Experts Tell NEWSNAC Indiana State Fair Broke Nearly All the Rules in Deadly Stage Collapse.

On Saturday night August 13, 2011, thousands of fair-goers at the Indiana State Fair watched in horror as an outdoor stage collapsed just moments prior to an appearance by country music stars Sugarland. The catastrophe claimed five lives and left over 40 injured. In the week that has followed both state and fair officials have come under fire for trying to dismiss the event as an unforeseeable freak accident caused by an extremely rare and highly localized wind burst that obviously crushed the stage but left the many rides on the near-by midway undamaged.

Indiana Governor Mitch Daniel’s early description of the event as a ‘fluke’ as well as a preliminary plan that would have left the State of Indiana (the sponsor of the fair) in total control of the accident investigation has raised a chorus of criticism. Late in the week officials finally gave way to the pressure and announced that outside independent consultants had been hired to assure the public of transparency in the final accident report.

Meanwhile in Brussels Belgium on Thursday night (8/18/11), another powerful thunderstorm slammed into a music festival killing five and injuring seventy others just as an American band from Chicago were about to perform. In this incident, other tents and temporary festival structures were also collapsed by the storm.

The two major aspects of the Indiana tragedy investigators plan to focus on are: (1) Why weren’t advance warnings of an approaching severe storm acted upon sooner, and (2) Was there a defect in the design or construction of the outdoor stage?

According to the experts NEWSNAC consulted, the Indiana State Fair failed miserably in both areas.

Arnold Carter is a retired entertainment producer and promoter with decades of experience in staging outdoor events. He’s also a pilot with a keen knowledge of weather.

“For many of the years I was working and promoting outdoor events we did not have the assets they have today like Doppler radar or direct lines to the National Weather Service, we used plain old common sense,” Arnold recalled.

“It is just unbelievable to hear the stories coming out now about when was a severe thunderstorm watch issued, when was the warning issued, what did they say to crowd, it’s just ridiculous. Just look at the facts. You have a forecast of storms and you have a huge black cloud approaching the location. You have hundreds, maybe a few thousand people out in the open between the grandstands and the stage which, regardless of the wind, is sitting like 50 or 60 feet in the air, a big metal box in the middle of an open field with a thunderstorm approaching…and no one has the common sense to say, let’s move people to safety until this storm goes by because this stage is a giant lightening rod waiting to get hit!”

“The Governor (Daniels) has really been putting the spin to the facts when he says this was a fluke because there was no damage to the midway rides. It’s the exact opposite, the fact that the midway rides stood and this stage fell over when both were obviously subjected to the same storm tells you the stage was all wrong.”

“I have not heard if they closed some of the tall midway rides like the Ferris wheels and if they didn’t then they deserve to be called doubly stupid! I don’t want to date myself too much but when I started in this business way back when, your kids could ride the biggest rides on the midway for a quarter or less and that’s certainly not true today. One reason is, just like a lot of other things, is the cost of the liability insurance a carnival has to carry.”

“I know for a fact because I was right there when it happened thirty years ago. There was a state fair, not Indiana but a smaller state that had a bad week due to rain and was trying to make it up on the last weekend of the fair. On the Friday night we had storm warnings and by nine o’clock you could see a lot of lightening coming towards the fairgrounds. I remember the fair manager and the manager of the carnival nearly getting into a fistfight because the carnival guys wanted to shut down the tall rides and the fair manager told him if he did then they (the midway operators) would never be invited back again.”

“The fair manager kept saying he’d accept the responsibility and the midway guy kept yelling he wasn’t going to risk his liability insurance. Well, they kept the damn things running until the storm was right on top of us and I can tell you, as a pilot I’ve been in some scary situations but that night I was really scared with both feet on the ground. By the time we got everyone off the talls (tall rides) lightening was hitting the light poles in the parking lot, the wind was blowing at 60 and everyone was getting soaked.”

“The next day here comes the midway operator to the fair office and his face is bright red. Sure enough, there was an insurance guy there that night and to make a long story short, they told the carnival their policy was cancelled until they came up with an additional risk adjustment $30,000 payment for not shutting it down sooner the night before. The fair was supposed to open at noon and there was a lot of scrambling and board meetings and ended up they were going to let the midway shutdown on the last and biggest night of the fair until a couple of the wealthy farmers actually pooled the money to cover the midway’s insurance.”

“Deep down, I can’t help but fear that those folks out in Indiana were thinking a little too much about the dollars and not enough about the dangers. They certainly would not be the first nor the last.”

While most engineering experts are obviously reluctant to speak openly about the disaster at this early stage NEWSNAC was able to persuade one engineer to offer his unofficial observations on condition of anonymity.

SJ, as we will call him, has over twenty years experience in design and construction of open frame steel architecture. His work has included both permanent and temporary stages similar to the one which collapsed as well as broadcasting towers and other structures which employ the use of cross-braced hollow steel tubing beams.

NEWSNAC: What are your first impressions or gut reactions to the videos and pictures you’ve seen so far?

SJ: Sickening would be my only gut impression. As a designer you don’t ever want to see something you or someone else designed fail like that and kill and maim people. It’s hard to sit here and try, as an engineer, to tell you what went wrong when all I have is the same pictures and news accounts everyone else has, but putting that aside, if I was asked to offer an opinion solely on the evidence at hand, I would have to concede some people made some terrible errors here. There are three which to me, really stick out and there’s some visible evidence in these pictures which I think will be valuable in the final judgment of what went wrong.

NEWSNAC: So what were those three errors?

SJ: Well let me start by saying there is nothing at all inherently dangerous about using cross-braced tubular steel(CBTS). It is used in all types of structures, offers a tremendous strength-to-weight ratio and in all honesty, without these you’d be using something like wooden poles for tents and stages.

NEWSNAC: So are you saying it probably was not a construction or design flaw but actually the strength of the wind that hit it?

SJ: No not at all. In engineering we like to say, when a failure occurs, that capacity exceeded design. In the case of the World Trade Center, even after the planes hit, the capacity of the damaged sections to support the sections above was not immediately exceeded, but the subsequent fires obviously weakened them until that threshold of capacity exceeding design was reached and they collapsed.

The capacity of CBTS to handle vertical loads is unmatched. If you look at a typical radio tower, the kind that are a single beam going straight up with guide wire cables supporting it laterally, the sections at the bottom are the same as the ones at the top. You have the bottom 30 foot section carrying the weight of hundreds of feet of additional sections above it. But again, using the radio tower as an example, once you get up in the air 60 to 80 feet, you lose lateral stability which is why you then need guide wires to keep it upright. But in the case of a stage like the one in Indiana, you can easily build in lateral support with perpendiculars to the verticals, which it appears is exactly what they did. So now you have this CBTS box and what is or should be a very stable and reliable structure.

NEWSNAC: So what went wrong.

SJ: The very first images I saw of this I just could not believe they built this thing and then put a gable roof on it. I actually had to go online to find some examples of outdoor temporary stage designers using that design and there aren’t many and none that I could find for a stage that large. Most stages are a single slope falling off from front to back or in some cases an open arch but not a gable roof because in a strong wind a gable roof becomes a dihedral, literally a wing! The air going over the top has a further distance to travel than the air flowing beneath it so you get lift. This is going to torsion or twist the whole structure and place excessive lateral loads on the vertical supports.

The second major issue I saw, and again, it’s going to generate the same kind of off-balance loads, was that they closed up the back of the stage and some of the sides. CBTS by itself has very low wind loading because it has a very small and rounded surface area. But when you laterally span a structure like this with huge swaths of canvas or tarp, now you have a sailboat, but it’s not in water, it’s anchored to the ground! The wind loads even from a 50 or 60 m.p.h gust on an area that large would have been huge.

Finally, the third issue was the height. Now again, normally, if this stage had been left totally open and all they did was hang the lights and sound without the gable, the tarps or stage backdrop – I doubt we’d be talking about any tragedy. But building such a tall structure and then closing part of it in meant you were risking some huge potential lateral loads when a strong wind hit those tarps. As I said regarding the radio tower, after 60 or so feet, CBTS starts to get unstable to lateral loading.

It’s like almost any other event of this nature, change one of these elements and it probably doesn’t happen. I can almost guarantee you that if you had changed all three it would not have happened.

NEWSNAC: You said there was evidence in some of the photography that may offer a clue?

SJ: The video everyone has seen has some basic information in it. I cannot be certain because of the camera but it does appear that the vertical supports start to wobble, then you see the tarp covering the gable on the right side of the stage blow off and then the collapse happens from left to right with a slight forward twist on the front right.

But I think the most informative picture is one attributed to Joey Foley/Getty Images and is a snapshot taken much closer and slightly to the left of the stage right as the collapse is starting. The first thing you notice is two of the verticals have snapped in the same place about eight to ten feet from the top perpendicular. It appears the verticals are still securely anchored and the critical junction at the top where the vertical meets the perpendicular is still intact. Now this does not rule out a failure of those areas on some of the other supports we can’t see but it indicates to me the entire top of the structure has shifted off center placing an unbalanced lateral load at roughly the same place on both of those verticals.

You can clearly see the stage backdrop is still mostly intact and obviously adding wind load to the structure. So when you combine the right gable tarp blowing off, the left staying on and the backdrop staying in place you clearly have a sudden combination of lift, twist and lateral loading

NEWSNAC: Do you see anything that would support Governor Daniel’s assertion that the wind that blew the stage down was a ‘fluke’?

SJ: No, quite the opposite. Again if you look at the Foley photograph you can clearly see on both the right and left side of the stage what appear to be typical fairground style pole-tents which are not being damaged. It appears the sides are flapping but there’s no indication from this picture or any of the reports I have read to indicate these simple stake, rope and pole tents were collapsed. You have to ask if this event was so rare why did it destroy the stage and not these generally less well constructed structures.

[End SJ Interview]

As the investigation into this tragedy begins one other question which relates to the comments offered by Arnold Carter and SJ will beg an answer.

For decades, country music stars have conveyed themselves, their bands and all of their instruments, costumes and equipment aboard a single customized bus. Today, many of these performers are accompanied by convoys of semi-trailers and a small army of stagehands greater than those which many iconic “coliseum” rock bands toured with in years past.

These large productions place greater demands on venues like state fairs to provide ever larger and more elaborate stages. But it also places extremely tight time restrictions on the touring company. Itineraries are literally scheduled down to the minute. Performances must begin and end at a precise time to allow the elaborate stage-show to be disassembled, trucked to the next venue and then reassembled in time for the next show, often in less than twenty-four hours. As a consequence performers force promoters to sign contracts that allow them to cancel or shorten an appearance to stay on schedule. This in turn places the promoter at risk of possible significant financial losses which may, as Arnie Carter noted, drive them to, “thinking a little too much about the dollars and not enough about the dangers.”

But What if it is not Just a Test?

The United States is moving towards the somber milestone of the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks. Next September (2012), the world will no doubt pause to remember the 40^th year since the terrorist attack on 20^th Olympiad in Germany where 11 Israeli athletes were killed. Meanwhile the nation of Norway is still struggling to understand the tragedy of last month which left nearly 80 young people dead and scores of other wounded. What do these three events have in common aside from the obvious common denominator of terrorism? In each case, lives were lost due to deficiencies in emergency planning.

On September 11^th there was a breakdown in the Four-C’s of coordination, communications, command and control caused by the fact that New York City’s Emergency Command Center was located in World Trade Ctr. Building seven. In Munich in 1972, much blame was placed on the German police for not having a SWAT or Rapid Response Team, trained and equipped to deal with the hostage crisis. In Norway, there is still a degree of outrage being expressed over the 60-90 minute response time it took police to get to the island camp and apprehend the confessed shooter.

Also last week saw the conviction of five New Orleans Police officers for their role in unjustified shootings which occurred in the chaotic wake of hurricane Katrina.

As state and local governments reduce police and fire forces due to budgetary constraints and private businesses continue to downsize in all areas there is growing concern among some safety experts that training and real-world execution of comprehensive emergency planning may suffer.

According to the experts we spoke with, an outdated or unpracticed emergency plan is like a ticking “time bomb” just waiting to go off. The event may be terrorism, fire, flood, tornado, hurricane, chemical leak or any number of other possible scenarios. Here are some comments the experts shared with NEWSNAC.

“People tend to write emergency plans then treat them like the Bible. As a practical matter they are reluctant to update them and sometimes to even share them within an organization. In the private sector they are usually kept locked up in the office of the facilities manager or head of security. So even if they are current and applicable unless the event occurs during the time that person is on the job and the event does not prevent them from reaching their office, they may as well be on Mars.”

“Fire is a common threat so most emergency plans are primarily just fire evacuation plans. The occupants are taught simply to respond like Pavlov’s Dog and walk to their assigned fire exit when they hear the alarm, but there are numerous emergency scenarios where this is the wrong choice. If there’s a gunman in the building the last thing you want is a hallway crowded with people trying to reach the fire escapes. Same thing is true if there’s something like a tornado warning. In the case of a gunman the right move is usually going to be a lock-down, for a tornado it’s shelter-in-place, preferably in a room or hallway without windows. People need to be trained and drilled on lock-down and shelter-in-place just as much as on escaping fire. You need to establish how you would communicate this information because obviously you do not want people pulling the fire alarm for any type of emergency.”

“I am gravely concerned with some of the comments I have been hearing regarding cancellations of annual full-scale drills in favor of desktop drills. Many first responder agencies are being told that there simply is not the money for overtime, or extra fuel or the other costs associated with these drills.”

“There should be concern with the current cuts in government budgets and how that will impact routine maintenance of equipment. So many agencies have helicopters which play a multifaceted role in their overall operations. Helicopters are very maintenance intensive and even the slightest deviation from full due diligence there can lead to a tragedy. But you can say the same about fire and rescue vehicle and the specialized gear worn by firemen or hazmat teams.”

The experts even spoke to the possible economic issues which may impact the emergency plans of the individual American family.

“The tragedy in Norway killed as more people in 90 minutes as usually die in an entire year in that country due to fire because they have a mandatory smoke detector law for all residences. I think we started to see in recent years with oil so high and people having trouble making ends meet, a return to kerosene and electric space heaters, both of which are safe if properly used and maintained but are deadly when they are not.”

Following the controversial Debt Ceiling debate and passage, congress adjourned for their summer recess without authorizing funding for the Federal Aviation Administration. While the issue did not impact air traffic controllers it should have impacted some safety inspectors. The only reason it did not was because of the dedication of these civil servants who not only worked without pay, but funded their agency travel from their own money. A stop-gap bill has been passed putting the inspectors back in full employment with expenses starting Monday August 8, 2011. It was a noble example of single-minded public concern for safety, but it will be a dangerous illusion if other cash-strapped agencies decide that shortfalls in public safety budgets will always be covered by their workers at the workers’ expense.