Festival campers forced to evacuate campsite by raft after flooding

Revellers at Belladrum festival endured a very wet weekend

Emergency volunteers were forced to be dispatched to the campsite at Scottish festival Belladrum over the weekend after localised flooding.

According to the Red Cross, the campsite had been battered by heavy rain for almost four straight days and eventually began to flood on Saturday evening (August 6). As a result, over 40 volunteers were called and one of the festival’s performance tents was turned into a makeshift rescue centre.

Rescue volunteers brought inflatable rafts with them in order to help transport over 60 people to safety after their tents became unusable.

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Ian Rideout, Red Cross operations director for Northern Scotland, said of the events:

The fields at Belladrum were already soaked after heavy rain on Thursday and Friday. A series of torrential showers overnight on Saturday and into Sunday morning saturated the ground, causing localised flooding. Our swift water rescue team are equipped with inflatable rafts to move people and equipment across water and mud to our evacuation tent. We had a field hospital on site, staffed by first aid volunteers, a doctor and two nurses.

Despite ending on Saturday, many festival goers were still on site well into Sunday (August 7) as the sodden ground meant cars remained stuck there for hours.

Belladrum was headlined by Deacon Blue and Texas, with Guillemots, Kassidy, Echo And The Bunnymen, Frank Turner, Newton Faulkner, Ed Sheeran and Anna Calvi amongst the other acts on the bill.

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