Friday marks the beginning of Seafair Weekend Festival — the annual extravaganza featuring hydroplane races, the U.S. Navy Blue Angels and more — which is expected to draw a crowd of 180,000 people over three days. But following the shooting at Bite of Seattle at Seattle Center on Sunday that left three dead and at least four injured, questions loom about public safety at large festivals and what measures Seafair is taking.
Seafair is taking “top-notch” security precautions, said Emily Cantrell, the organization’s president and CEO.
All events during Seafair Weekend are gated; attendees must go through metal detectors with built-in weapons detection technology and have their bags checked before entering, abiding by a strict list of prohibited items. Cantrell estimated that each day, around 300 security personnel will be present at the festival, including officers from the Seattle Police Department and staff from private firms Axis Security and Kaeka Group Security. Saturday and Sunday are ticketed days, but general admission on Friday is free. Regardless, all attendees will be required to go through security.
“I would never be comfortable asking my own friends, family, the general public to come to Seafair if I didn't believe we had made safety our No. 1 priority,” said Cantrell, who has an added personal reason for her attention to security. Cantrell is a survivor of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting — the deadliest mass shooting in U.S. history.
She said her experience with gun violence has directly informed the way she approaches safety and security planning, and she is “confident” in the measures Seafair has taken for this weekend’s activities.
Seafair puts on several massive summer events in Seattle, including the Fourth of July fireworks show above Lake Union and the Torchlight Parade, on top of the Seafair Weekend Festival. Cantrell said it is impossible to completely eliminate all risk when it comes to public safety at events of this size, but her team has done everything in their power to make sure security is watertight.
“My team knew the day I came on board how I felt about safety,” she said.
Cantrell was one of 22,000 people at the 2017 Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas, where a man fired into the crowd from a hotel room using an arsenal of 23 guns.
“Like a lot of people at Seattle Center, we thought it was fireworks at first,” said Cantrell.
She described standing close to the stage when it happened. She didn’t realize it was a shooting until a woman next to her collapsed after being hit, covered in blood.
Fifty-eight people, as well as the gunman, died and hundreds more were wounded that day.
“My life was forever changed,” Cantrell said. “I know that everyone who was at Seattle Center, their lives will never be the same.”
Cantrell has not shied away from talking about the Las Vegas incident, having testified before Washington state legislators in support of stricter gun laws — including the successful ban of bump stocks, which increase the firing speed of semiautomatic weapons to that of fully automatic ones. Still, she has carried the psychological toll for years, wrestling with survivor’s guilt and PTSD.
She described how Fourth of July used to be her favorite holiday, but learned “the hard way” that fireworks were her main trigger.
“When I heard them, I just cowered and cried,” she said. “I realized I couldn't stick around town anymore for the Fourth.”
This, along with anxiety about large crowds, posed a challenge when Cantrell was first offered the position of CEO at Seafair in 2024. She had worked there a few years prior, but returning to the organization would mean overcoming significant PTSD triggers. At the same time, the job presented an opportunity to use her experience in a way that could benefit public safety at such popular Seattle events.
The Seafair Weekend festival does not appear to have had major issues with safety, according to publicly available meeting minutes from Seattle’s special events committee. However, according to those minutes, the Fourth of July event at Gas Works Park had struggled in previous years with security and overcrowding.
In 2023, a representative from the Seattle Fire Department noted that the event did not have enough security personnel and faltered on checking bags at one point. In 2024, a representative from the Seattle Police Department noted that some people were throwing backpacks over the fences or bypassing security altogether.
These issues appear to have been smoothed over, as committee notes from 2025 indicate that the Fourth of July event went “calmly.”
Seafair organizers confirmed that they have made incremental crowd control changes to the Gas Works Park Fourth of July event in recent years, such as instituting a capacity limit in 2024 and advertising gate closures at 8 p.m. The event has been fenced for years, though nonticketed; this year, for the first time, tickets were required (though free) to attend.
Cantrell is still trying to figure out how to introduce more safety measures at other events like the Torchlight Parade, which — being a parade — is not fenced in and has never had metal detectors.
“Every single day, I'm thinking about safety and security,” said Cantrell. “I would never forgive myself if I knew we could have done something differently.”
Since becoming CEO, Cantrell said she has begun to overcome some of her fears. She has learned to love the Fourth of July again, describing how important a “visible” security presence has been to her sense of safety.
Still, given the fatal violence at Seattle Center on Sunday, she understands the hesitancy that some may feel about attending Seafair Weekend.
“I don't want to try and change anyone's feelings. They’re valid,” Cantrell said. “Seattle deserves opportunities to come together. … And if there are long lines, then hopefully people understand it's because we are taking security so seriously.”
Seattle Times staff reporter Margo Vansynghel contributed to this report.
© 2026 The Seattle Times. Visit www.seattletimes.com. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
