The Water Festival is easily manageable nowadays. This thread was started in 2010, before the tragedy on the bridge. The festival was an awe-inspiring event in the years 2005-2010. Peaceman used to call it an epic of biblical proportions. There were insane amounts of people crammed into the city. They were mostly rural people, and let's just say they were mostly the types that would stand on the left side of a Tube escalator. Many just wandered around endlessly in giant crowds or slept in impromptu camps or under plastic sheets in the parks. The security was a bit lax, I hung out at the 2008 with a bunch of let's say "security", and we drank Budweiser all day, nobody seemed too interested in doing their job.
So the disaster changed everything. I was down in that area the night before, we drove down in a pick-up and parked near the Russian Embassy. We walked past Sambo who still lived in the field behind the Australian Embassy. Koh Pich had only just been developed so was a new place for people to see. It didn't seem like anything unusual so I was pretty shocked to hear what happened the next evening. There was no festival for a few years, then some very tame efforts without boats because of the floods etc.
Last year was the first time I saw a decent attendance since 2010. It's a much more organized event now, the whole nature of it has changed. It's no longer viable for your average bumpkin to roll up in the capital off a coach with 20,000 Riel to last them the next three days while they walk around or doss in corners. It's just too expensive and you can't sleep in the parks anymore. So it seems the festival has a slightly different demographic, and (luckily)there just aren't the kind of crowds around there used to be. The security presence is something in recent years. There were loads of checkpoints manned by Gendarmerie/ Flying Tiger Police and then these heavy-looking squads of Gendarmes wearing tons of tactical stuff marching around. Then there were the goons in suits. Thousands of them in black suits with earpieces. They had lanyards with their ID/ units etc but I generally avoid spooky people, especially when I'm with my kid!
It's easy enough to get around, I'll be there tomorrow with some friends in the daytime. I'll be out of there well before dark though. It's not so much dangerous as just a pain in the ass to navigate when too many people decide it's time to go. I think the festival gets a lot of bad press but it has changed and is worth a bash. Enjoy yourselves whatever you do.