Stage Collapse at Pukkelpop Music Festival in Hasslet, Belgium during severe weather

[What Rigger?]

Re: Stage Collapse at Pukkelpop Music Festival in Hasslet, Belgium during severe weat

I've just been thinking about all these accidents and the nature of truss. Truss is designed with a male and female that slide together and a pin to lock it all in place. The vertical uprights rely on Gravity to some extent to hold the whole tower firmly in place. The whole thing is designed to keep things from falling down. But what happens when you take gravity away and instead apply a significant amount of upward lift and horizontal pressure on the roof and walls? That's not a force in a direction that typical truss is really designed to handle. Yes you secure it and stabilize the stage with wires, but that's a secondary line of defense. Perhaps we need to look at adding some significant steel diagonal bracing to the truss design?

I'm definitely not an expert with truss, I've only worked with it a half a dozen times, so don't quote me on this. However, the physics to me seems fairly straight forward. If you apply enough wind the basic design is suddenly rendered flawed. I would love to hear more from you riggers and road warriors who have worked a lot with truss over the years.

Remember, gang...these are temporary structures we're dealing with here. Nothing's built to withstand any/everything. At my gig, we design everything to withstand an 80mph wind load- and if it really looks like things might get shady, we just shut it down. Whatever event or thing "it" is.

Concert promoters/producers need to have the spine to do this as well if things start to look the least bit wonky.

My 2 cents.

 

[mstaylor]

Re: Stage Collapse at Pukkelpop Music Festival in Hasslet, Belgium during severe weat

I was supposed to be doing a Foxworthy show today, they canceled, just to be safe.