Why the
Lightning-Fast Safety Responce
By Jesse B. Staniforth
Lightning may not strike
twice, but striking once is bad
enough. Thanks to the diligence of
Stageline tech Francis Kopajko, when
lightning struck a SAM440 during the
leadup preparations for an evening
show in Rouyn-Noranda on August
11, the stage had already been evacu-
ated, and no one was hurt.
Mid-afternoon that day, technicians
were all over the SAM440, preparing
it for day two of the three-day Osisko
en Lumière festival, to be headlined
that night by Sum 41. The band itself
was being interviewed backstage,
while rehearsals and final prepara-
tions were happening all onstage
around them. Kopajko, however, was
watching his WeatherOps technology
very carefully.
“I was expecting bad weather,” Ko-
pajko says. “It was getting dark a
few miles away, and there was some
serious rain beginning. I saw some
lightning from a few miles off and I
got an update on my cell phone from
WeatherOps. After that I called the
evacuation.”
While Stageline’s Weather Ops have
a live meteorologist they can call for
a confirmation, Kopajko didn’t wait to
talk to an expert before making the
call. He had enough experience to
trust his gut feeling and start the evac-
uation.
Unfortunately, with the stage full of
different parties—artists, producers,
and promoters—not everybody want-
ed to heed Kopajko’s warning. The
26
show was set to start at 6:00pm and
no one wanted to see it delayed.
“People don’t realize when it comes
to lightning that it’s dangerous. I had
to tell people seven or eight times
and be very persuasive. There were
eight or nine people onstage, and I
had to ask them again and again,” Ko-
pajko says. “Four or five minutes lat-
er, the lightning hit—we saw a fireball
maybe 20 feet away. It is loud, and it
smells like sulphur.”
The lightning struck the upstage-right
corner post and exited through a pipe
on an upstage fog machine—and the
stage was empty, so everyone was
safe.
This was all in line with Stageline’s
strict weather threshold policies. We
get daily forecasts and text-mes-
sage alerts from our Weather De-
cision Technologies’ WeatherOps
event-safety service to keep us
abreast of wind, weather, and light-
ning that might threaten the safety of
the people on and around a stage.
In situations where there is lightning
within an 8-mile (12-km) radius of the
stage, our policy is always to clear all
personnel, period. A stage is by its na-
ture the tallest building in the middle
of a vast, wide-open space, and it is
full of electronics. For lightning, there
is little else as attractive as that. That
policy, together with Francis Kopa-
jko’s firm order to evacuate the stage,
saved lives.
WeatherOps weather safety expert
Dax Cochran agrees. His event-safe-
ty service provides Stageline weath-
er updates specifically matched to
stage thresholds and triggers for calls
like opening windwall doors, remov-
ing screens, releasing windwalls, and
clearing personnel.
“We’re only able to be successful if
our customers are heavily invested in
the entire process,” Cochran says. “We
can get a lightning alert to anyone in
the world, but if they don’t know what
to do when they get that alert, that
doesn’t mean a lot. We love organiza-
tions like Stageline who go the addi-
tional mile. They’re not just setting up
a weather service as a façade—they’ve
got the safety plans and training in
place behind it to make the weather
information meaningful.”
After all that, of course, the show must
go on—and it did. Once Kopajko de-
termined that the weather threat had
passed, he sounded the all clear and
personnel returned to the stage, cer-
tainly a little shaken. There were re-
pairs to make and some delays as a
result (opening act Rancoeur unfortu-
nately had their set cancelled), but the
doors opened only an hour late. And
that’s impressive, but a lot more than
that is the knowledge that every per-
son onstage went home safe and un-
scathed. We’re always proud to make
exceptional events happen, but we’re
prouder still to say we always make
them happen safely.