Manchester, Tenn. ? The third annual Bonnaroo festival last weekend notched its best numbers yet for gross and attendance, but two fatalities cast a pall on the event.

More than 90,000 hardy fans braved sweltering heat and the occasional severe thunderstorm to watch 80 acts, including Bob Dylan, the Dead, Trey Anastasio, Dave Matthews & Friends and David Byrne, take the stage on a 700-acre farm about 60 miles south of Nashville. Steve Winwood replaced Willie Nelson on Saturday’s bill after Nelson was forced to bow out because of carpal tunnel problems.

Co-producers Superfly Productions and A.C. Entertainment estimated this year’s gross around $14.5 million. That figure will likely be enough to make the festival tops among all engagements for the year. Last year Bonnaroo grossed $11.5 million, second only to Bruce Springsteen’s record-setting 10-night stand at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N.J.

Bonnaroo, along with the High Sierra festival in Quincy, Calif., and this week’s Wakarusa Music and Camping Festival at Clinton Lake outside Lawrence, Kan., have been billed by Billboard magazine as this summer’s biggest music festivals. Organizers are expecting about 15,000 people for the first-ever Wakarusa festival, which will feature 80 acts from Thursday through Sunday.

With the stifling heat and hundreds of drug arrests at the third Bonnaroo music festival, Coffee County Sheriff Steve Graves said it was fortunate there were just two deaths in a crowd he estimated at more than 150,000 people.

“When there is drug usage and the heat has been like it has, we have been expecting it every year. … This year our luck ran out,” Graves said Monday.

Preliminary toxicology tests indicated both victims were using drugs.

Graves said the death count easily could have been higher.

Festival spokesman Rick Farman disagreed with the sheriff’s crowd estimate, saying “we sold 90,000 tickets on the nose. With staff, artists and guests, that’s another 5,000. No more than that.”

Bonnaroo festival visitors play Sunday in one of many giant mud puddles created by Saturday evening's storms on a farm near Manchester, Tenn. The music event, which drew at least 90,000 people, was the site of two fatalities. Both victims tested positive for drug use, investigators said.

The deaths were the first in Bonnaroo’s three-year history. The festival ran Friday through Sunday at a farm between Nashville and Chattanooga and offered a diverse lineup that included Bob Dylan, Dave Matthews and The Dead.

Amber Lynn Stevens of Flatwoods, Ky., died Saturday. Her 24th birthday would have been Monday.

“We know that preliminary toxicology showed a presence of four different drugs,” Graves said. “There was cocaine and marijuana and two other drugs.”

Graves said the woman’s body was sent to the state medical examiner in Nashville for an autopsy.

Brandon Taylor, 20, of Lowell, Mich., died Friday. Details of his preliminary toxicology test, including the kind of drugs he had been using, were not immediately available.

“It appears to be drug-related,” investigator Dale Brissey said. “He was with his mother and stepfather.”

Weather reports put the highs at 90 degrees or more Friday and Saturday and the heat index, a measure of how hot it feels, was above 100 degrees.

“The humidity was extremely high,” Brissey said. “The high humidity, high heat, alcohol and drugs — it’s not a good combination.”