# Madonna's Stage Collapses, One Dead.



## erosing (Jul 16, 2009)

BREAKING NEWS: Madonna?s Stage Collapses; One Person Dies | RadarOnline.com


----------



## Van (Jul 16, 2009)

Wow, what a scene. Thoughts and Prayers to our French Brethren.


----------



## ishboo (Jul 16, 2009)

Scary, any other word from anywhere else? I'm curious to see what happened.


----------



## gafftaper (Jul 17, 2009)

Wow. That's bad. 

Can anybody translate the key points of that video for us?


----------



## ishboo (Jul 17, 2009)

I'm not fluent in french but I've been taking it for 6 years, they pretty much re-iterated everything in the article, I didn't catch anything new of interest in the clip.


----------



## Wolf (Jul 17, 2009)

From the video it looks to me as if the "Roof" was actually the grid, and possibly the cranes were going to be holding the grid for the duration of the concert. I could understand how someone would interpret it as a "roof".


----------



## Dover (Jul 17, 2009)

I think explains it in better detail


----------



## gafftaper (Jul 17, 2009)

> Firefighters said the accident occurred when the roof of the stage became unbalanced as it was being lifted by four cranes.
> It toppled one of the cranes which fell crashing onto the structure below.


Well that's interesting. It could be a problem with the rigging of the roof or it could have nothing to do with the stagehands and be a failure on one of the cranes or a crane operator operators. Not really a stage collapse either... it's really more crane falling over and taking out everything in it's path. 


How sad. Hopefully the two critically injured make it.


----------



## NickJones (Jul 17, 2009)

Here is the PLSN article on it.
My sympathies to all involved in this tragedy.
Nick


----------



## gafftaper (Jul 17, 2009)

> A crane collapsed while lifting a large metallic truss into place, Lt. Thierry Delorme of the French Navy told CNN. In Marseille, the Fire Department is a part of the Navy.


From CNN. 


The Fire Department is part of the _NAVY_? Oh those wacky French.


----------



## Van (Jul 17, 2009)

gafftaper said:


> ........The Fire Department is part of the _NAVY_? Oh those wacky French.


 

Makes sense though. Fire on board ship is one of your absolute worst possibilities. Therefore you tap the people who are used to fighting it fast. Sort of like how Our business grew out of sailing. 

Hearing how one crane seemed to instigate the issue, I'm wondering if it was lagging behind or was boomed out to far, which caused a failure on it's part. In a lot of ways this is the same as the .... was it Britney Spears and Justin Timberlake ? where the Super Truss was rigged and collapsed. From the pictures it appears as though what collapsed was a Super Truss type "ceiling" and the rest of the rigging and stuff < stuff - technical term> would be hung from that.


----------



## SAWYeR (Jul 18, 2009)

I heard from some of the shop guys that the wrong bolts were used in putting the trussing together.


----------



## CenterSpot (Jul 18, 2009)

I was just mentioning to my Dad (78 years old, retired, gold card, local 720) how FEW tragedies of this nature we have seen in all the years we have been around. Sad, but, because we know it CAN happen, and what is at stake, is why those of us that do/did rigging take it so seriously.


----------



## soundman (Jul 18, 2009)

CenterSpot said:


> I was just mentioning to my Dad (78 years old, retired, gold card, local 720) how FEW tragedies of this nature we have seen in all the years we have been around. Sad, but, because we know it CAN happen, and what is at stake, is why those of us that do/did rigging take it so seriously.



Few deaths but there have been plenty roofs and other ground support structures that have gone over. Most of the time they are kept quite because the company does not want the events to be made public. Just because there are no injuries doesn't make it less serous it just means people were lucky. Ground support is a very tricky animal, take the same system with the same loads to a different area and you need to re-engineer the whole system. Differences in soil composition, wind exposure, and guy wire restrictions means there is no such thing as a plug and play ground support rig.


----------



## gafftaper (Jul 18, 2009)

If I remember right, two technicians died last year and this is the first this year. That's three too many! When you consider the small number of people who do these jobs it seems like a pretty high accidental death rate to me.


----------



## CenterSpot (Jul 18, 2009)

soundman said:


> Few deaths but there have been plenty roofs and other ground support structures that have gone over. Most of the time they are kept quite because the company does not want the events to be made public. Just because there are no injuries doesn't make it less serous it just means people were lucky. Ground support is a very tricky animal, take the same system with the same loads to a different area and you need to re-engineer the whole system. Differences in soil composition, wind exposure, and guy wire restrictions means there is no such thing as a plug and play ground support rig.



I suppose I should have made it more clear that I was referring to the 30 year period he & I are familiar with in the Las Vegas venue.

The only fatality due to a mishap in all those years was that of Hank Vidauri. It occurred at the Flamingo Hotel during a rigging maintenance/repair call. Jeff Daniels could tell us the exact detail, were he here, but my skectch recall is that Hank was working on or around the proscenium and it might have something to do with the main. He either stepped from a piece of portable support equipment or from the grid and fell to the stage ice/floor below.

One of the difficulties I recall back in the day were road troupes bringing shows in without, what WE considered, proper gear and then insisting we use it despite having it explained to them why it was not safe to do so. I have declined to do so and threatened to pull the crew under my direction if they would not agree to allow us to have the proper gear brought to the site in order to proceed.

Fortunately, they all, eventually, agreed to allow us to do it our way and I never had a mishap with any setup I personally worked on. 

I can't even recall hearing about one during those years, and believe me, in a local of merely 1000 +/- people, and I knew everyone of them back then, I would have heard about.

And you can bet, if we'd had any, Chicago & New York would have heard about it, too.

Not everything that happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas.

The worst thing I can ever recall is a few times that guys would step, or kneel, through a false ceiling tile while running cable or hanging chain motors.


----------



## askiboot (Jul 26, 2009)

I heard from a french Newspaper that there were two that died, a 60ish frenchman and a 30ish Englishman, I also heard that Madonna is visiting the family of the frenchman and going to the hospital of the other injured. It is sad that these people died, but I think we need to learn from this, figure out what went wrong, and make sure it never happens again.


----------

