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Rigging doesn’t get its fair shrift. It’s not a topic that’s covered extensively. And yet, its significance simply can not be overstated.
“Thou shalt love thy neighbour as thyself.” – Matthew 22:39 (KJV)
At its core, rigging safety is about putting others first. We can’t easily hang thousands of pounds in the air without a terrifying concern: “Have I done this safely so that those below will be free from harm? Can I close my eyes at night knowing I have done everything morally, ethically and legally possible to keep others safe?”
Safety is no accident
American National Standards by the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) have to be reviewed at least every five years. That review can lead to them being reaffirmed, revised, or withdrawn. Quite often, both very new and very old standards need to be revised—the new ones to take care of errors or vague requirements, the old ones because technology or the expectations of society have changed.
Consider ANSI E1.53, Overhead mounting of luminaires, lighting accessories, and other portable devices: specification and practice, and its revision, in public review at http://estalink.us/pr starting Sept. 24, 2018, as an example of how we gain wisdom and move forward. When I first started hanging lighting equipment in theaters about 48 years ago, we used unrated c-clamps, no safety cables, and the barndoors or gel frames were held by gravity in holders on the instruments. About 10 years after that I started hearing people teaching stage rigging advising, “Don't use unrated hardware.” If it has no rating, you don't know what it should be able to hold, but we were still hanging hundreds of lighting instruments every show over people's heads with unrated c-clamps. We used safety cables often, but not always.
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Occasionally things would break or a gel frame or barndoor would fall, but usually during the hang-and-focus work call with no one below, so we dismissed the hazard. Ten years after that, the U.S. market was taken over by lighting instruments with latches to hold gel frames in place—leaving no easy excuse for a gel frame falling on stage or into the audience—and by this time, the use of safety cables was common.
However, four years ago I received an email from a representative of Actors' Equity, saying:
“. . . it has been brought to the attention of Actors’ Equity Association that there [have] been a few incidents under our agreements involving lighting instruments falling from their positions and crashing onto the stage floor when people are working. Recently, a lighting instrument managed to become undone from its overhead position during a performance and fell to the stage floor. Luckily, no one was injured. Another recent incident was a top hat from a lighting instrument free falling and landing on the stage floor during a performance. Again, no one was injured in that incident.
“Are there any entertainment standards currently in place that protect everyone on the stage and backstage from falling equipment, etc. (e.g., lighting instruments and their accessories; e.g., top hats, gobos, gel frames, etc.; snow machines, bubble machines, haze machines)? Is the use of safety cables required on all equipment in order to prevent a free fall? What other practices are in place to prevent equipment from falling?”
By this time, rated c-clamps exist, the use of safety cables is standard practice (find information at the bottom of this piece for an update on standards for the use of c-clamps and safety cables), and most lighting instruments have clips to hold in barndoors and gel frames, but this email makes it clear these things are not being used on all professional productions. We can't make people take appropriate care of their colleagues, but we can write a standard that says what that appropriate care would be. We can do that because that's what an ANSI-accredited technical standards program can do (we're not stage inspectors or workplace police), and it may encourage people to do the right thing, and it will remove the “Who knew?” defense when they don't.
So, ANSI E1.53, Overhead mounting of luminaires, lighting accessories, and other portable devices: specification and practice, was written, offered for public review three times (with changes after the first two reviews to address comments), approved by ANSI, and published in 2016.
“We had no seatbelts or bike helmets back then …”
E1.53 could not have been written when I first started hanging lights, decades ago. The Occupational and Safety Health Administration (OSHA) had just been founded, and the lighting catalogs I have from then don't show safety cables. Our community's sense of what are reasonable safety measures has changed over the decades. It's not that we were bad then; we simply didn’t know what we didn’t know.
And we’re still learning. E1.53 is in public review now to clarify how rated equipment needs to be marked. Right now it requires rated clamps to be marked with "Safe Working Load" or "Working Load Limit." That marking takes up considerable space; some manufacturers use “SWL” or “WLL,” which are reasonably clear markings but do not conform to the standard. This was pointed out when someone was evaluating some equipment. Good news: someone was reading and using the standard. But we need to make the standard a little easier to use, and so the revision and public review.
Perhaps with the current standards--or any human endeavor at present--we have not thought of everything, every scenario, every single neighbor. But we can keep working at the standards, adapting to what is reasonable and possible for our time, and—I hope—getting a little bit better with each iteration.
Editor's note: Latebreaking standards news on the use of c-clamps and safety cables appears below.
ESTA Posts Revised Standard for Mounting Overhead Equipment for Public Review
BSR E1.53, a revision of ANSI E1.53-2016, Overhead mounting of luminaires, lighting accessories, and other portable devices: specification and practice, has been posted for public review on the ESTA website at http://estalink.us/pr. The standard covers specifications for the primary and secondary mounting devices for portable stage and studio luminaires and accessories (e.g., c-clamps and safety cables). It also covers their use. The existing standard is being revised to clarify marking requirements and environmental considerations. Comments are due before Nov. 20, 2018.
