Toronto Stage Collapse

[Junior8]

Let's get to the nub. This is the latest in a number of such incidents involving different types of construction and circumstances. Now this could be merely happenstance or something rather more statistically relevant. I don't know. If I was an artist though I might well take Jim Digby's suggestion seriously.

 

For me though the most interesting comment made on Monday was from a Canadian Ministry of Labour spokesman who said: "We still haven't determined who owns the stage. So all of the orders regarding the stage are being given to Live Nation. ... They're in charge of the whole shebang, right?" Well they might be who knows - as brony pointed out there is already buck passing going on. (Edit - I wasn't going to name the firms involved but soemone already has.They are in the link.)

 

Now it surely beggars belief that in the case of a serious incident like this an official body can't apparently get a simple answer to a simple question - who owns the stage -from a multi-national concert promoting company.

 

I know this industry is increasingly fragmented but surely not to that extent?

Edited June 19, 2012 by Junior8

[ImagineerTom]

Since whoever "owns" the stage would have legal responsibilities to ensure it's to spec and set-up properly I can think of some good "reduce the ammount we could be sued" reasons why no-one would want to admit to "owning" it this early in an investigation

[Roderick]

And we are back to 'who to blame'.

Blame is not important. Blame is not going to bring Scott back. Blame is not going to fix the problem.

 

What is important in these sad matters is understanding how it happened, understanding what went wrong.

Understanding and recognizing warning signs. Learn from these things is what we should be doing, then we can prevent them from happening again.

 

Stop the fingerpointing, it serves no purpose unless you are in the news or legal industry.

As theatre technicians we should focus on the how and why.

[brony]

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?

 

Cheers:)

Most of the craziness I saw was on smaller-mid-sized shows (12 movers and some cans kind of thing). When I was in the biz, anyone who could buy some box (or 12" triangle) truss could call themselves a 'production company' Truly scary. I don't think our head tech even knew what SWL was.

 

On the bigger shows, I was just a stagehand. The whole thing was a lot more coordinated I terms of LDs taking to riggers, etc. but some little unexpected thing always led to us rigging up some kind of 'plan D' on the spot. Usually some old 'pro' would declare it ok by saying "that'll hold."

 

The way we handled the gear wasn't exactly the best either. Chain lifts got slammed around, scaffold was tossed like sticks, things were 'unbent' at the next show.

 

Again, I have no idea what happened here. But without actual regulation, I don't think the industry in this country will learn from it.

[brainwave-generator]

And we are back to 'who to blame'.

Blame is not important. Blame is not going to bring Scott back. Blame is not going to fix the problem.

 

What is important in these sad matters is understanding how it happened, understanding what went wrong.

Understanding and recognizing warning signs. Learn from these things is what we should be doing, then we can prevent them from happening again.

 

Stop the fingerpointing, it serves no purpose unless you are in the news or legal industry.

As theatre technicians we should focus on the how and why.

 

The problem is that when you speculate "why" you inherently, with or without intent, speculate "who", since everything that could go wrong is somebody's responsibility. So whatever went wrong, it was the person with the responsibility who you're pointing a finger at. Whether you mention them or not, you are. That is what I was trying to get at.

 

There is nothing anyone can do from the comfort of their arm chair and internet connection to look at the stage and suggest why it fell down. It's a tangled pile of metal at the moment. And that tangled pile of metal will be stripped apart and loaded onto trucks, meaning you'll never see the depths of it. Thus, the only people who will be able to input any kind of meaningful info on how it happened, are the engineers working on it.

[ramdram]

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.

Edited June 19, 2012 by ramdram

[paulears]

The thing that makes me intrigued is that whenever these sad events happen, and they get discussed on forums worldwide - with pretty much the same results as on the BR, there are so many people who from the pics can produce quite sensible sounding explanations, and very often have experience to backup how dangerous the incident was. If everyone is so knowledgable and experienced, then how do they keep happening. Do the people who see these things when they are place and not collapsed point them out with the same efficiency as they do post-collapse?

 

I'm not pointing fingers - but it does seem that the people actually there before these accidents don't seem to be able to predict them. We've had wind based incidents fairly often, and I wonder if the structures were upright and totally rigid before they collapsed, or did they start to show instability when the wind started to pick up - and nobody noticed before the danger point was reached.

 

If the structures are insured - and I'm talking about the big ones really - then shouldn't somebody from the insurance company inspect them before they are used. Maybe this does happen, but signing these off must be a rope around the neck if the thing fails.

[kerry davies]

History lesson Ramdram.

In the eighties I helped build large scale scaffold based stages and I am proud of what we achieved. In the late eighties/early nineties we stopped doing so in the UK for several reasons. We could no longer take the weight being suspended; moving heads, wider stages and later on screens all made it technically impossible. Other reasons were the time factor, labour intensive builds and de-rigs and the lack of expertise, stages are like no other scaffold. Our management systems were rough and ready, we hung/supervised everything and nobody messed with our stage, end of!

 

In 1993 the industry became aware of possible regulation and created the Purple Guide. Renewed in '99 and currently being revamped it became the authoritative guide on events safety. The raison d'etre was that rather we who know set the standards than the ignorant politicians impose them. The same goes, broadly speaking, for the IStructE guide, NRC and lots of other "self-regulation". More management systems.

 

Just taking Radiohead as an example, they do not and probably never have played on scaffold based stages in the UK. Their tour specs are a sort of management system that should ensure minimum standards for their stages taking account of weight, load distribution etc.

The stage builders will have tech specs stating precisely what and how things can be suspended from their systems. That too is a management system of a kind.

Now I believe that these management systems, and maybe others, were incompatible or that one or more were flawed.

 

Systems not individuals, not riggers or designers or builders or LD's but systems. The telling fact about Indianoplis is that they did an exercise regarding extreme weather and then failed to add the results to their show management system. Everyone involved including the emergency services knew what could happen but no-one took responsibility for adding it to the event manuals, system failure.

[ramdram]

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".)

Edited June 19, 2012 by ramdram

[Bryson]

To address Brony's posts: Event Safety (or, in fact, all safety) in Canada is not really dealt with on a national level. The different provinces have different (although similar) standards, regulations, enforcing bodies and advising bodies. So, I'm not really qualified to talk about how things are handled in Ontario, having never worked there. I know in BC we're considered lucky to have an organisation called Actsafe who mediate between WorkSafe BC (the nearest equivalent to the HSE in BC), the BC Safety Authority, and the production industry - but I believe Ontario does not have an equivalent - meaning that there's less connection between the enforcing bodies and the industry, and that production is probably quite low on the enforcing bodies priorities. Also note that Canada takes more prescriptive approach to safety regulation and that Risk Assessment as the UK industry knows it is a somewhat new approach here.

 

It's not as bad here in BC as Brony describes, but there are a few things that happen regularly that seem scary to my UK-trained eyes - although mostly that's a difference in "what you're used to" rather than a genuine safety problem. I manage by assuming that as PM, everything is technically my fault if it goes wrong, so I probably run one of the more conservative venues around with regards to Safety. (I know the local conference centre are similarly minded, too.) I really don't want to go to jail, thanks. (I'm too pretty! ;) )

 

Kerry: I'll see what I can find out about the Bluesfest/Cheap Trick business but I haven't heard anything. I might have more luck at the CITT conference this summer as there will be Alberta folks there. But there's the problem in a nutshell - the insulation from province to province means that even if useful lessons were learned, they don't disseminate out very easily as the regulations and enforcement aren't conistent nationally.

[minty]

I am deeply saddened at the news of this event.

I know / have worked with some of the people involved in this event, and my thoughts are with them, their families and friends at this time.

 

I am not qualified to comment on the failiure(s) that resulted in this event, nor do I think that there is enough evidence available as of yet to do so anyway.

 

I hope that in due course the root causes of this incident will be uncovered, and if appropriate, lessons learned.

 

 

Regards,

 

Martin

[Junior8]

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.

 

Interesting. During the vile weather of two weeks ago Mrs J8, was selling at a prestigious event where no staking was possible. The tentage, anchored by blocks and ratchet straps was supplied by a local firm. By the end of the four days the entire paved surface was pitted and chipped from the repeated impact of the concrete 'anchors' being lifted up by the wind and crashing down again. Now nothing actually blew down but that was, IMHO, only luck.

 

The question is will the organizers note this? Will the contractor - or will they simply sigh with relief that they got away with it? Or will the whole bang shoot simply go back into store and be hired out again to somewhere not surrounded by buildings to give some shelter?

Edited June 19, 2012 by Junior8

[karl]

The thing that makes me intrigued is that whenever these sad events happen, and they get discussed on forums worldwide - with pretty much the same results as on the BR, there are so many people who from the pics can produce quite sensible sounding explanations, and very often have experience to backup how dangerous the incident was. If everyone is so knowledgable and experienced, then how do they keep happening. Do the people who see these things when they are place and not collapsed point them out with the same efficiency as they do post-collapse?

It's nearly always easier to look at something that has failed and trace the cause than to predict the failure point before hand.

 

To me the real issue isn't so much why this one incident happened but why such failures seem to keep happening. Search on the BR for 'collapse' and there's about one thread a month discussing the latest disaster.

 

How many temporary staging structures are erected every year and what percentage fail? I suspect if the same percentage of commercial airline flights ended in disaster we'd all be dead by now.

[jono9691]

Kerry, I think you nailed it.

 

These structures are far to large and complex to be safely predictable/reliable.

 

I think one of the main reasons we have had so few catastrophic failures in Oz is because we don't usually build unrealistically large/heavy/complex temporary outdoor structures.

 

I heard a story from a reliable source about a big day out stage and ground support system getting hit with a freak gust lifting the thing a half meter and dropping it. The stage/GS/rigging/lighting and sound ALL FINE.

 

A fav little saying of mine:

Screw creative, let's go with realistic!

 

Anyway, that's my 2c

Edited June 19, 2012 by jono9691

[tom w]

I am aware of a few stage/roof failures which have never reached the press.

A few years ago we were replaced by a client in favour of a cheaper stage and roof. We still had other structures etc on the site, and built the FOH 40m in front of the main stage - which was not even on site when we arrived. Sign offs done, site left, job done. I received a panic call the day before gates opened - the clients preferred suppliers' roof had failed. It was only at lx rig height, and only carrying truss, when some of the main chords broke. We managed to prep, deliver and build a stage and roof system by the next morning. This endeavour involved several drivers, 2 shifts of crew, couriers bringing spares from other event sites, and a whole lot of hard work. But we saved their event.

Skip forward a few years, and the same client has made the same decision to go elsewhere. The cavalry will not be riding if anything untowards happens this time.