Wind, Rain Conspire to Shut Down Wednesday's Husker Harvest Days Fest

By: Steve Ross Email

Updated: Thu 6:04 AM, Sep 13, 2012

It began as a sunny, successful Husker Harvest Day, but the bad weather arrived, and then intensified.

"About a quarter 'til three, we started to get gusts that were really starting to concern us about the safety of the tents, and so we decided to just close the show two hours early," explained HHD organizer Matt Jungmann.

Visitors exited in mass, and exhibitors took measures to secure whatever might blow away. Staff members say that tents are staked to withstand winds in excess of 40 miles per hour, and with gusts up to 50, it wasn't worth the risk.

"When you have this big of a crowd and this many tents, you know, one tent, if one of the tents would have let loose, into a crowd or into a neighboring tent and dominoed...it's just not something that we wanted to see," Jungmann said.

The busy Husker Harvest Days festival was quickly turned in a ghost town with an onslaught of wind and rain.

For some exhibitors and vendors, the early closing created problems.

"We had scheduled a dinner with the people from John Deere, and we had to try, we had 125 steaks already put together, and we're trying to find out what was going to happen with that," lamented Greg Logsdon of the Grand Island Central Catholic snack stand.

While most attendees cleared out by around 3 p.m., a few decided to hang in there, including the barbecuers at the Husker Power Products pavilion.

"Well, we're in the irrigation business, a little weather doesn't bother us too much, in fact, we haven't seen rain in so darn long it's actually pretty nice," Jon Vandeventer of Husker Power Products said.

And, after all, the show must go on.

"It appears that, right now, tomorrow's show is going to open at 8 o'clock with no changes, regular schedule, 8 o'clock to 4 o'clock are the show hours. We're going to be able to, you know, assuming we don't get a ton of rain this evening, we're going to be able to run all the field demonstrations, everything should be on schedule," fair organizer Matt Jungmann said.

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