One of TT's finding in Indiana was that they had no understanding of the structure's limits which made it challenging for event organizers to understand where the cut-off
threshold needs to be in spite of any meteorology reports they may have been receiving. That's in no way any excuse, but it puts a lot of pressure on whoever's making the
call if they don't know the breaking
point. Whereas if you
know the structure will at risk at a certain
threshold, it's no longer an emotional decision a dozen people are going to argue about. The process becomes much more black and white.
In Mexico, Maynes (the presidential candidate hosting the event) described it on TV as a freak gust of wind that couldn't be predicted which is about what you'd expect a politician to say, but my understanding was that there were some degree of high wind warning, and like I said in a prior post though -- historical weather data seemed to show sporadic gusts at similar times of day several times in the last few weeks so there's a good chance this wasn't an uncommon weather event in that area from air coming out of the mountains.
Part of the reason there was "no understanding" was this: the Fair had the roof structure reconfigured, both for the upstage parking/traffic area guy
line clearance, and to redistribute some of the roof load to accommodate changes in artist-supplied LX and VDO from previous years. The vendor's structural engineer did not do a new analysis or review, instead using the previous year's calculations. In the T-T review of the previous year's calculations, T-T determined there were significant errors. So now we have old, wrong numbers used.
It turns out that James Thomas Engineering also had some "wishful thinking" ratings for some of the structural components that were used, and T-T found JTE removed on
line access to catalog pages and engineering documents soon after the roof failure. T-T found back
ups of those pages and included them in their analysis of the ISF roof failure. In a nutshell, the roof structure was not erected according to the design; the engineering supporting the design was flawed and incorrect for the client-ordered configuration changes.
It's what happens when a long term vendor/client relationship exists and nobody checked the other's work.
Now, about Witt Associates. They looked at the emergency plans and procedures created by the Indiana State Fair Board, Indiana State Patrol, Indy PD, and other first response agencies. The distillation of the Witt review kind of came down to this: y'all had a really good plan for what to do AFTER "the bad thing happens" but was incomplete and lacking comprehensive scale and definitive order of authority for how to handle threats as they emerged. Things like who makes the weather
call and what those criteria are, if that person has authority to order shelter in place or evacuation of the site; to cancel, postpone, or
play the show,
etc.
pre-post PS: The ISF roof structure is owned by the Fair, and was erected and removed under contract by the Fair's sound/LX supplier. One would assume that such a spectacular failure would be the end of a company but the amount of contributory negligence by the Fair (regarding the lack of coherent command and control over the show itself, and lack of supervison of the structure) likely
led the State to
settle claims and assume most of the liability. We'll never know for sure as all the settlements were covered under NDAs.
