It Was A Long Day...

I have to many things to talk about, to many stories, (that I’ve been already telling people) I wasn’t sure how to start, or even where to start. So I decided to start with the day after I blogged last, essentially the beginning I guess.

Ok, so you’ve seen the pic’s of me tying down my walls, so you know that I’ve pretty cautious about them, you know about the wind from my previous posts, all that stuff, well what I don’t’ think I’ve mentioned is there was a family weather team out there, that have some pretty cool stuff, I relied on them most of the week, even though, I really didn’t trust them a whole lot, just because the wind on one side of the building would be completely different than on the other side of the building, but yet they would tell people that we were only getting 15mph winds, well they were right, where the wind meter thingy was, and if you looked at the flag 30 feet away it wasn’t really moving a whole lot, but you looked at the flag on the other side (south side) the flag pole was bending the wind was blowing so hard. So that just gives you an example of the my trust, and having to guess a little bit, about what to do with the weather people.
Alright now that you know a little bit about the wind people, here’s there set up it was pretty impressive, and it was nice to see, when the storms were going be hitting us or if they were going around us, well there was one storm that didn’t decide to go around us, more like several storms that decided to not go around us, as you can see. The first one that hit us had what they were calling a front gust they kept saying “there’s going to be some pretty strong wind, but at the moment we’re only seeing 13mph winds”, so after standing there with them for a minute watching this thing on the computer screen, I made the decision to land the walls, (landing them is one of the safest things you can do, all the weight is on the ground) So I yell at the video director to stop I’m landing the walls, so he starts to get all his guys in and the camera’s in, well by the time I get the ropes untied on the south side (the really windy side) the rain started just to down pour and the wind started to pick up speed.

So I go running through the stage (the fastest rout) and of course all the posers are standing in there out of the rain, and in the hall ways of the building, so I’m screaming at them to move while running through (I totally hit this lady that walked right in front of me, and I mean like I was in a full sprint, screaming move Move!! And she stepped in front of me, it was like a rhino hitting a house cat, she got really mad and said something to the security guard which called her a bad word and said “you should have moved you dumb lady”) I get to the other side, and the wall is tied down, but now the wind is up to 70mph (I didn’t know at the time) so I start to bring the wall down to get the ropes untied, and to land it, I start bringing it in, and usually when its really windy the wall will swing, but this time no swinging,, the wind was blowing so consistently that the wall wasn’t swinging, the bottom was about 3ft. difference than the top, it took 3 of us to get it down after cutting the ropes of course.

Its almost over, I hop into the semi, (cause it was lightning out) and start to dry off, and look over to where the North side stage is, and say to Roger “oh wow they lowered the side stage roof really quick”, then got to looking, and thought where are the up right towers? And then realize oh no the roof collapsed, so I go running back in side to see if any one had noticed, and find out that both side stages collapsed, there was a south side and north side

South Stage

North Stage

There are to many pictures for me to show you, but I thought I would just share a pic from both stages.

The Chair that seen it all

Nobody got hurt except a few broken bones, but nothing real serious.

When I was walking through the airport, I saw this article in the local newspaper, and thought I should see what they have to say about the festival weather. They did the normal stuff, and then in the middle the writer says, "Metal latticework over a story high crumpled onto both stage areas. The jumbo projection screens flanking the main stage were also damaged." That's awesome! "jumbo projections screens" is one of the funniest names I've heard in a while, usually people just call them jumbotrons. Well they weren't "damaged", if the writer would have stuck around for the last band, one would have noticed my LED SCREENS were on and working with no problems. But it did give me chuckle, and that my screens are big enough that their "flanking the main stage".