techieman33
Well-Known Member
So the other day while we were tearing down the set of our musical our tech director told some guys to take a sign off of one of our fly lines. They took it off and flew out the bar, and then someone, we don't know who, thought "Hey, we just took that sign off, we should take some wight off". Well they took off the wight that was on the line and about half of the yellow safety weights that you NEVER take off. I'm sure you can see where this is going. One of the guys who took the sign off initially, remembered that there was some lighting cable on the bar that needed to come off, so he went over to the flys and opened it up. Now I've dealt with flys out of weight before, but this one was about 125ish lbs out of weight. The bar came crashing down and luckily everyone was out of the way except for a trash can that got squashed. When the bar hit the can it sounded like a gunshot and the wight system crashed into the top of the fly column and ripped the wire pulleys off the ceiling, witch threw fly weights (25lbs each) out of the system and onto the stage and I kid you not those things bounced. It totaled the line witch would have costed $7000-$9000 to fix. Our Tech Director was not happy. As for the kid who opened the fly, he tried to stop it, and it ripped skin off of his hands and left some nasty burns. No one will fess up to taking the weights off, I'm very glad nobody got hurt...
Pictures: http://imgur.com/gallery/3jlld/new
Originalpost on Reddit: http://www.reddit.com/r/techtheatre/comments/2qlfo6/guess_what_happens_when_a_fly_is_around_125_lbs/