Vernon’s Canada Day drone show cancelled after scooter riders drive through staging area – Vernon News

Photo: Kim McInroy

A staging area for the Polson Park drone show. Mayla Janzen, organizer of the Canada Day event, said people rode electric scooters into one area and damaged antennas, rendering the show unusable at the last minute.

The organizer of Vernon’s Canada Day celebration says people rode electric scooters through a cordoned-off area and hit critical antennas, rendering the drone show inoperable last night.

Mayla Janzen is the president of VOICE, which organized yesterday’s Canada Day celebrations in Vernon. She tells Castanet that around 10 p.m., at the “last minute,” people drove motorized scooters into the drone show preparation area.

The scooters managed to get through despite efforts by security personnel and tape around the perimeter to keep them out, Janzen said. The show was scheduled to start at 10 p.m.

After the crash, the team decided to postpone the show to give the mechanics time to fix the problem. The drone technicians eventually discovered that the problem could not be fixed and Janzen took the stage to announce that there would be no show.

Then the focus turned to getting people out of the park safely. “I’m really sorry that couldn’t happen,” she said the next morning.

Vernon Okanagan Inspired Community Events had 13 employees protecting multiple staging areas.

Janzen will be holding meetings soon to figure out what happens next, but she hopes the VOICE team can negotiate a make-up show for Vernon. Worst case scenario, the drone show would wait until next year to debut.

Electric scooters weren’t the only challenge organizers faced on July 1.

Kim McInroy, a resident who took photos of the staging areas, said she saw clear bins placed over the drones throughout the day, protecting them from the rain. Heavy downpours occurred throughout the afternoon following a severe thunderstorm warning issued by Environment Canada around 1 p.m.

Despite the turn of events that left the team a little “disappointed,” Janzen is grateful for the incredible turnout. She said she was thrilled to see an attendance of about 5,000 people for the show, even though she had only announced it two weeks ago and never knew how it would pan out.

She stayed in the park until 2 a.m. for the cleaning phase.