Stage Collapses at Ottawa BluesFest

Re: Stage Collapses at Ottawa BluesFest

Jason Lavoie said:
This was not a microburst.. one report I read from an amateur storm 'chaser' said that he was tracking the storm front for a while, and it was very clearly traveling at over 100km/h for at LEAST an hour before it hit ottawa.

Read the story for yourself here: http://ottawastart.blogspot.com/2011/07/guest-post-local-storm-chaser-kyle.html

I think the fault here is that people rely on what they see and feel, and didn't clear out until the menacing clouds were on top of them. I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies start requiring meteorologists to be keeping a look-out in the future

Jason
Click to expand...

I have never worked a festival where the company with the big line-array hangs didn't have someone on the crew with SmartPhone internet access constantly monitoring the weather radar. I believe they also write it into their contract that they'll lower the hang when any storm is 30 minutes away.

In the days of sailing ships they'd go as fast as they could for as long as they could, reef the sails they needed for steerage and when push came to shove......cut the rigging and let the canvas go to save the masts.

And from the Blogspot link above:

Between the hours of 6:00pm and 7:00pm the storm had travelled all the way from Pembroke to basically where I am along the Ottawa River in Westboro. That’s just over 100km. Do the math and you start to realize this storm was travelling at over 100km/h. During this travel time it got closer and closer to Ottawa, so Environment Canada issued a severe thunderstorm warning for the City of Ottawa at 6:35pm.

Around here the cops shut things down when the warning is issued.
 
Re: Stage Collapses at Ottawa BluesFest

Jason Lavoie said:
This was not a microburst.. one report I read from an amateur storm 'chaser' said that he was tracking the storm front for a while, and it was very clearly traveling at over 100km/h for at LEAST an hour before it hit ottawa.

Read the story for yourself here: http://ottawastart.blogspot.com/2011/07/guest-post-local-storm-chaser-kyle.html

I think the fault here is that people rely on what they see and feel, and didn't clear out until the menacing clouds were on top of them. I wouldn't be surprised if insurance companies start requiring meteorologists to be keeping a look-out in the future

Jason
Click to expand...

Storm cell movement (direction and speed) is rarely related to surface wind speed and direction.

I live/work in West Texas, where a light breeze is 18 mph, and storms like this pop up all the time. I've survived a clear-air gust front that shut down a street festive, wiped a stage clean of almost all backline, pushed me 100' down the paved street on my ass, and took away EZ-ups never to be seen again. Estimated winds through the downtown area were estimated at 90+ mph. There are a few aftermath videos of this Ottawa event out there and the most striking thing to me about them is that not a single tent tore away, temporary fencing didn't blow down, and people were still standing throughout the gust. That tells me that surface winds were likely below 40 mph, if they even got that high. Now I'll admit that surface winds and 20' winds can be different (they measure both out here), but that stage roof should have been the most secure item on the entire festival grounds. There's even video of people holding their EZ-ups in the gust, and I do know that it doesn't take much to rip the canvas right off of one of those.

However, I am also a trained SkyWarn spotter, and the moment I heard that "We didn't know it was coming" comment I was as disgusted as that blogger. I don't know the condition or capabilities of Canadian weather radar, but I do know that down here you can see gust fronts on radar. You can even get wind speed product from the radar feed, and you can get these feeds on iPhones (etc.) There's really no excuse for not knowing.

Of course, this year the weather world-wide has been very odd, so maybe this type of storm is a 100 year event up there. I still (from the comfort of my chair) think that some shortcuts may have been taken during roof construction.
 
Re: Stage Collapses at Ottawa BluesFest

Interesting to see that Cheap Trick have now made a statement that they refuse to perform on Berger(Mega Stage) stages again, and have cancelled a Sept 1 upcoming show because of this.

"Unless current investigations prove otherwise, the band will not, as a matter of principle, but more importantly, as a matter of safety, appear on a Berger stage in the future."

Interesting days ahead.
 
Re: Stage Collapses at Ottawa BluesFest

Newbie on the forum here.

I was in my backyard having a big bbq with wedding guests and relatives when this happened, and I live in Hull exactly across the Ottawa river from the "Blues" fest (what a joke, last time it was an actual blues fest they had a Cajun stage....now it's just a really big fest....btw they really pride themselves on the "really big" part.). We have very limited visibility of the sky and can't really see weather coming, but even I managed to get everyone, adults and children, and all the food, drinks, etc. inside when I saw the clouds and felt the wind. It seemed like something really big was about to happen. Out on LeBreton flats you can see for miles, and I expect they had much more warning, being tuned into weather reports. The winds totally destroyed the rear neighbour's trees, destroying fences and ripping our clothesline out of the side of our house. The winds also picked up our rented 40x100 foot wedding tent directly east in Gatineau and set it back down again, dropping about half the poles.....no damage that the included insurance didn't cover.

My bet is that someone decided to push things weather-wise and didn't shut things down soon enough. What if the storm had been stronger? More could have been hurt/killed, even if infrastructure was more solid (and it should have been).

Midwesterners in my experience are usually more relaxed about weather (try hanging out with them in their living rooms with tornado reports come on the TV - they just hang out as if nothing is happening while I'm wondering why we aren't all heading to the basement!) so when a forum member from Oklahoma says they didn't pack it in soon enough that's saying something!

I needed to drop off lighting from my wedding the next day at the local outfitters and they were scrambling because of the events at Blues Fest. They weren't accepting returns but took mine anyways, so kudos to those guys in the trenches.

My (very after-the-fact) 2 cents.

Regards,

...Greg
 
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