But mostly, Sunday's quagmire was due to the substance the city and C3, which contributed a $2.5 million donation, used in the resodding: something called "Dillo Dirt," a compost of curbside yard clippings and recycled sewage. Hats off to the city for its environmentally conscious efforts, but that didn't exactly lessen Noise's disgust that he and the 65,000 or so other festival-goers on hand spent an entire day trudging through treated human sh*t.It smelled like it, too, and the ACL staff scattering bale after bale of hay around the park to shore up the footing only made the atmosphere that much more stable-like. In their post-ACL damage control Monday, the city and C3 were quick to point out that the composting process superheats said sewage to a temperature that destroys any harmful bacteria, but it was still gross. (As of Monday, officials were unsure how much permanent damage the new sod had sustained.)
This "Million-Dollar Mud," as a friend called it late Sunday evening, caused entire puddle-strewn sections of the park to be closed off with yellow police tape, and completely destroyed what had been a beautiful expanse of golf-course-caliber grass just a couple of days earlier. Monday, the Austin American-Statesman reported that the ACL area of Zilker would be closed until at least November for cleanup — after already being closed for the better part of a year to let that ill-fated grass grow in the first place — and that C3 would pay for the damage to the turf as per its contract with the city.
No doubt the outcome of this year's ACL wasn't quite what C3 was hoping for, and the damage is bound to make this the most expensive festival yet, both financially and in terms of public relations; angry commenters were already coming out of the woodwork Monday morning on the Statesman's Web site. But this weekend was also the most extreme example yet in what is becoming an annual demonstration of the hostile environmental conditions people are willing to endure in the name of three days of almost uninterrupted music.
Gee, that seems to have worked out well.
The ecos never think things through.
The dillo dirt is filthy. When they first started selling this “crap” they told people not to use it for parks, ball fields, etc. They found out the hard way. Some kids had slid into second and got infections. Dumb ass liberals.