Water Lantern Festival returns to Boise following environmental concerns at Bend event

BOISE, Idaho (CBS2) — On Saturday, Julia Davis Park will host the Water Lantern Festival for the fifth time.

There's some worry ahead of this year's events. It's because the festival was in Bend, OR last weekend, and not all of the lanterns and plastic LED lights made it out of the river there, as the Central Oregon Daily reported.

The same thing is not expected to happen in Boise.

"The video Lled had, it's at night, and you can see the lanterns going down like underwater. I mean it was sort of disgustingly beautiful," said Radley Clothier, a diver with Loot the Deschutes. "It almost looked like those bioluminescence events you see in the ocean."

He and other divers with Loot the Deschutes were left to clean up after the event, retrieving pieces of lanterns, some of which ended up on the bottom of the river.

"Inside of those, it's like the little batteries, the fish are going to eat those, and then the birds, I mean there's an osprey nest, two of them big boys right there behind me," he said. "Every day we're pulling out all this garbage and then to have a kind of for-profit company come into town and do that, it was just maddening."

His group began diving the morning after the event, last Sunday, and is still diving, finding pieces of lanterns left behind.

Festival organizers said in part, in a statement posted on their website Wednesday, “The escaped lanterns in Bend was an unfortunate accident,” and that “When the lantern launch portion of the event started, it became apparent that the current was moving too fast for the buoy line to contain the lanterns within the designated area. As soon as this issue was realized, announcements were quickly made to stop the lantern launch.”

"I think it's 100 plus of those little plastic candles we've pulled out on top of all of the little wooden bases," he said.

They don't know how many are left in the river, and he says they aren't easy to find once they sink to the bottom.

Doug Holloway, Boise Parks and Recreation Director, said since hearing of the problems in Bend, he's been talking with the organizers, "just so we could reiterate the importance of the plan that they’ve submitted and following that plan."

He said Boise has had no issues in the past with these event organizers.

“With the number of lanterns they’ve launched in this pond, we have never experienced any leftover debris, not only in the pond but in the grass area that surrounds the pond," Holloway said.

Still, he said he's making sure the organizers follow what their permit requires.

“It requires them to submit a plan on all the details involved in launching the lanterns, where people will be located at when they launch, how they will pick up the lanterns out of the pond, and basically it’s no trace left behind once they’re done," Holloway said. "At the end of the day, I think the current, the access to the river in Bend, all those were contributing factors to some of the lanterns escaping the buoy system they had in place and getting out into the river. That isn't an issue here. There's no current."

Since there's no current in the pond and it doesn't connect to the Boise River, Holloway says escaped lanterns are not a worry here.

CBS2 reached out to the Water Lantern Festival for an interview request but was directed back to their online statement.

The Central Oregon Daily reports the Bend Parks and Recreation District will reject any future Water Lantern Festival proposals, citing “a lack of communication, lack of remorse and lack of clean-up efforts.”

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