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
