The Health and Safety Executive have opened up the revised version of  HSG195 ‘The event safety guide, A guide to health, safety and welfare at music and similar events’ for comments.

They are now looking for organisers of music and other events to contribute their comments, so that together we can make this guide as useful as possible to event organisers.

They’re inviting the following types of comments:

• Let us know if you think there is any material that goes beyond compliance with the law and why.
• Let us know about any material in the guide that an organiser would not be able to comply with and why.
• Let us know about any inconsistencies or inaccuracies in the draft.

Deadline to help produce a guide you can really use is 11th November 2011.

Get involved here!

Most of our health & Safety advisors are at the music festivals for much of the Summer.

We talked to Mike Herbert from The Event Safety Shop (live from Latitude!) about weather and what it means for safe stage structures and general health & safety issues.

As usual, we’ve seen a lot of rain and mud in the UK this season, but its more complicated than you’d think.   Mike points out that the soil conditions can make a big difference to the stability and security of temporary structures. At Glastonbury the soil is clay which turns to a liquid in heavy rain and can require deeper staking of some larger structures (even using railway sleepers) while at Latitude the soil is much sandier and better draining (just!) so while the top surface can stay in better condition, below the surface tent pegs are still subject to pulling.

So it’s worth factoring in soil type when you plan your anchoring techniques for larger structures.  Conduct ‘pull tests’ to determine how standard tent stakes will perform, use water tanks or concrete blocks for ballast, ground anchors which give a better hold in the ground or a combination of all the above to ensure a good connection to the ground. All stages should be provided with calculations from a structural engineer indicating exactly how much ballast or anchorage is required.

Then there’s wind, and worse, thunderstorms.  Recently there was a freak Summer thunderstorm at the Ottowa blues fest.  As people escaped the rain, the main stage collapsed.  Fortunately the band had just been evacuated off the stage. You can see a video of the aftermath here.

The thing about nature is of course that it’s unpredictable, and the advice on how to manage a construction site during a thunderstorm illustrates that perfectly.  No one can ever know for sure when or exactly where lightning will strike, so a site manager and health and safety advisor has to make a ‘best guess’ as to when they need to get contractors down from their ladders or bands off their stages.

In addition to monitoring weather conditions onsite using mini portable weather stations, installing anemometers* on stages and checking online weather including rain/lighting radar, of all the technological tools we have today, health and safety advisors have the 30/30 rule:  With 30 seconds between thunder and lightning, get people down from structures and under cover until 30 minutes after the last strike.  Some people do the 20/20 rule, but either way, it’s a comically simple way to manage health and safety!

* a device for measuring wind speed

Quoted in Broadcast last month, Bectu assistant general secretary Martin Spence said: “Where people are permanently employed at broadcasters and production companies, there are safety reps, which the law allows for. The problem is that when the Health and Safety At Work Act [1974] was written, it assumed that everyone was employed. It’s much harder to regulate freelance activity. Freelancers don’t have the same formal structures; it’s a bit more free-wheeling.”

Which is what we were talking about here : production designers and construction managers, who have significant health & safety responsibilities, are generally freelancers.

Luckily, the potential storm that could be kicked up by this is being addressed.

First off, Skillset and industry bodies have worked together to create the film and television Health and Safety Framework, an agreement across sectors about which qualifications or training courses are needed for priority production roles.

This is of real value to film and television freelancers, whose training and qualifications can now continue to be recognised as they move from contract to contract.  It also makes clearer to freelancers what training and qualifications they are expected to have in performing their jobs.

With Health & Safety a priority for the film and television industries, there are quite a few Skillset bursaries available for health & safety courses that are relevant to film and television freelancers.

And once you’ve got your cut-price training, you can take it with you from job to job by using the Production Safety Passport.  This logs an individual’s training record and travels with them, so that they are not asked to repeat training.

Angela Roberts, managing editor of the BBC’s College of Production and member of Skillset’s TV Skills Council, said: “The Production Safety Passport is a really important innovation for our industry; it will save companies and individuals time and money, whilst still making sure that we are operating in safe and effective workplaces.”

Do you know about STAGESAFE?

Run by Chris Hannam, STAGESAFE offers consultancy, advice and training services for the live music, entertainment and event production industries.  If you’re an event organiser, production and tour manager or promoters within those industries, click on the link below to his website.

We’ve not written yet on health and safety for film & television, and a lot of the work we do is with designers and construction managers in these sectors.  So you can expect to see more of relevance to health and safety on film and television sets in the future.  Here we’re highlighting the BECTU Health & Safety card advice for designers before we delve deeper by talking to a designer about their experiences in a later post.

You can click here to download the BECTU card.

Some key points that BECTU make:

“As a production designer you have specific responsibilities for design and construction health and safety.  Your producer/employer has overall responsibility under health and safety law for production health and safety’

‘The producer/employer must … ensure that risk assessments are properly carried out’ and ‘provide relevant information, supervision and training.’

However:

‘As a designer, you are responsible for managing and implementing health and safety in areas under your control, and for ensuring the safety and structural integrity of your design at all stages.’

When you look into the detail, there are many responsibilities, listed under the headlines:

* Risk Assessments * COSHH Assessments * Manual Handling * Monitoring and Reviews * Warnings and Signage * Standards (BSI, CEN, IEE etc) * Continuing safety and maintenance * Competence * Fire prevention *

Calling all production designers- what are your thoughts on this advice?  Do you have a view from the ground  and real experience to add to the theory?

Talking to our pool of advisors, who share the health and safety issues currently on their minds, a seasonal theme emerges.

With such a huge number of events at Christmas, often large-scale, and many of them involving putting up structures in public spaces, our health and safety advisors were reminded to emphasise a consideration – and not just for this time of year.

Structures put up overnight are climbing frames to, shall we say, inebriated partygoers.  So experts advise to make the area secure –think about buying in security for when your event is under construction.  We hate to be full of doom, but there’s always a sobering consequence that we want to protect readers from- if one of those people, inebriated or not, climb up and fall, the event organiser is in the tree of culpability and seen to be at fault.  Don’t let that be you!

And to something more light-hearted:

Councils request that event organisers don’t use artificial snow when the weather gets to 4 degrees or lower as, just like the real stuff, fake snow can turn into ice.

Of course at this time of year creating a magical white Christmas is key- so here’s an event organiser’s tip.  Source the snow that they use on film sets – Snow Business seems a good company to contact .  The secret is to avoid the water or oil based snow but go for the completely synthetic stuff they use in the film industry.

Happy Christmas all!

WTZR3T5ZKNAP

Just last year a man had an accident and died dismantling a marquee.  Then Madonna’s concert stage in France collapsed.  And then a second stage collapsed in Canada.  3 fatal accidents in as many months.  And this year a stage being put up for Elton John collapsed.

It’s sobering reading for event managers, especially as there’s very inconsistent support or preparation for the level of responsibility that event management requires. So we were happy to see Alison McDougall, of Relevant Risk, turn the spotlight on the high stakes event managers are playing  with when they’re ill-equipped to deal with health and safety standards:

Specialist Event Advisor Warns Event Businesses They Face Heavy Fines & Prosecution

It’s an impassioned warning- one we support wholeheartedly.  Yet we also sympathise that event health and safety can be problematic- especially when areas of responsibility are blurred.  When suppliers, subcontractors, freelance event managers and venues are all involved it’s hard to know who should be overseeing the H&S of each component of an event. And to confuse things even more, people don’t often have the same level of understanding of H&S regulations, if they have any at all.

Run by the Production Services Association, and set up by StageSafe’s Chris Hannan, The Safety Passport Scheme is a new universal, validated piece of basic H&S training that is shaping up to be more than just a piece of training.  It’s becoming the foundation of a campaign, because the Passport can provide solutions to everything from high staff turnover and employers who don’t want to train short term freelancers to high insurance premiums.

It takes no more than one day, costs no more than £100, and issues a driving license style passport when completed.  It’s this simplicity that means it can be the basis of such a campaign- because it will be widely taken up by the industry.  And it’s very important that it is, because the more employers and the big organisations buy into it, the more weight the passport will carry.

So for employers who need to get new employees up to speed and on site as soon as possible; for freelance event managers who are responsible for their own training and can’t afford to take time off; for organisations bringing in contractors whose current training isn’t adequate- have a look at the Safety Passport Scheme.  Let’s work together to give the industry a regulated standard.

Because if we don’t regulate ourselves, then others will.