Martin, who owned now defunct Optex Staging, testified Tuesday at the coroner's inquest into the death of 33-year-old Scott Johnson, the Radiohead drum technician who was killed when the stage roof came tumbling down on June 16, 2012.
Thursday, April 04, 2019
Stage design in fatal Radiohead concert collapse called for parts that didn't exist, witness says
Martin, who owned now defunct Optex Staging, testified Tuesday at the coroner's inquest into the death of 33-year-old Scott Johnson, the Radiohead drum technician who was killed when the stage roof came tumbling down on June 16, 2012.
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9 comments:
This is a sad story. There is no reason for there to ever be something like this especially for stupid reasons of not having something in stock or inventory. Even if they didn’t want to fabricate the required components, which they should have, they could have at least over engineered with larger components than to under engineer with not only physically less strong material diameters, but lengths as well. Clearly it is the fault of the engineers and the company for allowing this to happen. Even better, they allowed it for many years. At any point during its use they could have fabricated the required parts, yet they instead decided to sit back and not do anything probably because it seemed to be working for so long. It stopped working and now it really is their fault. I cannot think of any reason as to when this would be okay because the correct response is to engineer correctly or over engineer but you never under engineer anything for this exact reason, someone can and will die. The saving grace about this story is that one engineer came forward and admitted to knowing about this when the company clearly won’t acknowledge any of it.
Woah. I think the insanity of this situation is pretty apparent, but it still seems worth noting. It is astounding to me that safety and common sense were so blatantly and knowingly ignored. That the drawings requested a part that was not in inventory, and especially that the inconsistencies in the drawings persisted through multiple iterations of the stage actually being constructed and torn down until it killed someone. I can’t believe that nobody got punished for this. It seems like you would have to be not just willingly but almost intentionally negligent to just refuse to update paperwork when it is so grossly unsafe and inaccurate. On top of that, the fact that people thought it was perfectly fine, on multiple occasions, to rig what was notated as 3” truss with other dimensions of truss is terrifying. Shouldn’t it be obvious that something that has half the diameter of 3” truss is not as strong? I’m really blown away that this happened the way that it did.
This story made me very sad and disappointed. Reading about the years of negligence on their part is so heartbreaking because a simple fixing cost a human life. Back home, a lot of my tech theatre teachers were in the Local 5 union in town, so I was constantly viewing load-ins, and I could not imagine seeing something like that. Like Nicolaus said, the under engineering was downright ridiculous and I’m glad the engineer came forward and admitted to their mistake. The father of the deceased’s comments broke my heart, especially being an expert in that kind of work. Hearing about your child’s death and knowing who could have and how things could have been fixed is something I feel so bad that he has to experience. As someone who wants to work in live entertainment tours, I hope and pray I never have to hear about this for any of the technicians I’ll work with.
This story is extremely sad and, honestly, completely insane. It sounds absolutely ridiculous to me that a company would have the nerve to change something in the technical design without actually sitting down with the technical designer to talk about it and redesign the component. This is especially true for the enormous structure holding up something about many peoples heads. While it is incredibly sad to hear that a life was taken in the accident, it is also unbelievable that only one person was killed. This mistake could have caused a much larger collapse which could have led to dozens of injuries and many deaths. Things like this make me want to go into technical direction more and more. I want to go into the world with the knowledge I need to help prevent things like this in the future. This is also one of the reasons I want to focus on entertainment rigging in particular.
This story is really heartbreaking and shocking. Honestly, the biggest thing that has been emphasized to me, throughout my theater experience and my life in general, is that safety is the most important thing, more than talent or getting something done quickly or easily. When there are people involved and, like in this case, when there will be people who will be in a space that has been designed to be functional, safety should always be the most important thing. It is really appalling to me that people were completely aware that this system would fail and did nothing about it. I cannot even imagine what the reasoning would have been to not address this critical issue. I see that it can be really easy to just say that it will probably be fine, when you have not any previous issues with the design but this seems like such a critical issue, because these were concerns with overhead systems, and I honestly cannot wrap my head around how it could have just been ignored.
I find it shocking that the design called for a truss that the company never had in inventory. It is one thing to run the numbers wrong or fail to adjust for all the relevant factors, and I wouldn’t be surprised if someone subbed in a different kind of truss last minute because the proper truss was damaged or misplaced or otherwise unusable and in the moment it seemed like it would be okay. But to draw one thing and then knowingly and intentionally use something else is just absurd. They could’ve just run the numbers using the truss they had and then adjusted accordingly and designed something that would be safe for what they had. The idea of designing a structure and this scale and then intentionally ignoring all the engineering you’ve done is just absurd. I don’t understand how they could’ve been operating like that and not expected something like this to happen.
It is always deeply saddening to here about events like this particularly when the lose of life is involved. It is really just due to negligence which the owner of the company seems to fully understand. It is his recollection of being realizing the error and continuing to remind the engineer about it but nothing was done shows how important follow through is, especially when safety is involved. I think a lot of people are turned off from being a TD type because their fearful of some sort of catastrophic failure from an element that they designed. I try to remind people that there are always people to reach out to re-check work and we are in the business of overbuilding, since most of us aren’t engineers. The sheer negligence of this situation is sickening and I really hope that we don’t hear about this sort of failure again anytime soon or really ever again.
This collapse is absolutely unacceptable, and is on both those who installed the stage, as well as those who drew it to begin with. Similar to the article about Trump and OSHA, safety seems to be falling by the wayside recently. I think that as more people from my generation enter the workforce, labor is seen as even more dispensable, which it is not. Automation is becoming more and more prevalent, and while this is a step in the right direction, I think it diminishes the value of real, human labor. This story exemplifies this type of behavior, in which benign negligence ended up taking a man’s life. There was another incident in which a stagehand died, out in California. I just saw an article about it, as he was involved in the setup for Coachella. He fell sixty feet to the stage, as he was not wearing proper safety equipment. I am unaware if this equipment was available to him.
Reading about stories like this just puts everything into perspective for me. When working on sets, and especially in the entertainment industry, you’re always told to be careful, wear your PPE, etc. And then when you hear actual stories about it, it becomes very real. This story was particularly scary because it was a set for a concert and this initially scared me because my first thought was did a fan get hurt? And I wondered if the stage collapsed onto the audience because of its structure. When I heard a worker had died I was so upset, and more so upset at the fact that everyone working the concert had already known that the drafting was flawed. If everyone knew that the drawing was flawed to begin with, I don't understand what made them think building the structure wouldn’t be flawed. It was a very stupid mistake which then costed someone their life.
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