Indiana State Fair organizers should look to the Elkhart County 4-H Fair’s recent brush with a storm as a good example of taking the right attitude and being overly cautious.
Thursday night a severe storm was tracking in from the west and was headed for Elkhart County. Thousands of fans were in the fair’s bleachers enjoying the noise, smoke and pulling power of custom tractors as the storm closed on the county. Fair officials monitoring the storm put their heads together and made the right call, advising fairgoers of the storm’s approach well in advance of its arrival. A suggestion was made that fairgoers might want to leave. Then when lightning was spotted far in the distance, the stands were evacuated.
Fortunately the storm clouds broke apart before they arrived at the fair and the crowd was able to easily make it to their cars without getting very wet and drove home safely.
As the start of the Indiana State Fair approaches, its organizers are painfully aware of last year’s disaster of having a temporary stage blow down during a thunderstorm. That collapse killed seven people and injured dozens.
New safety protocols are in place at the State Fair, which should prevent anything similar occurring in the future. But State Fair officials should study our fair’s response to the storm and the actions of other fairs around the state, to glean useful information about how to warn a crowd of a problem and then how to handle that crowd after a warning is issued.
We are proud of our fair’s safety record, which by the way is not perfect, but is excellent for an event that lasts more than a week, is staffed mostly by volunteers and is attended by about 200,000 people with all kinds of backgrounds. Now that our fair is over, fair officials should assess what crowd control techniques worked well and which ones need improvement.
Two things we noticed at this year’s fair is that when a storm warning is issued, there are not a lot of options for protection for fairgoers. Most of the buildings at the fairgrounds are designed to hold cattle or other animals and have to be open on their sides for ventilation. Commercial buildings, while adequate to house temporary retail displays and keep the rain off them, are basically pole barns that wouldn’t offer a lot of resistance to blowing debris, such as tree limbs.
We also know that building tough storm-resistant shelters would be very expensive and there would never be enough of them to hold all the people attending a night at the fair. But, it’s an issue we think needs further study.
The only other safety concern we have involves the trams used to move fairgoers to and from their cars. At one time many of the trams had spotters on them. These were usually 4-H kids who sat backward and helped tractor drivers keep an eye on passengers. This safety feature should be reinforced because a 6-year-old boy who thought a tram was stopping, jumped from one and fell. The tram’s tires rolled over his ankle and foot causing severe bruising. Everyone was thankful that the accident was not worse.
Overall we believe the volunteer fair board, all of the county’s police agencies, the paramedics, the firefighters, 4-H leaders and the 4-H members, keep safety foremost in their minds and actions and work together to pull off a stunning event year after year. We are very grateful for all their efforts and they all make our fair, and our county, a great place to visit.
We wish the State Fair organizers the best of luck in achieving the same level of safety and competence at their fair this year.
Opinion
Related Photos
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Spectators in the grandstands at Thursday's tractor/truck pull after it was announced that a storm was approaching the fairgrounds. SCOTT WEISSER
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