If you’re an Event Manager and your events sometimes involve temporary structures, you’ll want to know about the changes going on at the HSE.

It’s about construction within the events industry: temporary structures, stages, temporary seating. In the past entertainments and events have been managed to a certain extent by local authorities. Recently however, the HSE have been noticing how many serious structures the events industry uses (perhaps the Olympics had something to do with that?!) and has determined that the putting together of temporary structures in the events industry can be defined as construction work and so will now fall under their remit.

Here comes the industry gossip… Many are wondering if the HSE will now want to apply the CDM (construction design and management) regulations to the events industry. (historically the CDM regs have specifically excluded some temporary structures such as marquees and similar tents). And we see how this could worry people- the CDM regs are too specific to the construction industry- the job titles and responsibilities are too specific and wouldn’t make sense to anyone working within the events structures without some intensive translation work.

So here’s the good news.

Whilst the HSE have tried to get the scope of the range of temporary structures in existence, after some research they have determined that event work does not fit the scope of CDM and that the work will fall under existing regulations such as work at height regs, workplace regs and the all-encompassing HSAW act.

And here’s the reality: You’ll be seeing the HSE visiting your event site and enforcing safe working during constructions and de-rigs much more in the future. In particular they will look at working at height, MEWPS (mobile elevating work platforms), transport and delivery to and from sites, and the separation of vehicles and pedestrians in working areas.

The jury’s still out on how this will play out. The HSE want there to be a consistent playing field across all local authorities, rather than the wildly different styles of management and degrees of experience that currently exists.  And by levelling the playing field, perhaps everyone’s jobs will be made easier.

Thanks to Mike Herbert from the Event Safety Shop for all his assistance on this topic. A true expert!

Richard got his 15 minutes of fame at the IOEX courtesy of Silverstream.  We thought he did pretty well, considering this was being live streamed to everyone in ExCel!

• The HSE have published a good practice report on temporary demountable structures for the events industry.  You can find it here
• The Events Industry Forum is taking over production of the new Health & Safety events guides.  The hope is that they will produce a much more comprehensive guide to replace the Purple Guide

That’s all for today folks.  We’ll be back in a couple of weeks with a more in-depth report on a Health & Safety topic from one of our experts.

A fun video clip showing quite an amazing tool in the new Ford Focus. For extra fun factor, play ‘spot the Duncan’. He’s the one in the orange jacket, harness, and hard hat.

The first person to spot the close up of Duncan, grinning away, and write it in the comment box below (e.g 1.68 seconds), gets sent a bottle of wine from us….

We’ll be back onto health & safety in temporary structures for our next post, but meanwhile we had to tell you what happened at the Event Production Awards.

As regular readers will remember, we were up for two awards – Best Staging Company of the Year and Best Seating Supplier of the Year.

We felt honoured to be recognised alongside the biggest international players, so we thought it was worth going along for the ride- a black-tie event at the Hilton Park Lane.

With 600 of the industry’s best seated under those fantastic chandeliers amongst the video projections and pyrotechnics, our work on the Bompass and Parr pyramid and the BAC auditorium had their 5 seconds on the big screen as the awards were announced. This time around, that’s as far as we went, but next year the Event Production Awards had better look out!

It was consolation enough to point and laugh at the boys trussed up in their dickie bows. We doubt you’d be able to imagine the sight, so to help you out here’s a rather blurry photo (blame the champagne) of Duncan and new guy Rob about to hit the roulette table – all in aid of Water Aid

Director : Adam Morely
Seen On Screen Fitness & Events Ltd

Joey Foley/Getty Images, Indiana State Fair 2011

The Stand Out Newsletter came out a few days ago, with news of an alert published by The Institute of Structural Engineers.

Stand Out summarise:

“The alert is aimed at those who commission, buy or licence temporary stages and structures. It has been issued in light of recent collapses of temporary stage structures in the USA and in Europe, which have resulted in fatalities and numerous injuries.”

You can download the IStructe document here.

Thanks to Stand Out Magazine for making us aware.

Stand Out Magazine wanted to run a feature on interesting temporary structures and staging in their September issue- and we thought what better example than the boating lake we built for Bompass & Parr on the Selfridges roof.  Not the usual stage hire job, but firmly in the category of temporary structures- and one we enjoyed immensely!

Bompas & Parr were asked to launch the new sweetener, Truvia and did so in their usual fantastical style.   The boating lake was part of a Voyage of Discovery… read more in Stand Out’s feature here.

And there is a great set of pictures, here, although they don’t, for obvious reasons, focus on the steeldeck staging structure that makes it all possible!

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