The Dangers of Audio Visual Work

I read the newspaper with trepidation when I saw the headline that the Provo Fire Department had released their report as to why the Provo Tabernacle burned down.  As I read the article, I felt bad for the hired Audio/Video company that had caused the fire.  The evening of the fire they were rehearsing Lex deAzevedo's Gloria. 

According to the report, the lighting technician had removed two ceiling 300 watt light fixtures and placed them in the attic.  (He was suspending a truss to hold temporary stage lights.) He was supposed to remove the lights from the fixtures for safety reasons.  However, according to the report, the technician placed one of the fixtures on a wooden speaker box in the attic.  At 7pm, that light came on with the rest of the ceiling lights when the rehearsal began.  The light reached 600 degrees in about 30 minutes, the speaker box was on fire by 9:30pm.  By 11:00pm the practice was over.  By 2:30am the building was burning and not able to be saved.

As I was reading the report in the newspaper, I thought back to a mistake that was made when I was working a summer in Audio/Video for Brigham Young University.  I was asked to provide sound reinforcement for a rendition of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat.

This play was being performed as the end of a wildly successful BYU Youth Theater Summer Workshop.  I was asked to run the audio after another engineer has already setup the speakers, mixer, microphone and cables.  This production took place on the outdoor patio of the beautiful Harris Fine Arts Center.

In the photo, the patio is right through the latticework on the right side of the photo.  The stage was setup close to the building, which was actually under the extended roof.  The chairs for the audience were setup in a semi-circle around the stage.  The speaker for the sound reinforcement was hanging over the lip of the roof, being aimed toward the audience.  The play was presented to sold out audiences (mostly parents) for Friday and Saturday evening performances.  I was a sight to see.  Since my position was prominent with relation to the stage, the director of the play had requested me to dress up in Egyptian attire.

There I sat, on a high stool, working the mixing console for lights and audio dressed as King Tut himself!  So the plays went on each evening without incident.  By the way, the youth actors were amazing!

The Saturday night performance ended roughly at 11pm.  When parents and kids had finished hugs, congratulations, party, etc., it was well past midnight.  As I was cleaning up the audio and lighting equipment, it dawned on me that I didn't know if I would be able to remove the suspended speaker by myself.  After I had cleaned up everything else, I went to the roof, located the rope that was holding the speaker in place and, without untying it, tried to pull the speaker up over the lip of the roof.  To no avail.  The weight of the speaker and the angle of the rope was too much for me alone.

So I called up a good friend, because by this time all the stage had been disassembled and taken away and the parents and kids had all left.  It was just me!  My friend came down and we both went out on the roof and pulled the rope.  The speaker inched up.  Right before it was going to come over the lip of the roof there was a loud SNAP!.  My friend and I fell backwards on the roof as the rope broke, sending the speaker plummeting to the cement below.   Man! what a crash!  I am so glad (lucky) that we were doing this at 2AM in the morning.  We immediately ran down the stairs and out onto the patio.  The speaker had cracked its case, pulverized the large woofer, the round frame being split in several places.  Needless to say, the speaker was destroyed.  After loading what was left of the speaker into the van, we went back on the roof the untie and remove the rope.

As I sit here and think about what could have happened during one of the performances (the audience was right under this hanging speaker), I shudder.  I was so blessed that that speaker did not fall during a performance.  Also very blessed that no one was walking across the patio when the speaker fell.

While I am reminiscing about my time as an Audio/Video engineer, I will leave you with a quick, humorous snippet.   I was doing the sound and lighting for a play in the BYU experimental theater in the same building.  This is a theater in the round setup with the sound and lighting controls up in the ceiling.  We had a professional actor (actor guild stuff) playing the main character in the play.  Part of the play had this lady laying in a bed with a phone close to her.  The play called for her to take some phone calls.  I had a phone on the top of my mixing console.  At different times during the show, I would lift the handset and call the phone on the stage.  On the first night of the show, I bumped the phone off the mixing console.  The phone fell with a crash to the suspended floor, but worse, the phone on the stage rang!  The professional actor didn't miss a beat, picking up her phone, having an impromptu conversation, and hanging the phone back up.  Needless to say, after the show was over, I apologized.  I fixed my problem for the remaining shows by duct taping the phone to the mixing console.

Till next time,
Bill