STOWE, Vt. (WCAX) – Artists rushed to save their work after the Stowe foliage arts festival’s big tent blew down.
“When we pulled in, my husband had made a comment that the tent’s look really small. I looked around and said, ‘Well that’s because there’s an entire tent that has collapsed,” Kate Slocum of Northfield said.
This was local artist Kate Slocum’s first year setting up a booth at the festival.
But she’s now one of many packing up her things, and heading home, after wind knocked down the tent early Saturday morning.
“We were looking forward to a very successful day today, and we came to this devastation instead. Helping other vendors here clean up, go through their items,” Slocum said.
For more than four decades, the festival has been a staple for fall in Vermont.
Over 150 artists come from all across the country to show off their work, like artist Alexa Varano.
This would have been her third year at the festival, an opportunity that’s become crucial for business, during Vermont’s biggest weekend for foliage tourism.
“The last two years I averaged around seventy five hundred in sales, so that’s a pretty good show for three days. Yesterday I did okay, a little over two thousand. Large projected loss definitely in profit. Probably about five to six thousand. Kind of leaving a lot of questions for us I think because I don’t think it should have gone down with the wind,” Varano said.
As organizers scramble to pick up the pieces, they still aren’t sure what went wrong.
“I look at the weather every day. Multiple days out. When I looked yesterday, it was showing fifteen – seventeen today, which is breezy but not disastrous. This tent was supposed to be ready for eighty mile an hour winds, but you see the result of it,” Tim Cianciola of the Stowe Foliage Arts Festival said.
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