The tower, erected stage left of the mainstage, buckled under the weight of speakers after they were hoisted into position by a crane.
Site manager Kirit Makan said nobody was hurt.
Saturday, January 25, 2014
Tower topples at Parachute festival site
The tower, erected stage left of the mainstage, buckled under the weight of speakers after they were hoisted into position by a crane.
Site manager Kirit Makan said nobody was hurt.
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6 comments:
at least it happened during the set up phase and no one was hurt, whereas surely people would have been hurt if it had fallen during a performance. it would be good for the article to mention if the cause of the failure was undetectable error in the structure of the scaffolding, or that someone was just careless in their loading of speaker arrays onto it.
That's a pretty disastrous disaster...I'd like to know what happened to make an entire fall down? It sounds like this was a pretty routine setup, so was the structure erected incorrectly? Or was there a mechanical fault with the hardware? These kinds of accidents always serve as a reminder to get all rigging certified, and to check all of your equipment. I wonder if this is in any way similar to what my class saw at the circus that one time...while we were there, they were hoisting some truss into the air, and one of the chain motors (the one in the corner) started to lift independently. This bent the entire truss, but the crew decided to ignore the manufacturer and continue to use the truss. Now there may not have been visible damage, but who knows if one day a normal load could bring the whole thing down.
I was really upset by the tone of the site manager. I get that things like this happen all the time and that no one was hurt, but to say that ''One of the parts of the scaffolding frame was just bent up,'' as though that is not that big a deal is ridiculous to me. People need to be a lot more careful in discerning whether or not to use certain material, especially if there is visible damage.
It sounds like the festival is starting a trend of poor rigging. I am curious at what point in the transportation, unloading, or set-up process someone should have been responsible for verifying the condition of the scaffolding. Sometimes we can get in a bad habit of being less careful when we are used to doing something over and over but this mentality needs to be thwarted when it comes to matters of safety such as structural integrity.
It's a good thing nobody was hurt, but the fact that something like that happened is kind of ridiculous. It would be interesting to find out what actually brought the truss down, and what the original load calculations for the truss were. I wonder what would of happened had the structure not fallen when the speakers were initially loaded on to it, and whether or not the movement from the speakers playing music would have affected it. Also, it's ridiculous that a chandelier fell on someones head at a similar event.
This seems like there were a lot of problems in the safety checking associated with the event. That said the article does a poor job at covering what these oversights actually were, and how they related to each other to cause the collapse. The last line especially, about the collapse of the bottle chandelier, seems completely unrelated to the rest of the article. Were the same people involved in the rigging? Is her band performing at the Parachute Festival? Clearer information is needed.
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