richardcadena.substack.com: When the show is over and the load out starts, the more stagehands there are, the finer the line between complete chaos and controlled chaos. It’s up to the crew chiefs to channel the energy into positive territory, but sometimes it’s like herding cats.
6 comments:
This was a really good read, especially for a newer stagehand perspective, and it shed a lot of light on the danger of arcing for me in particular. I would be really curious as to what actual stagehands must do to be qualified for events and if being safety certified is a standard across the different primary entertainment types, such as comparing theater stagehands to live event stagehands, and who generally is safer in these situations and if that actually has any say on who can operate this kind of equipment. For me personally, I've often been tasked with doing power runs with little to no training besides a TD or a designer saying something along the lines of Here's how not to die and leaving me to deal with the rest. This was especially true at my high school, where I was entrusted with stuff like making cable and setting up relays because I was the only one who knew how to, and there was almost no adult guidance. It was incredibly lucky for the stagehands to have the guidance of a trained person, but it's scary to think about the many non-commercial entertainment venues that have no such people.
I found this an interesting story & article, and while it certainly was informative about the hazards of live electrical cables and connections (honestly, the one thing I have definitely learned is respect any camlock cable), I think one element of the story that really stood out to my was the complexity of a work site like that, with huge crews of people striking a lot of different elements simultaneously, which must all be coordinated. Particularly in theater, where people have a tendency to want to be helpful and find the next task, it can be a problem of too many cooks in the kitchen, doing things in the incorrect order, not knowing what to do, or just having different methods of accomplishing the same goal. I noticed the difficulties of a large crew in the orientation tent teardown the other week: with probably 20 novice volunteers, there were definitely times where we would be waiting, or we couldn't remove slings or unplug connectors that were definitely safe to remove. I was thinking of this because one of the commenters on the blog suggested a system similar to lockout tags for power connectors, marking them as energized, do not disconnect. I think this could be a very cool and effective system to coordinate communication between all the different people of theater, particularly during the chaos of strike, but there will always need to be ongoing work in that field, particularly for huge events.
This article perfectly captures what I find to be the hardest and most complicated part of larger-scale load-ins and strikes: organizing people. The very few large events I’ve worked on have luckily all gone well with no hazards like the 480-volt unplugged feeder cables, but we’ve had some (less dramatic) close calls. Even working as a low-level lighting technician, I’ve been placed on lighting load-in calls where I’m one of two people with any electrics knowlege. On those calls, I’m often working with carpenters or stagehands who are eager but inexperienced. As technicians, we get immersed in our fields and vocabulary, and often assume the people we are working with understand our terminology. In an ideal world, everyone would speak the same technical “language,” but in reality, everyone comes to a call with different background knowledge, and crew leaders don’t always know what their crew knows. Strikes are very fast-paced, often out of necessity, but this event shows that taking an extra few minutes at the beginning of the call to explain things that seem second nature might be what we need to keep people safe.
Possibly one of the most challenging aspects of this industry is both sides of the “organize big groups of people at a load in or strike.” It’s challenging both to manage and to be a person that is being managed. I thought this was an really interesting article that laid out some good safety basics for stagehands to know. It is very challenging to be a stagehand because if you’re one of a hundred warm bodies that were called, and especially if it’s a big enough event that people are coming and going and starting at various times, the crew chiefs are often tired and spread to thin and you can’t really get individualized instruction on how to do things. It’s up to you to just figure things out, which is pretty challenging, This summer, I had the experience of being on the other end, as a point person for the automation department. The stage manager assigned me a group of locals, and it was incredibly difficult (I would say way more difficult than managing a run crew at here) to figure out what instructions to give, figure out who had experience in entertainment versus who needed more hand holding, and make sure nothing bad happened.
This is a very scary but also very real possibility to happen. I’ve been on large load outs before and I know first hand how crazy those outs can be and how many people are running around trying to get their work done as fast as possible. In all the chaos live cable could have definitely been disconnected. While I am aware of the dangers of live feeder cable. I don’t think I’ve ever had it fully explained what the dangers could be and how careful you have to be to not do something like that. I agree with the author that communication needs to be given out beforehand. Additionally, I think there should be some extra protection from being able to undo such an important connection. Whether thats a label or tape around the connections. Having a layer of something will make people stop for a second and think if they should be doing what they’re doing. Going forward I think I will pay more attention to power and how I can keep myself and other safe when working with high loads.
HAHA. this is funny. Richard Cadena is a great person and I love how this article's sole purpose is to help others with their own craft. He takes a simple thing (disconnecting cables) and breaks it down into all of its parts. He doesn't take any knowledge for granted. He also doesn't turn it into a lecture. He tells a story that asked how he could have done better: how he could have communicated better instead of just passing the blame to the person who physically pulled the connectors. He generalizes this specific case to other scenarios so as to give more examples of what could have happened. Additionally, there is valuable stuff in the comments as other people in the industry chime in with their ideas, furthering the safety of everyone.
I have Cadena’s book and that has been a great resource for me. He does a great job explaining things in a way that is understandable to everyone, even if you don't have that much electrical engineering background.
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