Just before you dive into that turkey this year, be thankful you got through the entire festival and outdoor touring season without a weather-related fatality. Compare that with the experiences of the last decade or so, particularly 2011, considered the annus horribilis of the industry’s history, when the stage structure at the Indiana State Fair collapsed in high winds, killing seven people and injuring 58 others.
That same year, less than a month before the Aug. 13 collapse in Indiana, a storm took down the stage on the last day of the 12-day Ottawa Bluesfest while Cheap Trick was performing on July 17, injuring three, including one of the band’s truck drivers, who was pierced in the abdomen by a piece of the stage structure. And less than a week after the disaster in Indiana, a storm hit the Pukkelpop Festival in Belgium on Aug. 18, knocking down tents, video screens and stages, killing five and injuring more than 70.
This year, we had con artists (the Fyre Festival) and the usual assortment of ODs (thanks to an opioid epidemic), and of course the horrendous shootings at the Route 91 Harvest country music festival in Las Vegas (see “Safety Factor,” page 54), but at least weather-related disasters that once plagued the industry have diminished dramatically. And that’s at a time when weather has become documentably more volatile and less predictable.
A lot of that is attributable to the work of the Event Safety Alliance (ESA), whose codification of event-safety protocols and guidelines, first released in 2014, have enabled event and tour producers to create “weather-action” plans for possible meteorological issues before they become a problem. For instance, in conjunction with partner Weather Decision Technologies (WDT), they established an eight-mile boundary as the red line for approaching storms, the point at which area in the path of peril need to be evacuated.
“In 2012, it was just Linkin Park using these guidelines,” says Jim Digby, the ESA’s chairman and major force, a reference to the 16 years he spent as that band’s production manager. “As of this year, we had literally thousands of events monitoring the weather appropriately.
The Event Safety Alliance became a nexus between an assortment of experts culled from areas such as meteorology, structural engineering and logistics on the one hand, and the touring and event-production industry on the other. At events such as an annual conference, this year held in early December at the Rock Lititz campus, each learns from the other: needs are raised, problems identified, solutions crafted, and, ultimately, the bible that the Event Safety Guide has become expanded.
New For 2017
Once the safety protocols were established, the ESA turned its attention to training. In addition to the annual conference, there are smaller events that take place around the country during the year. But this year that educational effort went wide: in a partnership with Full Sail University in Winter Park, FL, the ESA Event Safety Access Training (ESAT) regimen is now online. It’s an entry-level program that touches on foundational topics such as protective equipment, and health and safety regulations and controls.
“It’s pretty basic,” says Digby, “but it’s intended to get you thinking about safety.”
The fee is minimal — ESA members pay $180; cost to non-members is $225. But the payoff is potentially huge. That’s because the cost of insuring events and tours is spiraling upwards, in part because of issues like weather, but also because of some recent high-profile cancellations (which we discussed here last month — weather’s not the only thing volatile in this business).
Insurers, like ESA partners Allianz and Take1, want to see things that reduce their risk, and workers certified in safety protocols go a long way towards reassuring them. Participating underwriters are already offering premium discounts to companies where at least half the employees have attained certification.
That’s good news for the ESA’s touring partners, companies like Clair Global, LD Systems and Solotech, to name a few (although neither Live Nation nor AEG appear on the ESA website’s list of sponsors), which all share the burden of increased insurance costs. That benefit will also extend to all the money that doesn’t have to get paid out as a result of tragedies, a hefty amount of which isn’t covered by insurance policies and has to be borne by companies and individuals.
The settlements around the Indiana State Fair stage collapse alone totaled $50 million (including $11 million paid out by the state of Indiana). Compare that with the zero dollars that were paid because no one died or was hurt at the Osisko en Lumière festival in Quebec earlier this year. There, the manager looking after the Stageline stage saw a storm approaching and consulted the real-time, live-manned Weather Ops service provided by WDT, which confirmed the nature of the approaching storm. It took the stage manager several minutes of emphatic urging to get the stage cleared of people. He managed to accomplish that less than five minutes before lightning struck the stage, hitting the upstage-right corner post and exiting through a pipe on an upstage fog machine. It was a story that never made the papers or the courts. In other words, the best kind of story, when it comes to weather and touring.
Focus On Terror
Digby is fond of pointing out that the ESA can’t change the weather, only our responses to it. That also applies to the other growing danger the ESA is turning its attention to. There may not have been any weather-related fatalities this season, but there were 22 deaths when terrorists bombed a Manchester venue just as an Ariana Grande concert was finishing there in May. Along with the Bataclan Theatre attack in Paris in 2015, it’s clear that concerts are now in the crosshairs of the war with terror. Digby says they have brought in some experts on terrorism and related topics, such as crowd and crush dynamics. (There are predictive-modeling tools for those that are not unlike what you use to acoustically model a venue space.)
“We began the terror track after the Bataclan attack,” he says. “It’s become one of our pillars of planning. It’s become part of the focus. We can only go so far with the kind of resources we can develop on our own, but we’re trying to stay broad by looking at as much as we can.”
There’s one more element that Digby has brought into the safety agenda, and it’s one close to home for him: mental health. “I worked closely with Chester [Bennington] for 16 years,” he told me, on his way to catch a flight to Phoenix for a memorial event almost two months to the day Bennington committed suicide. “I knew him as well as anyone, and there was no way to see that coming. So we wanted to make a mental-health track part of the process going forward.” The Recording Academy’s MusiCares foundation is now also a partner in that effort.
It’s a scary world out there. The ESA has done a great job of making it a little less so.
Happy Thanksgiving.
