PSA: The Bigger Picture

PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE

THE ART OF GOOD SAFETY CONFERENCING

The PSA made the transatlantic journey to Lititz, Pennsylvania, for the annual Event Safety Summit…

I’m not a big fan of safety conferences; they’re generally populated by people with a propensity for out-acronyming each other, usually ending with nods of violent agreement and not a lot learned. The best safety conferences are the ones populated with those with something to learn and delivered by those willing to speak their language. This year’s Event Safety Summit (ESS), assembled by the Event Safety Alliance (ESA), delivered all that and much more.

To grow an audience is a challenge in itself, but when you’re drawing on a diverse pool of potential delegates, to achieve patrons made up of suppliers, vendors, event organisers, safety specialists, production managers and venues and keep them engaged with relevant content that expands knowledge and understanding is a monumental task. It’s simply not enough to have people leave agreeing that something must be done; the real achievement is when people leave knowing what they need to do and how they can do it.

To that end, the Event Safety Summit, held once again at the ultra impressive Rock Lititz campus (now with an added hotel!), with an overall theme of planning for safety, delivered a more interactive event, with subject sessions pitched at different levels of understanding. Simply put, those that had attended previously could learn more than before, whilst others could engage at entry level about new subjects. The interactive approach delivered the added advantage of learning from shared experience with all the benefits of meeting new, like minded people. From its inception, the ESA has reacted to the issues of the day and who’s going to blame them. When I first learned of the initiative at Tour Link a few years back, it was simply a gathering of people who thought that stages falling down and killing people shouldn’t happen and they were determined to put together guidance on how to stop that happening, but worker safety, fire prevention, evacuation and hostile actions were soon on the agenda. This year’s conference was notable in its holistic approach

WWW.CLF-LIGHTING.COM

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PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE

ESA Vice President, Steve Adelman and Content Architect Dominic Housiaux welcomes delegates who were probably still staring in awe at the curved screen.

to all things safety, with enough focussed content for those interested in single elements but enough access to a variety of sessions for those wishing to learn across the full spectrum.

As mentioned, interactivity was a key element this year, with very few sessions, even those full audience presentations on the main stage, delivered as simple lectures. Of course, you can’t get more interactive at a safety conference than a full evacuation, planned during a session on Wednesday and executed in the middle of a keynote session on the Wednesday. Got to love those windy, freezing late November Pennsylvania days.

As our gallery illustrates, it looked like a great event. As attendees will confirm... it was.

No production conference write-up can go without name checking suppliers who supported the cause above and beyond all expectation:

• Facilities - Rock Lititz

• Catering - TFB Catering

• Screens/Cameras - Upstage Video (that screen!)

• Video - Control Freak

• PPT/Content Ops - Shumaker

• Lighting - Arethusa Designs/4 Wall

• SFX - Pyrotek

• Staging - Tait

• Dressing - Atomic

• Audio - Clair

• Direction - Lankey & Limey Ltd TPi Photos: Nick Karlin & Shelby Carol Cude www.psa.org.uk

Technical design from concept to reality

www.wonder.co.uk

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Audience engagement was designed to challenge thinking as well as encourage interaction with new people; Hotel Rock Lititz and its appropriately named Per Diem restaurant provided a brand new hub for delegates. Road case lids for bathroom doors, naturally; Danielle Hernandez, safety specialist and Director of McAlister Auditorium and Dr Donald Cooper, ESA Executive Director proving that sometimes, photo captions are best left to the reader.

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PSA: THE BIGGER PICTURE

Itzel Molina shared 15 years of top level management and cultural transformation experience; Tait’s Sam Hillyer and Tim Roberts take audience participation a little far in its Automation Hazard Hunt session; Want to demonstrate how wind affects structures? Use pasta and marshmallow, naturally. The hairdryer test proves that riggertone would have been better than spaghetti.

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