Sunday, January 22, 2012
Follow-up to Indiana State Fair Stage Canopy Collapse
TheatreFace: Following the weather-induced collapse last summer of the stage canopy at the Ind..., the Indiana State Legislature announced today that a Senate Bill was authored that addresses the need to have outdoor entertainment structures inspected before use. The bill was passed and forwarded to the House for consideration.
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Imposing more regulations on structures and the entertainment industry can be good, but we will have to wait and see all of the affects. The process and scope of inspections that will have to be done will be significant and the demand for inspectors will be outrageous. Depending on if you meet the requirements to be exempt from this, or know if you are or not, can cause to people legally or illegally without knowing where they fall. I believe that there is still a gap in the process and regulation of outdoor stage equipment in addition to the gap of "qualified" event managers. I feel that the simple training and education people should have access too, such as event safety, or severe weather training, should be more on the for front then having one skilled person do inspections.
This seems to be a fine example of how politicians miss the point: the components at the Indiana State Fair performed to the level expected from them - they just weren't ready for such freak weather conditions. As the article mentions, the problem was somebody's failure to the call the event, and this government regulation doesn't look like it is doing anything to regulate that duty should a similar set of circumstances arrive in the future. I'm sure that the inspection process will be inconvenient to schedule and seldom particularly enlightening; the real answer is to find a means of ensuring that the people in charge make the right choices.
The interesting thing is that the structure itself meets almost all the requirements. The issue with the state fair collapse had to do with someone not shutting down the venue which, yes, there are a number of clauses in the new bill that address inspection and weather, but I am not sure how effective they will be. As the TheatreFace article states, it is really about Management saying no, this is not safe, we need to stop the show.
the indiana state fair structure failure is a tragedy. Yes the venue should have recognized the incoming weather threat and followed procedure to clear the venue and make the structure safe. To avoid a Hines worthy tangent I will shorten myself. Any area that has a history of higher weather factors should be taken into account when developing and constructing a structure for any venue. On the other hand for indiana state to mandate that all venue structures need to be inspected and certified is fairly out of hand. This would mandate that any single night outdoor concert venue's would have to be inspected before use and those structures typically don't go up until as late as the day before or even the day of. So scheduling an inspection (or let alone deciding on who can inspect) will be just another locations nightmare. The only viable way for this legislation to even be a possibility is if they make it an OSHA style certification so that Technical Directors or a supervisory staff can have the authority to make the inspection on site during construction. moral of the story is that government is just looking for an easier way to put the blame on someone
I think it is good that so much analysis is going in to the incident in Indiana. The fact that government legislation is on the way to to being changed in order to include more stringent inspection practices says something about the seriousness of the matter. However, I think it will be tough to pin down exactly who is qualified enough to structurally evaluate entertainment-specific situations that have to take into account so many factors that can affect the general safety of the event.
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