I have a great running fly story. Well I have two, but I don't really count the one from high school anymore. So, this most recent incident happened on a
Sunday evening
strike call. My crew and I were in working just to get our onstage electrics struck so that the carpentry crew could come in and re-rig for the next show on the following Monday. Now of course you have to understand that I have come to trust all of my crew members and I always do anything I can to make our work environment safer.
So, we were down to stripping our last two battens, one a dedicated
electric with
raceway and one was a standard
batten with
drop boxes. So as usual I had my crew members strip the arbors to
pipe weight and then off we went striking the lights cables and
drop boxes. Well, I sent two of my crew up to
fly out the battens so we could pack up and go home and as soon as they opened the brake on the plain
batten it took off. Turns out when they had stripped the arbors to
pipe weight they took the bare
batten to the electrics weight and vice versa.
Well that was the longest few seconds in my life as I watched the
arbor come down and smash into the stop
rail and
tension block. Being 400+ pounds out of weight the
arbor sheared about 10 bolts off that connected the stop
rail to the T-tracks. The
tension block was shattered, the
arbor bent, and lots of sparks went flying. Well on the
stage most of the crew had scattered, and luckily my fly ops had enough presence of mind not to grab onto the
purchase line.
On the
batten side, the pipe smashed into the
grid while passing through a fire sprinkler pipe on the way which burst. So after being showered with dust and debris from the
grid it started raining thousands of gallons of water onto the
stage. The fire alarms went off and about 5 minutes later there were fire trucks at our door. It took about 20 minutes for the fire department to get the water turned off at which
point the
stage, pit,
trap room,
crossover hall and basement of the
theatre had been thoroughly soaked.
One of the other shows
in one of our other spaces in the building had to be cancelled due to the water and lack of fire suppression
system. Needless to say I was quite shaken as I am the ME and am responsible for my crew and the
theatre when I am the only staff person here. Thankfully no one got hurt, and when our
production manager got to the
theatre that night what he said to me was: "Equipment we can fix, people we can't. So since no one was hurt you should relax."