There are two things to note about the recent fatal stage collapse in Toronto in mid June this year: 1) Radiohead sold out Downsview Park’s capacity of 40,000, meaning that those who were heading to the event constituted roughly 0.1 percent of all tickets sold annually in North America, none of those ticketholders were even scratched and most of the other 99.9 percent of concert attendees each year need little more than an aspirin as result of a show they go to; and 2) all of that is completely meaningless. A string of fatal staging incidents, including the Indianapolis State Fair stage collapse last August that killed seven, the Pukkelpop Festival storm in which five died in Belgium that same month, and the Big Valley Jamboree in August 2009, where one person died when wind knocked down the main stage, is about to put the live staging industry under scrutiny like never before.
Not Weather-Related
What sets this tragedy apart from most of the others is that it was apparently not connected to weather of any kind. It was sunny and in the mid-80s in Toronto, with none of the wind or rain that precipitated the worst of the earlier disasters. But more to the point, unlike most of those events, at Downsview Park, the rigging was not being performed by members of the International Alliance of Theatrical Stage Employees (IATSE), according to the union. I spoke with John Lewis, international vice president and director of Canadian affairs at Local 58, the Toronto chapter of IATSE. He confirmed that the riggers were not union members. Lewis says that’s unusual in Canada, where IATSE and other stage unions have strong presences, particularly in the major cities. Lewis also says that Downsview Park is not a union venue at this time. “That’s an anomaly for a town this size,” he says.
Focus on Rigging
Understandably, Lewis could not comment on whether or not the use of non-union labor had any effect on the accident, but absent any of the meteorological problems that have been cited in the other high-profile stage collapses, it’s a point likely to be scrutinized by investigators and regulators this time, along with the staging blueprints and engineer approvals. Potential rigging flaws were certainly being noted on blogs and forums afterward, with rigging professionals pointing at the straight downward 40-foot collapse as likely due to some combination of overloading of the vertical supports and the use of insufficient clamping. As one poster put it, “The collapse stands as morbid proof that safe design and assembly were totally disregarded.”
Just as the Indiana State Fair disaster has resulted in new guidelines regarding scaffolding and weather, some of which went into effect last May in that state, the Toronto accident could bring about a new focus on training and the use of qualified rigging labor. While John Lewis did not state that this accident might also result in more lobbying action by the union in Ottawa, he did leave that possibility open when he told me, “We’re looking at all options.”
Vested Interests
Here’s something else that also needs to be looked at. As tragic as these events have been, they take place in a changed context for the music industry, one in which live music has become the main moneymaker as prerecorded music remains in a sales trough. However, it’s not only the artists, promoters and vendors that make money on these shows — the towns, cities and counties that host concerts and festivals are big beneficiaries as well — from the $99 million that Austin derives directly from SXSW to the estimated $20 million that is pumped into the economy of Manchester, TN (pop. 10,000) every year thanks to Bonnaroo. However, these tragedies have also become staples of the relentless maw of online video — video of the collapse of the Indiana State Fair stage last year has generated tens of millions of YouTube hits. Tragedies may sell newspapers, but ticket sales tend to suffer when any type of event experiences a loss of life — the sinking of the Costa Concordia last year caused the multi-billion-dollar cruise industry’s net revenue yield to drop by three percentage points.
Media Restrictions
It’s with that in mind that I share what a colleague at the Downsview Park event reported on his blog in the wake of the stage collapse. Julius Grafton, publisher of Australia-based staging technology blog CX, was at the park and posted that even as the promoter’s agents began turning away concertgoers, “security were instructed to restrict media and deter any photographs or videos.” Grafton further writes that security personnel followed him and other members of the media and concertgoers as they left the scene, discouraging the taking of pictures or videos.
“TV and other media were allowed to gather on a grass knoll backstage that had very restricted views,” he writes. “At this time, media photography from the public parklands was perfectly legal, yet security were obsessed with obstruction. At one stage, [we could overhear] security describe us and issue last-seen coordinates. We broke cover to shoot the CX-TV News intro, and were then ordered down a steep embankment, and tracked the whole time we remained in the public parklands.”
The extensive video shot by concertgoers before, during and after the Indiana stage collapse was useful in helping investigators piece together what happened and, presumably, in the creation of new safety criteria to avoid future tragedies. Authorities actively trying to discourage citizen video of events like this don’t help their municipalities; in fact, they do quite the opposite, by diminishing the amount of available evidence, one camera phone’s worth of which might make all the difference in the outcome of an investigation. Whichever security forces were involved in what Grafton describes would have been of better use doing anything but chasing away witnesses.
