Auckland Tourism, Events and Economic Development (ATEED) manages many festivals where LPG bottles are an essential tool for the food vendors, and in our desire to go above and beyond, our event production team created a bespoke plan to mitigate potential health and safety dangers at Auckland Lantern Festival. 

Current legislation around gas bottle usage specifically focuses on buildings. A pop-up marquee may not be considered a building per se, but our events team felt that fires aren’t ‘picky-burners’ so adjusted their model accordingly: 

  • The team redesigned the layout of the festival to ensure that a 4-metre gap was between the different food stalls zones to act as a fire break. A maximum of 90kgs of LPG was set for each zone. Despite 90kgs not requiring a fire break (100kgs requires a 5-metre break), the team used them regardless. 
  • Additionally, a non-gas using food stall (such as a drinks stand) was used to split up the gas using stalls. 
  • Fire extinguishers were kept behind the food stalls and each stall had a fire blanket. 
  • Behind the food stalls, each zone had refill gas bottles in a cage, with a 2-metre squared fence. Each cage had a fire extinguisher.  
  • Vendors were not allowed to come on site with their own gas bottles. A dedicated team were onsite to deploy gas bottles when one needed refilling, who would fit them and carry out safety checks. 
  • Each gas bottle hose needed to be 1.5-metres long so that the bottle could be kept outside the marquee. 

Input was provided by several sources – Worksafe New Zealand, health and safety, certified plumbers and gas fitters – to determine this plan for Auckland Lantern Festival.  

This workstream was carried out entirely behind the scenes, so there was no adverse experience for the 170,000+ audience that came to the festival - enjoying their noodles and dumplings! 

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