Ed Sheeran cancels in Vegas
- Thread startergafftaper
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There's a reddit thread. Seems like the floor surface was slippery and allowed the structure to slide out of place. The pictures of that set are wild too, it's very involved.
RonaldBeal
Well-Known Member
RonaldBeal
Well-Known Member
The above from a FB group.... I have since seen several other discussions referencing the same issue from folks that were there.
Not to armchair quaterback it... but... ya??? Expecting those kind of forces to hold when the top is in suspension is nuts. Thats expecting a lot of any arena floor... or any thing really. There was nothing stopping them from carrying a show deck that would have moved those forces into the rest of the rig. This whole thing kinda blows up the idea behind ground support.It needs a compression ring around the bottom. Coefficient of friction ain't sufficient.
Somewhere there is a person who said "it'll work" and now wishes for invisibility.
Props to them though for pulling the show. People might be mad... but if one of those kicked out with 60,000 people all jumping in unison... we'd have a much larger problem.
Taylor Swift's next ex. /nudge, wink
The design reminds me of the "roof" at Woodstock 1969 as designed by Bill Hanley. It was not erected as designed, though, due to damage in transit to the site, and was waaaay under-trim. In the linked image the view is upstage right to ds left. It looks like this was taken after the first round of rain and part of the fabric structure was removed over collapse fears. The cable-stayed structure is visible and reminds me a bit of what was done in the Sheeran setup.
From the rumblings on Reddit, sounds like the stadium didn't have a good contingency plan for this and waited too long to make the call -- and then announced it poorly. Lots of complaints of people standing outside in 102F weather, water stations being out of cups, vendors only selling booze, and when they eventually let people inside, they densely cordoned them on the first floor. Also sounds like most people in line learned about it from Ed Sheeran's Instagram post.
Thankfully some diligent police officers and Uber/Lyft drivers were heading people off at the pass who were on their way to the venue and told them it was cancelled before they made it all of the way to the venue.
Teachable moment on having contingency plans for this kind of thing and when the cutoff time should be for making a call instead of waiting until doors are supposed to open. I suspect part of the delay in announcing it was time spent negotiating between the tour and the stadium for a new date so they could announce the new date at the same time as the cancellation, though I suppose it's possible they started working on a Plan B earlier in the day. In any case, the stadium could've done a better job at communicating to crowds once the decision was made and making sure they were accounting for the large number of people sweltering in the heat outside.
Thankfully some diligent police officers and Uber/Lyft drivers were heading people off at the pass who were on their way to the venue and told them it was cancelled before they made it all of the way to the venue.
Teachable moment on having contingency plans for this kind of thing and when the cutoff time should be for making a call instead of waiting until doors are supposed to open. I suspect part of the delay in announcing it was time spent negotiating between the tour and the stadium for a new date so they could announce the new date at the same time as the cancellation, though I suppose it's possible they started working on a Plan B earlier in the day. In any case, the stadium could've done a better job at communicating to crowds once the decision was made and making sure they were accounting for the large number of people sweltering in the heat outside.
I heard that they at least had the souvenir stands open so that people could buy their T-shirts before leaving...
What Rigger?
I'm so fly....I Neverland.
Every concert really is just a t-shirt stand wrapped in a fancy concert. Way more money in t-shirts than anything else in this business.
Saw Hamilton a yearish back down in south Florida. My son talked my mother-in-law into buying him some merch and she said go nuts. He decided on a hoodie that would ultimately start falling apart in a few weeks because the stitching was abysmal and the fabric was as thin as tissue paper. It was $90
The crew merch is nice. The t-shirts were Bella Canvas heavyweight. Show merchandise is a 3rd party company, I think.
From his perspective, it's almost the last stop on the tour. I don't blame him for being surprised it didn't work out. At the same time, I would be interested to know if there were any warning signs at prior venues.
It's a really complicated design. The towers support like 10T or something like that between the structure, speakers, and video walls. The video wall above the stage is supported from those outer towers, as are the main PA speakers and delays. The stage has a lot of physical automation built into it as well. The show appears designed to be fully ground supported, but I tend to think they could've had steel bracing along the floor covered with ramps or behind barricades that could've helped prevent the towers sliding toward the stage rather than crossing their fingers on friction. With however many stadiums that are on the tour (looks like about 21), it's a gamble to put so much faith into the coefficient of friction for all those different floors you can't anchor into.
While I'm glad they pulled the plug -- it's also disappointing how long they tried to make it work. I really hope they had a structural engineer on-site when they started rebuilding and adding ballast. If this was just the road crew throwing spaghetti at the wall or taking guidance from a remote structural engineer, that would be concerning.
On the subject of my previous comment about waiting until doors to announce through the artist it was cancelled -- I just struggle to imagine it was wise to take that extreme of a "wait and see" approach. The towers were probably sliding along the floor gradually -- not several inches just in the 30min before doors. Easier to cancel an event a couple/few hours beforehand than once you've got 70,000 fans on the premises. As much you may want to make it work, once you have 70,000 fans outside, there's a lot more pressure to cross your fingers, close your eyes, and hope for the best. Thankfully they didn't fall into that trap, but their delay in calling it possibly put fans at risk waiting in line since they weren't prepared for that kind of delay.
The crappy thing here for the fans is many of them are out thousands of dollars. Flights to Vegas, hotels, tickets, etc. Because of how many people are tourists in Vegas, it's really going to suck for many of them that the MSG Sphere is opening with U2 later this month. Hotel prices are already much higher for the rain date for fans hoping to return to Vegas for the replacement show.
At the end of the day, nobody got killed and that's what matters most, but there definitely several teachable moments here.
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