The horrifying footage of the disastrous Cleveland Balloonfest
At their core, what do balloons represent? Horror fans might argue that they signify the imminent arrival of a clown, and children might say a birthday celebration. However, if you’re from Cleveland, a large-scale disaster will immediately come to mind. The fateful Balloonfest of 1986 started with the innocent intention of beating the Guinness World Record for most balloons released at one time, but some 1.5million balloons later, the fundraising event resulted in two deaths, injured horses, and countless car accidents.
Preparations for Balloonfest took six months, and an area of Cleveland’s Public Square was allocated to hold the balloons in a giant mesh structure ready for the release. Its central location was a highly intentional move to get as many eyes on the stunt as possible. The morning of, thousands of student volunteers gleefully pumped up balloons with helium for hours, content with getting a free T-shirt and a chance to witness the spectacle for their troubles.
However, anticipation soon gave way to anxiety when a storm threatened to cancel the event, so officials made the ill-advised move of simply releasing them earlier. At around 2pm, the Cleveland sky swirled with colour, and attendees revelled in the jubilant atmosphere. Cleveland had hit the big time, and this was the event to put them on the map. “There is no ‘mistake on the lake’ anymore,” one emphatic DJ declared. “Cleveland has now broken the Guinness Book of World Records and released over one million five-hundred-thousand balloons!”
In normal circumstances – as normal as a mass balloon release can be – a standard helium balloon will float along until it’s fully deflated, at which point it’ll wither its way back down to Earth. By some cruel twist of fate, the Balloonfest balloons hit cool air and rain, causing them to plummet back down, still inflated. The ensuing chaos looked like footage from an ecological horror film.
The bright balloons resembled a swarm of primary-coloured insects raining down from the sky. Unscrupulous in their aim, they landed everywhere, from waterways to airports. Burke Lake Front Airport was forced to shut its runways for over an hour as the balloons descended. As waterways clogged with blue and red balloons, drivers swerved around the roads to dodge them. The Cleveland Memorial Shoreway was quickly closed as balloons pelted motorists. Eventually, a bulldozer was enlisted to clear the devastation.
One Medina County woman walked out to her pasture to find her Arabian horses so shocked by the onslaught of balloons they’d somehow injured themselves. When the injuries were found to be permanent, she sued for damages and settled for an unknown amount. Until the equine injuries, you’d be forgiven for finding the entire situation one hilarious miscalculation, but for two families, it resulted in genuine tragedy.
Just a day before Balloonfest, two local men had gone out to Lake Erie to fish. When Bernard Sulzer and Raymond Broderick didn’t make it home, actions were taken to search the lake and rescue helicopters were sent out, but they had difficulty even reaching the area because of the balloons. While their boat was found empty, anchored near Edgewater Park, searching the water became virtually impossible as authorities waded through balloons.
When the Coast Guard look for missing people in the water, they always hope to see the top of a head or a bright life jacket. The balloons completely hindered the search effort, with someone involved comparing it to finding a needle in a haystack. “You’re looking for more or less a head or an orange life jacket, and here you have a couple hundred thousand orange balloons. It’s just hard to decipher which is which.” They were forced to abandon the search, and tragically, the bodies washed up on the shore just days later.
The wife of one of the fishermen sued for damages and, as seen previously, settled for an unknown amount. In the midst of the tragedy and environmental ruin, Cleveland had put itself on the map in the worst way possible. The catastrophic failure was included in a 1988 edition of the Guinness Book of World Records. Sensing the insult to injury, the category was later retired. In 2017, the world was once again reminded of the disaster by Nathan Truesdell’s short film, Balloonfest, which mined archival footage of the celebrations before they soured, in a sobering reminder of what a light-hearted event it could have been.
