Originally published at: World Scout Jamboree turns into scouting version of Fyre Festival | Boing Boing
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Well, I guess the bright side is that they got an honest-to-god adventure they will remember forever instead of just a camping trip.
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The Fyre Festival wasn’t a debacle because of extreme weather events, it was a debacle because of extremely poor planning.
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the jamboree has also been criticized for very poor planning
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Some irony in excessive climate-change heat vs flying 40,000+ kids to a festival… Definitely not “leave it better than you found it” thinking
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Aren’t Scouts supposed to always be prepared?
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Poor kids. Now, if it was a festival for doomsday preppers, I’d laugh.
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At about 67 mpg per passenger, flying is probably twice as efficient as whatever they drove to the airport.
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In the case of something like a typhoon “be prepared” means “know your evacuation route in case of emergency,” not “be ready to tough it out.”
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Does JooAngDaily smell political blood? Chang Kim’s comments were pretty scathing.
“I heard that because of the Korean president attending the opening [ceremony], all the Korean staff were busy catering to him and his wife so they couldn’t help the scouts and adult leaders from other countries,” he added.
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The Canadians stuck it out through the heat…
…but then the typhoon was the last straw.
Well, they all got quite a story to tell, and a trip to Korea, so that’s something.
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Yeah, it seems like less “Fyre Festival” and more “The World is on Fire Festival.”
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I was a Cub Scout a very long time ago. My jamboree experience consisted of a long weekend in Stoke Poges in an ex-army bell tent, getting beaten at all the sports until we came to the tug of war where my team won everything.
Something about learning to tie knots. I still can’t remember the bowline.
Seriously, though, a festival like this offers teenagers the chance to mingle with other nations and experience some different cultures. It’s a real shame it was a wash-out. I can’t believe that South Korea, one of the richest countries in the world, would have made such a pig’s ear of it.
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Is that the ‘the rabbit runs around the tree and down the hole’ knot? Yeah I can’t do that one either.
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In this case, “basted”.
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Never underestimate the fuel efficiency of a minibus full of Scouts hurtling down the highway.
I get more than 100mpg per passenger driving my kids to their Scout meetings.
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I’m not ruling out embarrassing mistakes being made; but when the (thematically appropriate) choice of venue is a large campground rather than some flavor of convention center or the like you don’t really have much room to turn GDP per capita into climate control or typhoon resistance.
The COVID outbreak is the bit that suggests some combination of optimism and denial; since that’s an uncooperative-but-amenable-to-rigorous-testing-and-controls sort of problem; but if you’ve committed to doing outdoorsy + tents 40 degree heat is going to go poorly; with the difference between extensive capabilities and shambles being measured more in whether you are collecting and stabilizing the heatstruck fast enough that they all recover or whether you’ve got people dying for want of detection or relatively basic response supplies.
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Dying in droves in hot climates would be thematically appropriate to Scouting of course. It is, after all, how the Empire was built.
Anyone for a pink gin?
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Some of the economic reasons for the Jamboree are in that JoongAng Daily article. AP has also been covering it and in today’s article they had this.
Saemangeum is the result of a 19-year project to build a 33-kilometer (21 mile) seawall, which South Korea describes as the world’s longest.
Since the wall was finished in 2010, the land the wall helped to reclaim from the sea remains largely barren. Once seen as a major development project for a region lacking an industrial base, it’s now increasingly viewed as an ecological blunder that wiped out coastal wetlands and hurt fisheries production.
Local government officials insist that the project remains key to the region’s economic future, despite its failure to deliver on early promises.
In a 2018 document describing its successful bid to host, the North Jeolla provincial government wrote that its main reason for hosting the event was to lure badly needed infrastructure investment to the area after initial plans didn’t progress as hoped.
“North Jeolla Province needed a project that could spur the construction of an international airport and other SOC (social overhead capital) investments to further encourage the development of Saemangeum’s inner areas,” provincial officials wrote, using an acronym that refers to infrastructure projects.
Local officials continue to pursue plans for new highways, ports and an international airport. The airport was initially supposed to be built for the Jamboree, but construction hasn’t started yet.
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