a large number of RVs. a. Target mass gathering sites like Lockn', Richmond Raceway, Virginia International Speedway, and others that have existing infrastructure for mass RV gatherings. b. Target facilities that have infrastructure, power, water, septic, internet, food facilities, and are built to host a lot of RVs. These sites are near large population centers, however no one lives nearby because of all the noise.
3. Who. Our core-competencies as event producers uniquely qualify us to work alongside emergency services, local administrators, and health officials as operators. We are accustomed to renting RVs en masse, setting up large central medical field units, deploying roving med-teams on Kabotas, feeding 10,000s' of people breakfast, lunch, & dinner, working closely with emergency services, providing security, complying with all the permitting authorities, cleaning up, providing power, water, septic, internet, and more.
4. How. Based on need, once forecasted needs and location(s) are identified engage local, regional, and national festival, concert, sports, and event producers, specialists, and vendors to turnkey everything that would be required. We operate in this space regularly and have all the skill-sets, the experience, the people, the assets, the broadband, the infrastructure, and we are accustomed to overseeing large and often unique public assembly challenges.
Please let me know a good time to have a call to follow up. Thank you, Dave”
Dave ran a budget which, without the medical expense, and using a rental model comes to a weekly cost of $4688.— per RV which can work out to about 2400.— per week per person double occupancy on average.. This is a very low price for a quarantine facility that has size flexibility and keeps hospitals mostly safe…
I lean more toward a “purchase model” as I believe occupancy of 100 bed nights will be likely and that would then be cheaper… In any case it is possible.. but we must act now.
Link to the budget.
Insurance will be out… this is an emergency situation.. we all do the best we can – people will die, mistakes will be made… but “doing something” is better than the “mistake of doing nothing”…
This is posted in the interest of transparency and time as is the reason for this website...