Monday, January 05, 2026
Stagehand 101: Staying Safe On the Road in 2026
richardcadena.substack.com: In the winter 2019 edition of Protocol magazine, I wrote an article titled “To the new touring tech: staying safe with electrics.” It was intended to help new techs work safely while they earned their keep. Little did I know that just one year later, the Pandemic would rear its ugly head and devastate the industry, forcing lots of talented and experienced techs out of the live event production industry, some of whom were never to return again.
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3 comments:
Electrical power is a fascinating thing to me, because it is both so ubiquitous in our everyday lives, but also so mysterious and seems to be almost incomprehensible for many people. Almost everyone knows how to plug their phone charger into a wall outlet or even vaguely knows that you can’t plug a power strip into itself to get infinite power, but I think that most people don’t even try to understand how power distribution actually works. We are so used to a safe world where there are many levels of protection to make it very difficult to get an electric shock.
I think it is great that through programs like ETCP certification and articles like this we are raising awareness of how important it is to take the electrical work we do for our industry seriously. In this industry we both use tremendous amounts of power, use it in temporary ways, and have intense time pressures that might push people to do things in a rushed or unsafe way. It is important to go back to the basics, understand what the hazards of power are, and make sure that we are always following best practices to keep ourselves and everyone else around us safe.
This article raises important points about electrical safety in a fast paced world, things as simple as inspecting cables to make sure the insulation is intact is something that I could easily see getting overlooked while quickly trying to load in a show. I had never heard of self-vulcanizing silicon rubber tape but it seems like an interesting concept. I had no idea there were other things you could wrap around wires other than electrical tape. I think the amount of electricity that runs through something as massive as a concert rig often gets overlooked, and it's easy, as this arctic says, to think that these wires are indestructible and perfectly safe all the time, but the reality is that things wear down and it's important to always be vigilant when dealing with dangerous equipment. Especially things like the importance of a ground need to be understood by everyone dealing with this amount of voltage on a daily basis.
I’m glad an article like this exists, and I am interested in reading more similar articles. This author seems to have published a lot of wise adages and stories pertinent to entertainment technicians. This article is simple in nature, but it contains good basic information that might be easy to overlook given other tasks within the job. Checking power cables for damage is essential. To wrap a damaged cable temporarily with self vulcanizing silicon rubber tape, then electrical tape is a good tip. Previously, I hadn’t heard of the rubber tape in this context. Checking for damaged connectors is equally as essential. To advise destruction of a cable with a faulty adaptor is good advice to prevent the misuse of dangerous equipment. On the third point of ‘don’t lift the ground’, I didn’t realize that there was such an adaptor to ‘lift the ground’ with a grounding adaptor, or that it was commonly used to eliminate a hum.
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