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ramdram

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    Voluntary theatre worker
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    Retired from BBC Ext Services; Monitoring. Some limited experience of studio practices and live sound in BBC. Now help, as volunteer, at Plymouth theatre with access for disabled patrons, ie. helping said patrons with using headphones for Audio Described performances and general audio reinforcement. Volunteer also for various local amdram companies as sound/lighting bloke and general dogsbody.
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    Once a local Branch Secretary for Beta and safety rep.
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    Ross Kneebone

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    Far East Cornwall
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    Anything to do with any theatrical tech stuff.<br /><br />Drinking real ale.

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  1. And if the training is there to ensure these standards are attained and indeed maintained then all the better. I would like to believe that there was/is nothing malicious behind the recent events but simply a lack of understanding regarding the forces of Nature and allowance thereof.. I allude to having someone who just scraped a "pass" sort of thing cf someone with an "A*+ with distinction" in designing "a" the temporary structure. Might even be an idea to include a module on meteorology perhaps.
  2. A fair point ref your use of "system" Kerry. However someone or some people have to administer this system or take the overall responsibility for a system. And, according to Brony, in his experience, I infer this "system" could be less well managed in some places. We read in the report of the Indiana collapse of several issues which could be down to an individual. Take the issue of the concrete ground anchors as an example. Someone must have decided that the weight of the ground anchors combined were sufficiently heavy to withstand the lateral force generated by the wind. And someone else might have agreed with them. They were wrong, not because they wanted to be wrong, but because they were confident the weight they had decided/calculated/estimated was sufficient. As above I put this down to their training/education, or their less than complete understanding of the possible forces generated by the wind. (Slightly OT. One thing about the recent winds around our venue is that I have been more than aware of the fixings of our canopy rafters to the ground anchors. Allegedly we experienced gusts of 60mph around the Caradon Mast area yet nothing on the main canopy moved more than it was supposed to, or tore, apart from a few toggles on some secondary sheets. These secondary sheets were all engineered well after the main canopy was fitted...whoever designed the main canopy really did know their business. This main canopy uses keder type slots/grooves. I don't know what the yield strength of the lip on a keder slot is...but it must be a "lot".)
  3. Ref the playing the blame game, it is extremely important to find the responsible persons (I do not say culprits btw) for a whole host of legal reasons of course but for discovering who the designer/team were and how they were trained and by whom. You have to start somewhere so the first port of call might just as well be the designers and their plans. Then there are the folk who signed off the structure...it may be they were not educated (in the technical sense) well enough to spot any flaws in the design. In other words there needs to be a paper trail right back to the training of the designer and inspectors. It may be that the designer has a flawed knowledge of the intricacies of scaff design or mating the scaff with "stage" truss perhaps. He or she may be genuinely perplexed at the failure and begin to imagine that the rigging crew were not as assiduous in the construction...after all, if the riggers followed the blueprint so to speak then they might have had a moment's doubt but carried on regardless in the sure (yet inaccurate) belief that the designer knew their trade. Or perhaps a single rigger simply did not torque a nut tight enough? Said designer may have designed many previous structures but got away with it those times because there was not such a heavy load of kit being flown at that time, say. Or possibly the designer user some CAD type package? Perhaps that package's data is incorrect? Perhaps the designer did not fully understand the program? Perhaps the designer allowed the "trainee" to design the structure and merely glanced at the design before accepting it as "fit for purpose"? Without wishing to minimise the human cost it's not really about Scott...it's about all the other Scotts of the future, right across the planet, who are the innocent victims...of folk who may be just as blameless as themselves because of their training or less than complete understanding of temporary structures.
  4. Crikey Brony, your remarks on some of the aspects are appalling...the fact that you mention from your experience in other places there was no oversight bod or the lampies don't know the weight of their kit(????!!!!). Or perhaps the worst is "these tragedies always raise the issue..." Or is it that you would be obliged to hang kit and, from your post, and by my inference, the LD not be concerned about the overall weight of the load on whatever... Does this imply that nobody even signs off the design (against vagaries of the weather/ground anchorage etc) before the truss/scaff leaves the yard...or signs off the truss/scaff when erected or has organised an inspection regime for the entire structure. I find this almost unbelievable, yet the incident has occurred...and there has to be a reason or even multiple reasons. The points raised in your post is almost on a par with whistleblowing but could indeed be a contributory factor(s) in this latest incident. Speculation this may be of course but it might be a shrewd notion for anyone involved in temporary structures to review their practices before the publication of a report...why wait?
  5. Of course we speculate on BR...it's what we do as a species across the planet...it sounds a bit too precious to state we should not speculate; after all it is a forum..and nobody sat around the Forum in Rome waiting for the barbarians to arrive on the doorstep before evolving an RA on "Intruders at the Gates, action plan to get rid of". Of course there's blame to be laid somewhere...duff design, duff construction, duff manufacture of the components, abuse of said components before the fact and during the fact...insufficient monitoring of the scaff structure...overloading the wrong part of the structure...not realizing parts of the structure were overloaded. The report might, if we speculate (further) from the other recent findings, attach a proportion of blame to all of the above to some degree...I don't suppose "Act of God" is going to be enough. What really matters, to my mind, is what we" do about the findings. Looks like the "authorities" in Indiana twigged quite quickly after the fact...yet dare we speculate why this issue was not addressed much earlier...especially as there is a history of nasty weather? These events certainly made me a bit more aware of stuff we hang at our venue and whether it is permissible to "mission creep" as it were...no was the answer. As for folk knowing about hanging stuff overhead...that does sound unduly optimistic. I have now learnt, via BR and links, that if anyone who wants to hang stuff at our venue (very rare as it happens) does NOT ask about the SWL of whatever they want to attach to BEFORE they arrive then you need to be a tad "concerned".
  6. Having very recently taken more of an interest in all things rigging oriented...I happened across the Prolyte site: http://issuu.com/prolyte_group/docs/prolyte_blackbook They have a very informative (for me anyway) "Blackbook" online manual (with trendy options for virtual page turning and so forth). Prolyte make mention that truss does NOT last forever and advise on when to scrap the stuff on a "your mileage may vary" basis. See Section 18, Page 89. It occurs to me that perhaps the truss failures we read of in the press/see on TV, may in fact be time expired and was due for retirement the "gig" just before it collapsed. Obviously this is speculation but possibly said truss failure really was a gig too far?
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