2012年11月18日 星期日

who immediately ran back toward the wreckage

In was the closing night of Bluesfest 2011,Find the latest styles and dsquaredshoes. and most everyone in front, behind and on the stage knew the violent storm was coming.

They had known for almost an hour, but it was unthinkable that this monolithic main stage, 45 metres wide and 17 metres high, wouldn’t be able to withstand one of those typical Ottawa summer windstorms.

At Ottawa airport, the wind speed was recorded at 96 kilometres an hour. How fast the wind was travelling when it arrived at the festival site remains unclear. Some think 120 km/h, others even higher.

There were about 20 people on the stage as it began to collapse. Most prominent among them was the veteran Illinois rock band Cheap Trick, whose members had been enthusiastically running through their greatest hits catalogue when in a sudden, horrifying realization of impending disaster, lead singer Robin Zander screamed, “Get off the stage. Get off the stage. Go.currently watchreplica are a perfect replacement for a bulb. Go. Go.”

The musicians scrambled off with seconds to spare, but were trapped and enveloped by the canvas walls of the collapsing stage.Find the largest selection of womenshoes on sale.

Zander wasn’t the first to see, or to sense, the gravity of the situation. He might even have been among the last. He got the message to evacuate from sound engineer Mike Cormack, 31, who had been told to cut the main sound feed.

Seconds before the collapse, and with chunks of metal already dropping from the tonnage of rigging 22 metres above, members of the stage crew were already desperately trying to minimize whatever damage and injury was about to descend.

If heroes emerged in the chaotic minutes before and after the collapse, members of Ottawa’s tightly knit stage crew community were certainly among them.

“You learned a lot about people that night,” says Sacha Morazain, a former partner in Project X Productions, which employed many of the crew. “They stepped up and risked their lives.”

When they saw what was about to happen, Freddy Steele, 43, and Jay McNicol, 35, riggers and spotlight operators, ran from the “front of house,” the tall tower-like structure looming over the rear of the crowd that holds the sound board and other technical equipment.

But even as they were dashing toward the stage, Cormack and others were already on it pushing people off — the 25 or so highest bidders for the Best Seats in the House and a few assorted dignitaries who had turned up for an end-of-festival presentation before Cheap Trick’s set.

A guy with a tray of beer pushed his way up the stage stairs as others were scrambling down. He got difficult and in one swoop, a member of the stage crew knocked the beers out of his hand and pushed him down the stairs. It would be half an hour or so later that the guy, contrite and tearful, sought out the man who’d robbed him of his beer: “Thanks for saving my life, man,” he said.

By the time Steele made it from the spotlight tower to the corner of the stage,High Quality Make your own ownfigurine To Look Like You, the wind was whipping sand and soil out of the grass into his face. The stage crew say the back canvas wall of the stage should have come apart under pressure from the wind, but it hadn’t. Steele rushed behind the stage,Welcome To Red Bottom Shoes replicashoes Online Store. There Are A Lot Of Cheap Christian Louboutin Pumps On Sale. stuck a knife into the back screen and had made a slit barely 30 centimetres long when the force of the wind ripped it apart. Metal bolts began falling.

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