Stage collapse in Toronto

[JohnD]

Just saw this at prosoundweb:
Downsview Park Stage Collapses Ahead Of Radiohead Concert In Toronto (PHOTOS)
14aa46c0b7ef11e1ab011231381052c0_7.jpg

[iAdam]

1 Person pronounced dead.
Show cancelled (obviously);
news article: Toronto News: One dead as Radiohead stage collapses before concert at Downsview Park - thestar.com

[JohnD]

Here is a photo before the collapse:
torontostage.png

[DuckJordan]

1 dead as Radiohead stage collapses ahead of Toronto concert - Toronto - CBC News

Another news article

Count
1 dead
3 injured

[DuckJordan]

A couple are saying it was calm and not windy or inclimate. Sounds to me some company didn't know how to setup their stage. Or took shortcuts.

When are rental companies going to learn they are building structures not little light bars on t stands. GET IT RIGHT D*** IT!

[avkid]

CNN now has video shot by a local news helicopter.
1 killed when Toronto stage collapses before sold-out Radiohead concert - CNN.com

[len]

Enough is enough! How many people have to die in the name of someone's good time?

[Aman121]

It seems like this has been happening rather frequently, what is wrong with people? Why should money and time ever matter more than human life?

[gafftapegreenia]

Of All the stage collapses in, say, the last 24 months, have any two been the same in design or from the same company?

No show is worth a life!

[ruinexplorer]

I'm not sure that this accident happened as a result of lack of time or money. In setting up large outdoor events such as this, they don't go up in a day like many arena tours. However, there is a good possibility that there was some bad math done. We can speculate on the causes, there are many possibilities. We will most assuredly follow up with this as we did with the Indiana State Fair collapse.

[Footer]

Of All the stage collapses in, say, the last 24 months, have any two been the same in design or from the same

No show is worth a life!

This is not a thomas style roof like Indy. This looks like more of a mountain style stage.

Sent from my Galaxy Nexus using Tapatalk 2

[venuetech]

cijz-sa.gifThis photo shows mountain productions "Scaffold System with a Hercules Roof Grid and Video Support Towers"
it looks very similar to the Toronto staging

[mstaylor]

It looks like a Mountain stage except the head blocks are sitting on top of the tower instead of being captured in the structure. It looks like it pulled the head blocks as opposed to a hoist or roof failure. It must be some knockoff version of Mountain.

[JohnD]

At the prosoundweb forums, James Feenstra stated:
"stage is owned and operated by live nation, purchased from optex some years ago, nasco was the labor company hired to set it up."
Here is optex:
http://www.optexstaging.com/Home.10.0.html

[shiben]

It seems like this has been happening rather frequently, what is wrong with people? Why should money and time ever matter more than human life?

Has it been happening any more frequently than before, or is that just media bias after Indiana?

As for the question, the answer to that is complicated and convoluted, but the long and the short of it is, money is almost always more important than human life, especially to people in the business of making loads of it. This is not an endorsement of that reality, but recognition of the facts.

[jstroming]

As for the question, the answer to that is complicated and convoluted, but the long and the short of it is, money is almost always more important than human life, especially to people in the business of making loads of it. This is not an endorsement of that reality, but recognition of the facts.

This is absolute B.S. I don't know one production or labor company owner who thinks that making a quick buck is more important than the life of a human being. And all of the bad publicity (both to the public AND potential clients), paperwork, man hours, lawsuits and lawyers that go with it. I have worked with Mountain, Upstaging, etc and they all take safety VERY seriously on the corporate level. It is usually the guys ON-SITE (be it with the staging company or local labor) who try to cut corners.

That said, I use NASCO in virtually every city I go to on tour in Canada, and let me tell you, the canadians take safety VERY seriously. Alot more then most stagehand unions or companies in the US. First time I was on tour in canada, I was told I couldn't work a call (and I was the Video Director! haha) because I didn't have a hard hat that was rated, steel toe boots that were rated, and safety goggles that were rated.

You're just looking to rally against big companies, who considering the size, complexity, and potential for danger have MUCH better safety records than smaller companies. Probably because they have the large budgets to do so. Maybe you got treated badly by a production company, but most production company owners do care if the people who work for them die. It's insulting for you to insinuate differently, and claim your point as "fact".

[FMEng]

I would hope that local governments, venues, artists, and producers will start requiring temporary entertainment structures to be assembled under the direct supervision of a licensed structural engineer who specializes in it.

[church]

Each Canadian Province already requires a licenced engineer to design any structure except a simple house where the standard structural tables apply. In Ontario it is covered by the Professional Engineer's Act which was recently revised and made more restrictive to prevent workplace injuries etc. and this is much broader in its application than structural engineering

It will be interesting to see what the investigation reveals. However the Ontario government's official policy is "there is no such thing as an accident" and they will inevitably do something to prevent a re-occurence.

[shiben]

This is absolute B.S. I don't know one production or labor company owner who thinks that making a quick buck is more important than the life of a human being. And all of the bad publicity (both to the public AND potential clients), paperwork, man hours, lawsuits and lawyers that go with it. I have worked with Mountain, Upstaging, etc and they all take safety VERY seriously on the corporate level. It is usually the guys ON-SITE (be it with the staging company or local labor) who try to cut corners.

That said, I use NASCO in virtually every city I go to on tour in Canada, and let me tell you, the canadians take safety VERY seriously. Alot more then most stagehand unions or companies in the US. First time I was on tour in canada, I was told I couldn't work a call (and I was the Video Director! haha) because I didn't have a hard hat that was rated, steel toe boots that were rated, and safety goggles that were rated.

You're just looking to rally against big companies, who considering the size, complexity, and potential for danger have MUCH better safety records than smaller companies. Probably because they have the large budgets to do so. Maybe you got treated badly by a production company, but most production company owners do care if the people who work for them die. It's insulting for you to insinuate differently, and claim your point as "fact".

I dont think its just big companies or small companies or staging/entertainment companies. I was speaking to companies in general. Insinuating that is diverting from the real issue. How many companies with great safety records had all those protections in place before OSHA, insurance companies and a lawsuit happy public? None of the major reasons you mentioned to avoid incidents can be construed as genuine caring about individuals, but more accurately as caring about not loosing profits. I have no doubt that Mountain, Upstaging, and other companies have leadership that does care about their guys. And in fact, a lot, if not all of them probably personally care about health and safety. But to suggest that even a majority of companies do not have other motives in their embrace of safety is not terribly accurate from my view.

FWIW, I actually think a lot of these staging companies are great. I worked with one the other day. Their guys cared about safety and going home in one piece at the end of the day. I was definitely speaking to a larger picture than a narrow segment of a specific industry.

[ejsandstrom]

Who here remembers all of the shark attacks during the late summer of 2001? That was all you saw on CNN, MSNBC, Fox blah blah blah. Then After the 11th of September you didnt hear about any more shark attacks.

My point being, I am sure there are are still shark attacks all the time, but they are local news only. The 24hour news cycle has a list of say 50 things and if it on that list it gets reported on, once something new hits the top of the list the bottom one is pushed off and into a "let the locals report it" list. In 5 years one or two people a year will still get killed by some sort of stage malefaction, but only the industry people will hear about it.

Who remembers when people were constantly getting trampled or killed by being stepped on at concerts? It was everywhere, now you never hear about it.

[derekleffew]

...Who remembers when people were constantly getting trampled or killed by being stepped on at concerts? It was everywhere, now you never hear about it.

I remember because I was almost there. Some dorm-mates were going, but I decided I couldn't afford the $11 or $14 or whatever the tickets were. The Who Concert Tragedy - Twenty Years Later Eventually, "festival seating" was outlawed, and concerts today are safer as a result.

[ruinexplorer]

I would hope that local governments, venues, artists, and producers will start requiring temporary entertainment structures to be assembled under the direct supervision of a licensed structural engineer who specializes in it.

This would kill this part of the industry. There aren't enough engineers to be available for all the structures being built. Either that, or a change would happen where the engineer wouldn't truly be qualified by the standards they are now.

[len]

The deceased is Radiohead's drum tech. Radiohead drum tech killed in stage collapse - CNN.com

[MNicolai]

These things are such one-off's and are just blips compared to the kinds of jobs most structural engineers are doing day-to-day. To get a structural engineer interested, you'd have to throw a lot of money at them. If it got to that extreme, it'd probably be cheaper to tour with an engineer than to hire a new one in every city. Even then, that only reduces the risk of failures after the structure is erected and still leaves some amount of risk in the process of erecting the structure.

As for news, this is a small industry. While I think there is more awareness in the media than there has been, plenty of accidents that are only covered by local news show up on these forums. It's a small enough industry that there's a chance with every incident that someone here at CB personally knows the people involved with the accident, even those reported only by local news.

The line that we use a lot here in the office is, "Same faces, different companies," because despite people moving between different companies over the years, the various players in our industry remain the same.

Regardless of how often these accidents happen versus how often they make national headlines, it doesn't change the fact that we're such a small industry that one person's death or injury can make regional or even national waves.

Just because the national media does or doesn't bite on a story doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing here on CB or putting under the scrutiny of our peers. That said, it's worth noting that there probably has not been a recent influx of these accidents, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think they were showing up on CB a lot more than they used to...

[church]

These things are such one-off's and are just blips compared to the kinds of jobs most structural engineers are doing day-to-day. To get a structural engineer interested, you'd have to throw a lot of money at them. If it got to that extreme, it'd probably be cheaper to tour with an engineer than to hire a new one in every city. Even then, that only reduces the risk of failures after the structure is erected and still leaves some amount of risk in the process of erecting the structure.

As for news, this is a small industry. While I think there is more awareness in the media than there has been, plenty of accidents that are only covered by local news show up on these forums. It's a small enough industry that there's a chance with every incident that someone here at CB personally knows the people involved with the accident, even those reported only by local news.

The line that we use a lot here in the office is, "Same faces, different companies," because despite people moving between different companies over the years, the various players in our industry remain the same.

Regardless of how often these accidents happen versus how often they make national headlines, it doesn't change the fact that we're such a small industry that one person's death or injury can make regional or even national waves.

Just because the national media does or doesn't bite on a story doesn't mean it isn't worth discussing here on CB or putting under the scrutiny of our peers. That said, it's worth noting that there probably has not been a recent influx of these accidents, but I'd be lying if I said I didn't think they were showing up on CB a lot more than they used to...

with many tours being international events it is very difficult for one engineer to cover every venue. To illustrate each Canadian Province licences their own engineers and you cannot practice in another province, an Ontario engineer cannot do structural work in the U.K. and vice versa.

I can also get a structural engineer to do work that requires only 1 hour of their time, not a problem at all, I just have to be prepared to pay for their time.

[Footer]

The real changes will take place when insurance for these type of shows gets so outrageous that you can no longer afford to do the gig. Either that, or the insurance companies will put so many requirements on these shows that they won't be feasible OR we will start doing things differently. Finally, you will start seeing bands do what ZZ Top just did... and that will probably have the largest affect.

[gafftaper]

I think, the real question to look at is one that has been discussed here in the past. Are promoters asking too much from portable staging systems? Do concerts need to scale down the tech of their outdoor shows and leave the big bad toys in the truck for use in theaters and stadiums with real pick points to hang from?

[BillESC]

I think Gaff nailed it. Why does production have to be of epic scale for one offs?

[JohnD]

Here is an updated article from CBC:
Radiohead company among 4 named in stage-collapse probe - Arts & Entertainment - CBC News
According to "unnamed sources", Upstaging who provided the lighting, there were concerns about the weight involved but the engineer said it was OK.
The article also points out that criminal charges have been ruled out and the full investigation could take a year.

[gafftaper]

From the end of the article linked above...

"The thing that's unique about this type of facility is the speed that it goes up and the speed that it comes down. And it might very well be that the pace of the industry is just too fast to allow normal protocols to do their job," Toronto-based civil engineer David Bowick said.

Bowick added that temporary stages such as Radiohead's are inherently less robust. "Because of a lack of redundancy, a very small human error could precipitate a chain reaction."

Janet Sellery, a Stratford, Ont., safety consultant specializing in the arts, agreed that the pressure to produce flashy performances on a short turnaround could bear part of the blame. She also said inconsistent labour and safety standards are endangering those toiling behind the scenes at increasingly ambitious shows.

Yep.

[gafftapegreenia]

From the end of the article linked above...


Yep.

Yep indeed.

[mstaylor]

Evidently there were engineering plans approved beforehand. So that begs the question, was their numbers off, the shows numbers off or just not put together correctly.

[ruinexplorer]

PLASA just issued a statement about the collapse.

[DuckJordan]

Evidently there were engineering plans approved beforehand. So that begs the question, was their numbers off, the shows numbers off or just not put together correctly.

or things were not loaded as intended or as to the plans. More than once I've seen carps come in and ask for a different lineset because "It looks a bit too close" when we went off their exact specs.

[JohnD]

Radiohead to delay part of tour:
Radiohead postpone portion of European tour - MSN Music News