Early arrivals begin today for Resonance Music Fest in Masontown

MASONTOWN, W.Va. — Emergency Officials at the Masontown Volunteer Fire Department are preparing to provide medical services to as many as 10,000 music fans for a three day event in Preston County.

The Resonance Music Festival at Marvin’s Mountain Top in Masontown is expected to draw approximately 10,000 people to the campground and according to Masontown Volunteer Fire Chief Dan Luzier, there will be approximately thirty medical personnel who will be working the event that starts Thursday and will continue into Sunday. According to Luzier thirty percent of the festival goers are expected to arrive sometime around Wednesday night.

“It’s going to start Wednesday with early arrivals, they sold three thousand tickets for early arrivals, to help keep the traffic down,” said Luzier partially describing the amount of people expected to attend.

Members of the Masontown Volunteer Fire Department, were told to expect the large number of people several months in advanced by the promoters of the Resonance Music Festival, which has been running it’s events in Ohio since 2018. After taking a one year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the festival is making it’s return and for the first time outside the State of Ohio. As a result, Masontown emergency officials have prepared for an influx of people that would essentially be nineteen times the size of Masontown’s census population, while maintaining it’s current caseload for regular residents.

“We’ll have those people out there at the festival and then I have to still have people in town to handle our normal calls,” said Luzier.

In order to best utilize the thirty medical personnel on hand for the Masontown Volunteer Fire Department, one single medical tent on the festival grounds will be in use located within a reasonable distance for festival goers to access if there is a medical emergency. There will also be personnel driving around the campgrounds based on reported concerns as well as precautionary measures for personnel in light of the recent spike in cases of COVID-19. These measures are being taken so that the Masontown residents will not have any hindered emergency response as staff tend to the Resonance Music Festival.

“We go in to areas where there are tents, if we know there’s a problem area we’re constantly monitoring that by just driving through and looking,” said Luzier elaborating on some of procedures in place.

Despite the concern from the Masontown Volunteer Fire Department, Luzier feels that medical personnel will be able to get through the nearly week long festival based on their past experiences working at Marvin’s Mountaintop. The campground, has played host to several music festivals in the past including Domefest and All Good Music Festival, which has hosted several thousand people at a time. While the venue goer medical personnel ratio is not ideal, the Masontown Volunteer Fire Medical personnel will look to continuing to do their job the best way as possible.

“We’ve learned from past festivals that we’ve covered,” he said. “Where we can bring people in and just let them, for better words I guess, would be to mello out just to watch them and monitor them, so that we don’t have transport them,” he said.