Here's a thought... If you had a very important system that needed to work 100%, 100% of the time or it was likely that people would end up dead, and it had failed at least once in the past, would you use it if someone said it was ok?... Me?... Well I'd sure have to know what made someone say it was now ok, but you can bet I'd never feel real good about useing it, let alone useing it up in a heavy duty situation... Well some folks down in Atlantic City did just that... They rolled the dice on an overhead support system, that apparently has faile once in the last year or two... Well guess what... It failed again... This time while it was holding quite literally tons of equipment overhead... The report I heard this morning, claims the equipment damage was around a million bucks. (and I suspect that's really just the gear the tour had out with it, ignoreing the stuff on the ground like a bunch of rows of empty (thankfully) AUDIENCE CHAIRS) Somehow nobody got seriously hurt when it came in. I can't for the life of me understand how that miracle happened, though I just met someone that was there when it happened and I'm going to have to grill him when I get the chance...
Who cares?... Why am I worked up about this?.. Well hey, I work in the industry... and even more specifically, I work a lot of the rigging. (rigging is all the hanging overhead work for anyone not of the entertainment world) Someone dropped the ball big time here... I can't point any fingers at anyone since I wasn't there, and I probably wouldn't anyway in a public forum... What I know is that if the facility even considers putting in the same system again, they should be closed down... The admin should all be sent to science labs and studied to find out how they managed to exist with absolutly no brain in their skull... The fact it failed once before has me questioning things right off the bat... Twice is just nuts... While the engineering on such a system can be complex, it can be done... The major unknown is how the unit will get used after it is installed... I can't tell from the pictures how the load was distributed due to the mass carnage... (I'll link the pictures as soon as the webspace I'm setting up for this blog is established)
What really scares me, is that it is quite likely that I will never hear the final outcome of the investigation... I'm going to try to keep on this one though... If I hear anything, it will end up on here I'm sure...
Ok... Enough rant on this... (geesh what a way to start off something I wanted to keep kinda lite)
Posted by Backstage at August 19, 2003 07:51 PM