By Lori Prichard
Produced by Linda WilliamsWEST VALLEY CITY — Alcohol poisonings, drug overdoses, half-naked girls, parents in the dark.

Emergency room physicians see it all every time Saltair hosts a rave party. A KSL 5 News investigation discovered an emergency room flooded with patients on rave nights — most of them underage and many of them still in high school.

“I think we had five patients come in all at once,” said Dr. Matthew Feil, recalling a crazy night in the ER following a rave at Saltair. “We had most of our trauma rooms taken up — three trauma rooms taken up with patients that needed to be placed on life support.”

Feil has worked in the ER at Pioneer Valley Hospital in West Valley City for six years. Most of the time patients come in with quick problems to fix. But when there’s a rave at Saltair, everything changes.

“During the raves we will get a rush of patients — up to four or five at a time. And on a busy night on the weekend where all of our resources are already being consumed, it’s a real stress on the emergency room,” he said.

The ER gets so busy on rave nights, the hospital now tracks Saltair’s event calendar and schedules extra staff to handle the rush, according to the doctor. In the past year, the ER admitted 41 patients after Saltair raves. Nearly three quarters were under 21. A third of those hospitalized were younger than 18.

All were brought in for alcohol poisoning, drug overdoses or a combination of both. Feil said such patients are high-maintenance to treat, requiring a lot of extra work and attention.

“Cardiac monitoring, putting them on life support if needed,” he explained. “They’re hyper-stimulated, meaning that they’re agitated. They don’t want to be here. (They’re) oftentimes tearful. They’re not cooperative with the staff.”

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The hospital staff often has to call for security's help with rave patients, and a lot of times the police get involved. It's often an involved process that can take up to five hours, Feil said. And if the patient is under 18, the hospital must track down the family, too.

“I can’t remember an instance where I’ve had a parent who knew that they were at a rave and knew that that kind of activity was going on," he said. "Sometimes they’re surprised. They’ve had no idea.”

That fact concerns Feil and other doctors. He said parents need to take a more active role in their kids’ lives by finding out what shows or parties they are going to.

Kids at raves

“The younger kids aren’t telling their parents where they’re going and their parents don’t know what they’re doing,” said 18-year-old Ariana Grow. She has been going to raves since she was 16, even though she feels they aren't a place for kids.

“I’ve said it a billion times,” she said, “even when I was 16 and walked in. I said, 'This should be an 18+ event.'”

Currently many electronica concerts are for all ages or for 16 years of age and older. If someone is under the age limit, all they need is an adult to sign them in. Cori Santos, 20, believes this is a flawed process because she often sees strangers signing for kids, unaware of the risks involved. If there’s a concern about young teens going to raves, they shouldn’t have any way to get in at all, she said.

“There shouldn’t be ‘you can sign in if you’re too young’ (policy). There shouldn’t be 16 plus. It’s not a place for teens,” she said.

A rave is formally known as an electronic music show or techno dance party. They’re unlike any other club scene or concert in Utah. People dance for up to eight hours straight to deep beats pumped out by live DJs.

“You definitely have butterflies,” Santos said. “It’s kind of like that feeling before a first kiss.”

"It gets going and going and going and once you’re in the middle of it, everyone’s just dancing around. It’s just — it’s almost a euphoric experience,” said 20-year-old Erik Olson.

Pulsating lights shoot through the room. Thousands of young people party.

“Everybody’s dancing with you and the louder the music gets, the more people want to party and go, go, go,” Grow said. “It’s explosive.”

“Everybody’s jumping and dancing,” Santos explained. “There are people spinning lights all over.”

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“A whole new world,” added Grow.

That world — Utah’s promoted rave scene — thrives on the secluded shores of the Great Salt Lake. Between April 2010 and April 2011, Saltair hosted a dozen of these shows, attracting thousands of people each.

“Saltair is one of the most intense venues I’ve ever been in,” Olson said.

People who attend say they go to hear the hottest DJs in the world, hang out, make new friends and enjoy a fun night.

“You can be however you want to be and dress however you want to dress and there are people there that aren’t going to judge you for it,” Santos said.

She said many ravers live by a creed of peace, love, unity and respect. But she and others admit there’s a darker side to this colorful, synthetic world.

“I love the rave scene,” Grow said. “But you can’t deny what’s going on in there.”

Few clothes

The first thing partiers might notice when they go to a rave is the lack of clothing worn by nearly every girl there. It’s “pants down, shirt off, ready to go,” said Grow, who makes many of her own outfits for raves — variations of colorful bras and corsets, ribbons and tutus.

Santos said she also wears skimpy outfits to these shows — bikini bottoms with “leg warmers or fluffies” and a bra or bikini top. Both say the outfits are typical of electronic shows, and serve a practical purpose — keeping girls from overheating during long nights of dancing. In fact, Grow says the outfits are so commonplace she doesn’t think boys even notice.

“It’s almost like guys are so desensitized to it now,” she said. “I swear nobody even looks twice anymore.”

Olson disagrees. He noticed the outfits as soon as he walked into his first Saltair rave in April. “Girls were in a lot less of clothing,” he said. “Stripper boots all the way up to the knee or past. Little bikinis, booty shorts, stuff like that. They even had their performers up there in just bikinis and high heels.”

The highly sexualized environment is a point of concern for another long-time raver. Hunter Carlston, 18, said he’s fine with girls over 18 wearing skimpy outfits, but he said too many kids under 18 are showing up at these wild parties — dressed in nothing but their underwear.

“A guy is scouting a girl out, and with less clothing on it’s just making them an easier target,” he said.

“I have a huge problem,” said Santos, “with 14-, 13-year-old girls shedding their clothes in the parking lot or the bathrooms and then being in their bras and panties.”

Inside a rave

You don’t have to look hard to see girls in outfits like those. A television camera taken to one event right away captured girls running and dancing in the parking lot wearing nothing but tutus, bikinis, even see-through nighties.

That's when a security officer tried to shut down the photographer.

“I need you to get away from my event,” he said, shining a flashlight into the lens. “I need you to shut the camera off, sir.”

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Once inside the venue, cell phone cameras captured many other scenes. Near the back of the room, several girls were filmed making out with multiple guys in a row, dancers dazed by streaks of LED lights were seen as well as young people sucking on baby binkies — which can be an indication of ecstasy drug use. Walking through the crowd, it isn't unusual to hear young people talk about taking drugs, buying drugs — even misplacing them.

“I lost my pills,” yelled one girl.

Club drugs

Drugs such as ecstasy and LSD are known as club drugs and ravers say you can find them at just about any rave.

Grow, Santos, Olson and Carlston all say they rave sober, although most have friends who take drugs before or during shows. And Grow said she’s seen how bad it can get when people take it too far.

“Uhhh ... I hate thinking about it, but people will start to like chew on their cheeks and stuff when they’re on ecstasy,” said Ariana Grow. “There have been people that have, like, almost chewed through their cheeks.”

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Grow said she’s watched paramedics carry people out on stretchers and heard stories of people overdosing in the bathroom. It bothers her to see people that way, because she feels they are the ones who give the scene a bad name.

Santos feels the same way. She claims she goes to raves to hear her favorite artists, but thinks the younger crowd is motivated by something else.

“I feel like they’re there because it’s a place to get high,” she said. “You have these little girls and these young boys coming to these shows not knowing what they’re doing, taking too much, and those are the kids I always see getting loaded into the ambulances.”

Ambulances and EMTs are almost always at Saltair during electronic music events. Two companies that work together putting on many of these Saltair shows are V2 Events and Bondad Productions. In a written statement the companies said they work closely with local law enforcement and fire departments to “provide a safe and secure environment” for patrons.

“We expressly condemn illicit behavior by any of our patrons and have put in place measures to prevent such behaviors at our concerts,” said Jeremy Moreland with V2 Events. [CLICK HERE to read the full statement from V2 Events and Bondad Productions]

Some of those measures include pat downs at the entrance, increased parking surveillance by Saltair and age verification. V2 also says it encourages parents to attend electronic music shows with their kids to learn what they’re about, and for those who go to educate themselves about the concert environment.

KSL tried a dozen times to reach Saltair for comment, but never got a response.

Email: iteam@ksl.com

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