Photos: Portola Festival Debuts With Spectacular Shows, But Very Messy Crowd Management - SFist

Long lines and some highly ineffective crowd management strategies led to mayhem, chaos, and bum-rushing at Saturday’s Day 1 of the Portola Festival, overshadowing terrific performances from Flume, Charli XCX, and Fatboy Slim.

It is never a good thing when the headline news out of the first day of your inaugural new big-budget music festival is not the performances on stage, but instead some poorly mishandled crowd management incidents.

But so it is for the first-ever Portola Music Festival, put on by the producers of Coachella, which had its first day marked by a few chaotic incidents Saturday, and continues Sunday at Pier 80.

The people in this video are already inside the festival, having paid $200 for a single-day ticket or $300 for the weekend.

Hundreds of people jamming up to get inside the warehouse stage with no real direction/crowd control from the venue staff.

But the crowds were so massive that many people did not even realize there were barriers, and there was no signage and very little direction for people to understand the Warehouse Stage's highly counterintuitive entrance structure.

And as we see above, it was not even that crowded inside the warehouse stage area.

Warehouse was 2/3 empty inside, and @PortolaFestival and @goldenvoice were choking people into barricades and crushing thousands of people for no reason pic.twitter.com/MFMB8FvRpe.

But Day 1 of the Portola Festival will probably be remembered more for its rookie operational mistakes than for any of the otherwise very good performances.

Me and my besties getting into the warehouse stage at portola #portolafestival @PortolaFestival pic.twitter.com/fiQwtynevA!