The weekend tragedy that took five lives and injured at least 40 visitors at the Indiana State Fair is exposing gaps in safety oversight and highlighting the hazards of outdoors shows.
The regulatory void in Indiana begins with a lack of supervision of the companies that construct temporary outdoor stages such as the one that collapsed Saturday amid high winds. The firms aren’t required to get state building permits. As a result, they don’t have to submit engineering plans or undergo any kind of inspection, according to a spokesman for the Indiana Department of Homeland Security.
“There is no permitting process,” the department spokesman told The Indianapolis Star. “There is no regulation on it.”
And even though the city of Indianapolis requires permits for temporary structures, the city lacks that authority in this case because the fair is on state-owned property, as The Associated Press reports.
Also at issue is why no evacuation was ordered before the 60 mph winds and heavy rain reached the fairgrounds. Although Indiana Gov. Mitch Daniels at least initially called the stage collapse an unforeseeable “fluke,” a timeline released by the Indiana State Police indicates that fair officials were alerted about the likelihood of a severe thunderstorm several times in the hours before the disaster.
“It was quite foreseeable,” said Mike Smith, senior vice president of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions. “The State Fair should have had someone making a call that if a weather warning was issued, the area would have been evacuated immediately.”
A fair spokesman said the fair’s executive director, Cindy Hoye, and Indiana State Police Capt. Brad Weaver were headed to the stage to order an evacuation when it collapsed.
Today, according to another AP account, Daniels said he might support mandating inspections of temporary structures like the State Fair stage that collapsed. He also said, however, that the fair’s existing emergency plan is a “pretty well thought through policy.”
The Indiana Occupational Safety and Health Administration and the state fire marshal are investigating the accident.
According to Rolling Stone, the Indianapolis tragedy was the third outdoor concert of the summer in which abrupt, heavy winds destroyed all or part of a stage, prompting questions about whether outdoor shows are safe for bands and fans. The previous concerts disrupted by winds were in Ottawa, Canada, and Tulsa, Okla. In both of those cases, tragedies were narrowly avoided.
I had seen the warning live on the weather channel, and the weather channel gave a two hour warning for Indiana, and Illinois to clear both fair grounds. Illinois had taken the warning serious, and cleared their fair grounds, and all their people were safe. Indiana, never listen’s, it is the dumbest state I had ever seen, and told people not to vote for Mich Daniels, but Daniels is the Fluke, not the stage just him, he lied to all the media, but he did not listen to the warnings as Illinois did, and the whole state lied, but I know the truth. I posted other storms last summer, Texas did not give a warning in enough time, and I posted it on the Internet.
Gail, Illinois is not the only place where people ignore warnings like these… in fact recent hurricanes along the Gulf Coast have had people staying in coastal houses with no escape route and Cat 5 storms heading their way. There’s something about the way weather is presented in this country that tends to make people really complacent when faced with terrible conditions… and sadly this is not the only recent incident where people have died in situations like these. Remember the poor kid from Notre Dame who died in a film tower collapse last fall?
These deaths are preventable. I’m not sure why we’re not doing a better job preventing them.