The Purple Guide to Health, Safety and Welfare at Music and Other Events — Campsites[1]
Summary
Establishes a campsite density standard of 476–543 tents per hectare at a predicted occupancy of 2–2.4 people per tent for general camping at rock/pop events, reduced by up to 50% for family camping (§18–19). Land used for access tracks, facilities and storage must be subtracted before density is calculated (§20). Density is explicitly a requirement under fire safety legislation rather than the Health and Safety at Work Act (§17 note), and the governing constraints are fire spread and appliance access: fire lanes at least 6 metres wide where no on-site firefighting unit is provided, with intersecting-lane frequency set by hose reel length (§87–88). Public health provisions include exclusion of grazing animals from all areas other than car parks for at least 4 weeks before public access, on E. coli O157 grounds (§51). Fire safety names carbon monoxide poisoning from camping stoves and barbecues used inside tents, and states these must never be used to heat a tent (§57, §61–62). Medical support must exceed first aid at multi-day events, should be sized to the demand on a GP practice serving a community of similar size, and should include pharmacy, emergency dentistry and mental health support (§68–71). Services must run for the whole duration campers are on site rather than the licensed entertainment period (§2, §6, §64), with 24-hour first aid listed as a site service (§67). Contingency planning holds that at large events fed by public transport it may be impossible to clear a campsite in an emergency, so facilities must be brought to the campers rather than campers removed (§46).
So what
Gives us the first campsite occupancy figure in the library. Converted, 476–543 tents/ha at 2–2.4 occupants is roughly 950–1,300 persons per hectare, or about 0.1 persons per square metre — an order of magnitude below the 1 person/m² threshold at which crowd dynamics is defined as operating. Campsite density is therefore a fire problem, not a crush problem, and the two literatures should not be conflated. The GP-practice sizing model in §70 is categorically different from the patient-presentation-rate model US event medicine uses: it predicts a flat residential baseline that PPR models do not see at all, and for multi-day camping events the two are probably additive. The coverage-hours requirement is the most commonly under-planned element of camping-event medical cover, which is likely why the chapter states it three separate ways.