We recently had to cancel a Friday night English Ball and a Sat night contra dance - both highly anticipated - due to freezing mist that covered everything in a fine coat of ice. The Highway Patrol was asking everyone to stay off the roads - so we figured that was a pretty good sign we needed to cancel.
The area had hundreds of accidents - but I did not hear of any involving our dancers.
We used email and Facebook for the cancellations and for the other events we offered.
We held last minute scheduled events on Sat and Sun afternoon as well as a dance on Sunday night. Attendance was much lower at the afternoon events than we expected and the cancelled evening events - but everyone got paid. We lost a lot of money. The community pitched in with donations to cover about 1/3 of the losses - and the rest we chalked up to community building
Mac McKeever
Childgrove Country Dancers
St Louis.
From: David Kirchner via Organizers <organizers@lists.sharedweight.net>
To: bobfab@aol.com
Cc: organizers@lists.sharedweight.net
Sent: Thursday, December 29, 2016 5:59 PM
Subject: Re: [Organizers] Cancellation Policies
I don't recall ever cancelling a dance in the Twin Cities on account of weather, certainly not winter weather. We have a policy for an instant cancellation in the event of a tornado warning or a loss of power at nighttime, but I don't think it has come up since we instituted it.
On the other hand, we don't get a lot of big dumps of snow like upstate NY; anything over 6-7 inches is pretty unusual, and 12 inches or more is a once-every-five-years sort of thing -- so the odds of it happening on dance night are pretty low. It does get cold here, but we had a night with 30-40 below wind chills a couple weeks ago and the dance went on as scheduled. We didn't even bother to post an announcement that it was still on.
David