Event Safety Alliance: This month the industry was faced with two separate but related eye-opening reminders. On April 6, 2019 the industry lost another veteran member of our family in a heartbreaking accident on the Coachella festival site. Less than a week later, an inquest into the 2012 stage roof collapse in Toronto that killed another member of our family returned 27 recommendations that, had they been in place, might have helped break the chain of causation in both events
5 comments:
I think the most interesting thing about this article is that it points out culture changes that need to happen the rigging community to the work site safer and not physical ways to make things safer. This goes to show that people do know how to do the safe thing and it is more of a culture change that needs to take place. This is completely unsurprising as the more I learn about traditional theatre practices. The theatre is a creature of habit and this call to action clearly calls theatre out for doing this as well as making sure that theatre tries changing this for people's safety. I think this article makes a really strong point when it says that the more experienced, other riggers need to set this culture. From my understanding and little work with IA and Equity members, I have seen that you listen and do what the boss tells you to do. It is unheard of the new person questioning the older staff. This culture forces the other people to have an eye for safety and I’m so glad this article pointed that out.
This article makes one thing very clear: the culture surrounding safety needs to change. Industry leaders (owners, producers, promoters, etc…) need to be held accountable for the safety regulations and practices held within their organizations. Workers need to take them seriously, and not adopt the “too cool for safety” ideology that I see all too often on threads about tragedy in the Stagehand Humor facebook group. There needs to be a mutual understanding of the things at stake when someone is working on site, especially in rigging. People’s lives are at risk, and once an audience is in the room this extends far beyond those of the stagehands. Work environments for workers need to be safer for them, and venues cannot be too dangerous to hold an audience. I have read so many stories about industry-related death in the last few weeks, and it is honestly shocking that things have not been changed much earlier than now. Hopefully these new measures are taken seriously and go on to change how different companies operate their safety protocols.
I find it really ridiculous that these kinds of things to be said. I do not see how anyone can work productively if safety is not the first priority. At the end of the day, in this industry, it is all about people, whether they are building or performing or just watching. To me, it is obvious that keeping those people safe would be the most important item on anyone’s agenda. It may only be obvious to me because this message has been ingrained into me for years; everyone I have had to work with has told me multiple times that safety is important than any of the work we do; even when I was being told to do something quickly, it was quickly followed by a reminder that safety was more important than speed. I really hope that people wake up to this straightforward principle because enough accidents have happened and it is obvious that something needs to change.
The heart breaking news from past few weeks were responded, finally. As a member in this society, I am feeling both depressed but hopeful. From my past experiences(also there were a few actually happened relatively recently), it is really a uphill battle that hardly seeing a end. Hazards are all around us, and when it catches some one, it is always surprisingly obvious that something terrible would happen if multiple safety nets failed at the same time. The one topic I would like to actively pushing is that we should make a system that reports, records and exams the past occurrences. Only by establishing an open database for upcoming generations of our peers, we can really navigate ourselves out of the dangerous zone. We have been avoiding discussions for the failures for too long. To accept the accidents are not only happening unpredictably is the first step forward. We should be talking about it so no one will run into the similar situations blindly.
Since I first learned about Event Safety Alliance, I have always appreciated their firm stance that safety is, or ought to be, a cultural value that must be developed. I often find myself telling someone on my staff not to do something, but catching myself in the act later on. The hardest part for me is not prioritizing safety over production for the people I supervise, but enforcing those rules on myself. I think it is particularly important for leaders to visibly follow safety protocols (besides the fact that no one is exempt from them and no one is exempt from the possibility of getting injured) because there can be a mindset that senior members of a team will do whatever necessary to get things done. Junior members see this behavior and come to believe that once they have graduated to leadership roles, they should do the same. This article hits the issue on the nose: productions and vendors both need to place more value on human life than on getting the show up in time, and they need to clearly state and follow this value.
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