Get ready for Fall Town Hall, Saturday September 22nd, 12:00pm~5:30pm, where we’ll be choosing the theme for Flipside 2019.

12:00pm – Tailgating and Socialization

Come mingle with your fellow Flipizens pregame. Show off your burner finery. Reminisce about next year. Pitching or supporting a theme? This is a great opportunity to promote your theme suggestion(s) one-on-one or from your gussied-up pop-up shade.

2:34pm – Meeting, Theme Presentations and Theme Voting

We’ll give you a little info to kick off the Flipside 2019 season, and hear theme proposals from the Flipizens proposing them. The theme that gets the most votes during the break will grace Flipside 2019.

Meeting agenda:

• Welcome, Pledge, and Leave No Trace Reminder
• 2018-19 Update from Austin Artistic Reconstruction, LLC
• About Area Facilitators, Leads and Volunteers
• Theme Presentations
• Break and Voting
• Stickets Design and the Selection Committee
• Submitting Effigy Proposals to the DaFT Selection Committee
• Warehouse Use and Opportunities
• Combustion Chamber Update
• Closing: Community Announcements, Winnerest Theme Announcement

All this happens at Lloyd the Warehouse, 3106 Industrial Terrace, ATX.

This year marked the 20th edition of Burning Flipside. In 1998, George Paap and about 30 people got together for “Burning Man Texas”; the first event called Burning Flipside was in 1999. Since then, a family of regional events has grown up around Texas, and Burning Flipside itself has grown steadily in size, organization, and the strength of the community that underpins it.

Tickets & Attendance

In 2018, 2710 tickets were sold, and 2627 tickets were used, for a no-show rate of about 3%. For comparison, in 2017, 3017 tickets were sold and 2870 were used, for a no-show rate of about 5%.

In 2014–2017, AAR had some form of public second-round ticket sales after the normal mail-in ticket-request process. These secondary sales have never worked well, causing either strife among participants based on where and to whom tickets were sold, large amounts of extra work for volunteers particularly those on the board, and conflict between the community and the organization when the community did not feel the sales were done well. Therefore the board decided not to do a formal secondary sale outside of critical volunteer tickets to allow the event to run.

Incidents

• Nature: It was a hot and very humid year. Apart from that, nature was cooperative.
• Gatecrashers: There was one group of gatecrashers who did manage to enter the event, but were rounded up and removed quickly. Another group attempted to enter from the north but were picked up by Milam County Sheriff’s Office deputies before they reached the event perimeter. There was also a ticketed participant who left and attempted to return by trespassing on neighboring property. All these people received trespassing tickets.
• Medical transports: There were a total of 8 medical transports this year, including 5 in a 24-hour period. Most of these were either caused by the heat or exacerbated by the heat, but there were a couple of accidents causing injuries as well. This put a serious load on the nearest hospital, which is very small.
• Interpersonal incidents: Perhaps the heat left everyone feeling too sluggish to get into much trouble, but there were zero ejections during the event, and the few traceable interpersonal incidents reported post-event have not been serious.
• Sound: There was one external sound complaint on Friday night. Rangers and the one sound marshal on duty worked with sound camps to reduce the volume levels and that complaint did not recur.

Art

It was a record year for burnable art, with four pieces of burnable art in addition to the Effigy: the Throne, the Mermicorn, Origins, the Memorial Temple, and Wee Burn. And it was a record year for art in general, with 65 total pieces of registered and placed art.

The Effigy itself, the Pine Cononagon was memorable for its interactive elements, hidden surprises, organizing theme, performances, and so on.

Theme Camps & City Planning

There were 126 registered theme camps, plus an unknown number of informal camps in the Badlands.

There were also 130 registered RVs in theme camps, and many more in the badlands–the final figure may have been as high as 200. RVs are beginning to present challenges in terms of space availability, planning, safety, and even volunteer capacity, and this trend appears likely to continue.

The direction of Road #2, (“Bad Idea Blvd” as it was called this year) was reversed this year from what it had been previously. This seemed to cause some confusion, and in general, keeping traffic moving in the right direction on roads continued to be a problem.

Some theme camps reported being allocated less space than they expected. In a radical experiment, City Planning this year allocated space based on the requirements stated in the camp’s registration, rather than the much larger spaces allocated previously.

Parking

Parking ran smoothly, with some 1300 cars being parked. Another 150 stragglers never got properly parked.

Ice

Unsurprisingly with the heat, Ice had very high sales this year, so much so that we needed to order extra ice for delivery during the event.

Recycling

2018 was the first time in many years that the organization did not operating a recycling station. Anecdotal evidence is that it was not missed.

Safetyside

Safetyside had roughly the same attendance as in past years, but with more people from around the country. A couple were firefighters with BRC ESD, and they had high praise for what we’re doing. The centerpiece of Safetyside every year is a large-scale simulated incident, and this year the Safetyside organizers raised the level of professionalism with controllers and monitors throughout the incident to keep the action moving and to collect better information.

Work Weekends

As in previous years, there were four work weekends, with attendance in the 15-30 range, which was plenty. After years of hard work at Apache Passtures, it has gotten to the point where it doesn’t need a lot of people to get it ready for Flipside.

Load-In

Load-in, the Saturday before Flipside when we ship all the event’s infrastructure out to the event site, was well attended. The layout of the warehouse’s loading bays and parking lot created a bottleneck that slowed things down somewhat, but we got the job done and can work around this next year.

Load-Out & Cleanup

Load-out and cleanup, when we return our infrastructure to the Warehouse and perform line sweeps of the land for final LNT, were not covered very well, with only about 10 people on LNT duties and about 40 more to load trucks; there was also a crew at the warehouse to unload trucks.

The 2018 MOOP Map shows that there was little MOOP found post-event. The low quantity of MOOP may be attributed to community awareness of LNT and a low number of volunteers for MOOP Sweeps and documentation.

The MOOP Map is a grey scale Safety Map which is annotated with yellow dots and red dots. Each yellow dot can be associated with an item of MOOP found. A cluster of yellow dots represents a MOOPy area. If the MOOPers feel that the MOOP item or action is atrocious, then the dot is changed to red.

Only 1 red dot was assigned to a MOOP item in 2018. It was a bag of bio-hazardous waste, which found either in or next to a portlet near camp 300. The stench was so horrible that most volunteers gagged and declined to move the bag. An anonymous Saint disposed bio-hazardous waste bag.

There were a handful theme camps with 3 or more items of MOOP found post-event. Those theme camps with 3 or more items of MOOP were 312, 408, 501, 515, and 607.

There were 2 areas in the Southern Badlands that were MOOPy. The first MOOPy area in the Badlands was near where the exit road connected to the entrance road in safety grid R6. The second MOOPy area in the Badlands was at the South end of Wizard Way near an emergency call box, in safty grid P7.

Overall, the vendors did a good job at LNT. However, the privacy fence along the county road did produce some MOOP.

If you see one or more yellow dots placed in your camp or near your camp, then please get involved. Ask questions of your camp mates and neighbors to raise awareness. Send email to cleanup18@burningflipside.com and ask for details on the MOOP findings. Visit the Cleanup and Site Sign Off booth at the next Townhall and volunteer for the next burn. We need you in 2019.

Disclaimer: Not on the 2018 MOOP Map were things picked up during the event, insignificant random findings or reported items post-event. There were some complaints about numerous cigarette butts on the ground during the event. However, most of the cigarette butts were picked up during the event by conscience burners. Being short on volunteers post-event, MOOPers spread wide and thin, walked fast, picked up that which stood out in the grass. MOOPers got a warm fuzzy feeling that things looked good, so a secondary sweep was not organized. However, MOOPers may have missed things with the spread between them, and the speed at which they moved. In some cases, MOOPers elected not to document small, random findings here and there, because of the documentation overhead and time.

Did you get any great photos at Flipside that you’d like to share on the burningflipside.com website? We’d love to have them. Or any other creative works in digital form. Please submit them through our Media Contribution Form here:

https://www.burningflipside.com/contact/media-contribution

Please do read the “Media-Use Agreement” on that page first. These are the terms you’re agreeing to when submitting a media contribution.

If your photos depict art, we need the name of the piece and the piece’s creator/s in order to credit them appropriately. If there are any people depicted in your photos, please be sure you have their explicit permission to post their photos online.

If you want to contribute a large number of files, you can contact media@burningflipside.com, but we’ll need all the information requested on that form either way.

Big thanks to our City Planning volunteers! Check it out here:

http://burningflipside.com/event/map