80,000 in Evansville on Monday? 'We know they were here,' eclipse planner says.

EVANSVILLE — Roads stuck in bumper-to-bumper gridlock. Hordes of people packed tightly into large outdoor spaces and threatening to spill into the street.

Those are the images some conjured up when local planners for Monday's total solar eclipse in Evansville said the once-in-a-lifetime celestial event might bring 80,000 visitors to the area.

But for the most part, it just didn't look like 80,000 visitors. Especially when you consider that locals were out there too.

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"Somebody called and said, ‘What’s it look like down at Central Park?’ And I said, ‘Well, there’s people here,'" said Henderson (Ky.) County Sheriff Chip Stauffer.

"But I would say no different than when there’s a good day and school’s not in session, you know what I mean? It’s hard to gauge. Now, they brought lawn chairs and stuff, so yes, there was a turnout."

Henderson "didn’t have any (traffic) issues whatsoever" in its downtown quadrant, Stauffer said. There were, however, backups on U.S. 41's southbound lanes running from Evansville to Henderson.

Evansville police had officers on the ground, drones and cameras to see any crippling traffic congestion that might materialize and then spring into action if necessary. It wasn't.

Explore Evansville, the lead local eclipse planning organization, was resolute on Tuesday. Alexis Berggren, the organization's president and CEO, said it's likely 80,000 visitors from areas at least 30 miles outside the region did visit Vanderburgh, Warrick, Posey and Gibson counties in Indiana and Henderson County, Kentucky.

But not all in large public gatherings, Berggren said. In smaller gatherings spread over a large area.

"I think where we didn’t feel the density in the area, especially in the days leading up to the event, that’s probably because people were largely in the homes of friends and relatives," she said. "But we do know that there was increased traffic at restaurants and retail stores."

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Some local hotels still showed vacancies online as late as Sunday night. Berggren said 80,000 visitors were never going to be confined to the area's roughly 40 hotels anyway.

But Bob Baer, a Southern Illinois University official who played a central role in the planning of Carbondale, Illinois for the 2017 eclipse, told the Courier & Press before Monday's event that planners here had to be realistic.

"I can say that from a tourism standpoint, it is a good thing, but the numbers of actual tourists who come and stay a while is much lower than what people claim you should expect," Baer said by email.

"Use common sense when estimating crowds. We count tickets sold to our event as a primary indicator. Don't believe ridiculously high numbers of potential visitors."

A few thousand here, a few thousand there

Unofficial estimates of the numbers of people at major eclipse public gatherings — estimates that included locals as well as out-of-town visitors — didn't bespeak stadium-sized crowds.

• The University of Southern Indiana reported Tuesday morning that more than 5,000 people showed up for its Solarpalooza event. Explore Evansville said staff on the ground at USI put the number at somewhere between 3,500 and 4,000.

• Evansville police and Explore Evansville each estimated about 3,000 people showed up on the city's riverfront. Downtown Evansville Economic Improvement District produced a higher estimate — 8,000-10,000 people in an area stretching from Sunrise Pump Station cascade and Sunset Skatepark to Bally’s Evansville Casino & Hotel.

• Explore Evansville estimated about 700 people attended an eclipse party hosted by Wesselman Woods on the former Par-3 golf course. EPD put the number at about 1,000.

• Roughly 1,300 people showed up at Angel Mounds for an eclipse watching event, according to Explore Evansville.

• Henderson, Ky., which had about two minutes and 30 seconds of totality, did attract thousands to watch, said Police Chief Billy Bolin. A few thousand. "It wasn’t overwhelming," Bolin said. "There were a lot of people out enjoying it, but I would say more in the lower thousands would be, if there was any kind of guess."

Planner: A formula spit out the 80,000 estimate

Berggren said Explore Evansville arrived at its estimate of 80,000 visitors outside the region by following a formula created by Dr. Kate Russo, founder of Being in the Shadow, an Australian-based, global eclipse consulting company.

Russo describes herself as "an author, psychologist, and eclipse chaser who has seen 13 total solar eclipses from six continents over 20 years" and an authority on community eclipse planning.

The formula isn't for the faint of heart.

"We took the population of the region and then we multiplied that by a numerator and then added in the hotel occupancy we had," Berggren said. "That came about to be somewhere in the 263,000 range, and proportionally we decreased that alongside the estimates of the visitation to the state. So it was really based on population plus the hotel rooms we have in the area, proportionally compared to what was expected throughout Indiana."

More: Eclipse planners working to avoid nightmare traffic scenario in Evansville

The 80,000 out-of-towners that Explore Evansville believes were here were just hard to see in their totality, Berggren said.

"I wouldn’t expect 80,000 people to be carved up across five events, so I would expect that they were in backyards and at the country club or at various, different watch sites," she said.

"I do think a lot of people came to Evansville, stayed in Evansville because we had all the amenities here — we have the hotels and all that kind of stuff — but then probably went out to more rural parts of the county to watch it where there wasn’t light pollution."

The eclipse isn't over until the data sings

Better numbers will come into focus in the days to come, said Adam Trinkel, executive director of Downtown Evansville. Trinkel said the organization has access to cell phone location data generated by analytics company Placer.ai.

"It usually runs on a 48- to 72-hour lag, so I looked at it (Tuesday) morning and the data is only as recent as April 5," Trinkel said Tuesday. "In probably the next day or so we’ll be able to go in and look at that and actually get a better understanding of how many cell phones were downtown, which can give us a pretty accurate visitor count."

More to the point for many local businesses, Explore Evansville had projected that visitors would spend at least $7.7 million on lodging, transportation, retail, recreation and food and beverages in Vanderburgh County alone in the runup to the total solar eclipse.

That too will take some time to confirm. Berggren said the organization needs about two weeks to compile complete retail and food and beverage spending data. Hotel occupancy reports should be available next week.

Carbondale's Baer counseled caution about those final numbers, too. He suggested the notion that eclipse visitors to Evansville would stay here the weekend before the Monday event is flawed.

"Keep in mind the majority of people just come in for one day," Baer wrote. "They don't go to the grocery store and in most cases don't even shop for souvenirs outside of what they can grab conveniently at their viewing location. They get gas, a meal or two, and go home."

Berggren said the 80,000 visitors projection will hold up when all the data does come in.

"We know they were here," she said. "It’s just a little early for me to say where exactly we landed."

This article originally appeared on Evansville Courier & Press: How many people came to Evansville for the solar eclipse?