OTTAWA — The Ontario Ministry of Labour is investigating what went wrong at Ottawa’s largest music festival after a main stage collapsed during a violent storm Sunday night.
The challenge will be to determine how much of the dramatic finale of the Cisco Ottawa Bluesfest was manmade and how much was thanks to Mother Nature.
A fierce storm with winds measuring up to 96km/hour moved into Ottawa’s LeBreton Flats around 7:30 p.m. after a day of blazing hot temperatures and sunny skies. Facing the force of the storm, the MBNA stage collapsed sending three people to hospital marking the end of a 12-day, multi-stage music festival.
"What came in, came in very quickly and went out very quickly,” festival director Mark Monahan told reporters during a press conference Monday morning.
Monahan said the fact that the storm took out one stage and not the rest a “freak situation.”
But Environment Canada meteorologist Peter Kimbell said Ontario is nailed by 70 of these weather systems each summer – a weather event he called a squall line.
A squall line is a wall of thunderstorms that are accompanied by large down drafts which cause serious wind damage.
Kimball said there was nothing about the site that would give any hints to why one stage was damaged, while the others withstood the gale force wind.
“It was a fairly large scale event that crossed the National Capital Region,” he said. “There’s obviously some interesting phenomenon to study for building people.”
But questions are being raised about the construction of the stage that crumpled in the storm.
Monahan said the stage that crumpled in the storm was different than the others on site, which are built on trailers. He stopped short of saying that the construction was the reason behind the cave in.
"Right now the site is in the hands of the Ministry of Labour. It is their site and they are investigating what happened and why it happened. I cannot comment on the structure of the stage or what is different about it," Monahan said.
The Ontario Ministry of Labour was onsite Monday and told Global News an investigation could take up to a year. One investigator and one engineer are examining the engineer’s design for the stage and whether it was constructed to code.
The investigation could result in charges under the Occupational Health and Safety Act or a declaration it was an accident.
The stage that collapsed is owned by a company out of Montreal and has been rented by Bluesfest for the past five years.
An independent engineer inspects the stages after they are constructed, according to Monahan. He said Bluesfest organizers do their own safety checks daily.
Engineers generally customize temporary stages to account for local weather and geographic conditions, said Alan Walker, president of AJW Engineering, a firm that specializes in designing temporary structures. The firm recently built a stage for U2. It did not set up any of the stages at Bluesfest.
“There is a due diligence and level of safety that is expected, but you can’t build Fort Knox,” he said, adding that there is always the risk of extreme and unpredictable weather events.
Walker, who does not know the specs of the Bluesfest stage, said safety needs to be built into the design of the stage. He said outdoor stages often include concrete ballasts to buffer the structure against the winds that can get captured in mesh used to hide the scaffolding.
Another important safety precaution is to have solid leg supports, according to Walker.
Monahan also told reporters he was very happy with how festival organizers and volunteers reacted to the situation. When festival organizers realized a storm was moving in, they told shut down the festival and started sending the 30,000 people in attendance home.
Cheap Trick, who was playing the main stage, was also evacuated before the stage gave way. Three other people were sent to hospital with injuries, but were all were released by Monday morning.
The accident mirrors a country music festival in Alberta in 2009 when a trailer-based stage was blown over by a rogue windstorm, killing one woman. An engineering report prepared for the Alberta government said it was built to code.
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