Wednesday, January 26, 2011
Rigging FAIL: The most dangerous kind of runaway.
Backstage at BackstageJobs.com | Life behind the scenes…: "A counterweight fly system should never be out of balance when the heavier part of it is higher than the lighter part. Counterweight should have been stripped from the lineset’s arbor before any lights or goods from the batton were removed. Simply trying to keep the lineset arbor heavy, and trusting the lock and some temporary weight (usually bodies holding on to the batten) not only goes against the design of the system, but is ridiculously unsafe. It is unconscionable that this would be done in a student environment: teaching these students that this unsafe practice is acceptable.
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3 comments:
Unfortunately, this is something that happens way more than it should. At my high school, a similar situation happened. There was a load-in day that our TD could not be present, so our director hired someone else for the day to be our supervisor. All of the students were taught the correct way of using the fly system, so when the temporary TD told us to make the system arbor heavy, we all disagreed with him, so to show us that we were wrong, he did it himself. Thus, we had a runaway batten. Thankfully, everyone got out of the way in time and no one was injured, except for this temp. TD's ego. It was a very scary and dangerous lesson to all involved. After reading some of the comments posted on the article's page, namely the one posted by the student that was present when this accident occurred, it is beyond me why they chose to take this tactic to load this piece of scenery without considering the negative consequences that could come from it. It's a very scary thought to think that the "professionals" in charge are this careless.
This is ridiculous, that this happened. I am sure that this would have not got all that much news if it was not for the fact that Blue Man group was there and it ruined a lot of their gear. Someone has some explaining to do and is probably no longer with the company. I wonder if the $60,000 that was damaged is ever thing it dose that seem to be that much money when you are talking about a touring show. I am sure that this happens all the time and it is just not reported. I have never seen this happen but I hope that I never have to see it. It seems that the places that I have worked are great safe places and if anything is going wrong someone will talk up and stop what is going on and fix the problem before it gets worse.
Trying to speed up load ins by cutting corners is not a safe practice. And as we can see in this example, it comes to bite you in the backside. If they had tried to speed up load in by hiring more labor, then that would have made sense. And surely more stagehands is cheaper than the 60k bill someone now has to pick up.
From the student's response, it didn't seem like things were being conducted terribly unsafely on their end. Surely stabbing a lineset is fairly standard, right? Perhaps the industry should use aluminum rods or something instead of dowels?
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