What Went Down in Horn Lake, Mississippi

One of the pleasurable gigs I get to do occasionally is stagehand work. Last fall, I had the quite unique privilege of working on the site of the first presidential debate. Having never been to that site, it was a geography lesson itself. The Secret Service didn't help things making it an obstacle course with their barricades, but I got there. It was a trip, to say the least.

But three months before that, I was part of something quite different, held in a different Mississippi city. I had worked at the Fedex Forum in Memphis for a few gigs. The company supplying labor to that site was not the IATSE stagehands union. The difference showed itself in the wages, the way we were regarded and paid, and they way they conducted themselves on this site that night

I was told to go to that site and that I would be paid the same rate I was at the Forum-first mistake. The pay was not the same, and the company refused to rectify the situation. If I had known the rate I ended up with, I would not have taken the job. A stagehand is a skilled, hard working professional, and the rate paid for that night's work was from a company that did not respect the trade or its professionalism.

This site was the DeSoto Civic Center, and the event we were taking down was a wrestling match, I believe, tho I am not sure. We were to report at 10 pm, when the event finished up. We waited for the crowd to file out and then we started on the early parts of disassembly. There was a stage and a wrestling ring. We started taking lights off of various parts of the stage first. I was assigned to work under the direction of a guy named Angus, the head lighting director. Angus came out of Florida, and travelled with the show, telling the local hands what went where, and how it all went up, and down. There were three trusses mounted on the stage, which was 5 feet above a concrete floor.

When you take lighting instruments down, you take the light itself, unplug it from its power source, and control source, along with a safety cable and then dismount it from what its mounted on. If the instrument is large and heavy, you do this with a partner. Very often you re-reconfigure the cables for packing and transit. The first lights I took on were movers, which were computer controlled lights that hung from two struts and rotated and moved about. The struts themselves hung from a rotating base, so a mover put light all over the place, everywhere but straight up into the base. So, my first assignment was taking the movers, de-cabling, and moving to the edge of the stage for another crew to pack them in their cases. After that, Angus was up in the air, working with other people, so I found something to do, packing away the arms that some lights were hung from. Usually everybody has a job that they do, but you don't always know what to do next, so you do what experience has equipped you for. Packing away struts and arms is nearly everyman's job, just try to find someone who seems to know what's to be done and doing it correctly.

I looked up the ceiling and noticed that this venue is not equipped with near the number of points to hang chains from that the Forum is, so I was wondering how some of this high-standing hardware, was kept upright. As it turns out, you can handle this kind of situation in a completely safe manner by securing the trusses sideways with ropes, but if the head roadie feels in a hurry, he might not bother- a potentially deadly mistake.

I got thirsty and went lookng for a water bottle, a very timely move. As I got 30 feet or more away from the rear of the stage, I heard crashing noises, and saw first one truss lean over, then hit another and finally the last. I saw no people on the trusses as I looked. But there had been. I asked a fellow hand had anybody been injured. They looked at me and nodded yes.

I approached the rear of the stage from the side opposite where people were saying the injury had occurred. I went completely around to the front and kept walking until I saw the injured person. He was laying on his back on the concrete floor, and a towel was on his head. I turned back, having seen enough. As I went back around toward the door, I heard someone saying "call 9-1-1" on their phone. Don't know why this person wasn't calling it himself, but didn't say anything. The whole place was instantly traumatized, a feeling that was inescapable. We all stopped work. Most of the hands had seen how he fell. I won't repeat the scene, but I knew he was gone within a minute or two of hitting the floor.

Ambulances came immediately and drove in to within a few feet of the injured person. The EMT's in the ambulance moved him to a gurney and got him out of the building. A hospital was only one mile north of the site, a lucky fact. As it turned out, that didn't matter, though, because his situation was too grave to make it to the hospital alive. Turns out it was my crew boss, Angus. Because of this being a fatality accident, the area was secured, and work stopped for most of an hour.

The event had been cablecast and the TV crew was left to help themselves getting hundreds of feet of TV cable up and packed away, a job some stagehands would surely have been assigned to help with. It was too horribly bad about this accident, but the TV people had somewhere else to be, so they had to pack up and scram. Stopping to react was a luxury they didn't have.

One of our personnel had also been involved in the accident, and our crew bosses were making sure he had some medical attention, as he was going into shock from his injury. He went to the hospital too, in a different ambulance, but survived his injury.

After the police came and did their investigation, we eventually were allowed to finish taking down the set. Half the crew left, calling themselves unable to continue to work that night, having been firsthand witnesses. I was blessed with the good timing of my thirst, so don't have that memory. I stayed on until all the parts were rolling, ready to be loaded onto the trucks. Enough crew being present to see to that, I left the site myself.

The emotional impact of being on a site where a fatality accident has occurred is quite profound, especially for an eyewitness, which I thankfully was not. I still had my own shock and horror to deal with, but cannot imagine was it was like for most of that crew. I prayed with quite a few people, and told some of the availability of psych services which they could seek out and bill to the insurance company covering the event. Needless to say, because of the accident, the crew leaders' handling of it, and unexpectedly lower pay, I no longer work for that company.