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Toronto Star: More than four years after the Radiohead stage collapse at Downsview Park, one of the companies on trial for the deadly incident wants the case thrown out because the legal proceedings are taking too long.
This article is troublesome to me for a variety of reasons. If a performance and safety consultant has enough time to investigate, create a report, and publish her findings on how to fix the safety issues she found in a much shorter period of time, how is the litigation in this case not completed? I understand that they had to get all of the facts together to create a case against the engineer, but I would suspect that the safety consultant for OSHA had those same facts. That being said, the delay does not justify throwing any case where someone’s negligence may or may not have resulted in someone’s death. On one hand, the engineer in question needs to go through the full trial process and be penalized and possibly lose his license for the failure of the building to support the load it should have. On the other hand, I wonder if the building was built as the financiers requested the maximum loads be met and if the Radiohead rig was in fact too heavy for the building. That is what the trial is for, and if the engineer is innocent, the trial would also indicate that someone else along the line was negligent and should be held accountable.
Any accident in during a performance is extremely serious. It puts dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of people in danger. In this case, I don't understand how the suspect company is even considering just dumping the case especially because there WAS a death and there WERE three other injuries. It's understandable that the victim's family would be extremely upset because their loved one isn't getting justice. It's understandable that this case has been going on for a while now (4 years) and it's beginning to become a little excessive. However, it's not appropriate for the company to just be forgetting the intensity of the drummer's death. In some cases, murder trial have been open for almost double, triple, or quadruple the time that this case has been open for. Furthermore, I don't think the engineer should be the only one held responsible--the company definitely has more of a say here instead of just brushing off the incident and throwing it into the dust. Finally, I just hope someone has some logic out there and doesn't throw this case out--this is one of the cases that definitely have to be solved.
2 comments:
This article is troublesome to me for a variety of reasons. If a performance and safety consultant has enough time to investigate, create a report, and publish her findings on how to fix the safety issues she found in a much shorter period of time, how is the litigation in this case not completed? I understand that they had to get all of the facts together to create a case against the engineer, but I would suspect that the safety consultant for OSHA had those same facts. That being said, the delay does not justify throwing any case where someone’s negligence may or may not have resulted in someone’s death. On one hand, the engineer in question needs to go through the full trial process and be penalized and possibly lose his license for the failure of the building to support the load it should have. On the other hand, I wonder if the building was built as the financiers requested the maximum loads be met and if the Radiohead rig was in fact too heavy for the building. That is what the trial is for, and if the engineer is innocent, the trial would also indicate that someone else along the line was negligent and should be held accountable.
Any accident in during a performance is extremely serious. It puts dozens if not hundreds if not thousands of people in danger. In this case, I don't understand how the suspect company is even considering just dumping the case especially because there WAS a death and there WERE three other injuries. It's understandable that the victim's family would be extremely upset because their loved one isn't getting justice. It's understandable that this case has been going on for a while now (4 years) and it's beginning to become a little excessive. However, it's not appropriate for the company to just be forgetting the intensity of the drummer's death. In some cases, murder trial have been open for almost double, triple, or quadruple the time that this case has been open for. Furthermore, I don't think the engineer should be the only one held responsible--the company definitely has more of a say here instead of just brushing off the incident and throwing it into the dust. Finally, I just hope someone has some logic out there and doesn't throw this case out--this is one of the cases that definitely have to be solved.
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