(photos accumulated from a variety of sources…Ottawa Citizen, Flickr, etc.)
I figured I should fast-forward to story of interest right now, instead of catching up on reviews from the past week. If you didn’t know already, the main stage at Bluesfest collapsed last night while battling against a massive windstorm.
My story starts out by heading down to the fairgrounds for the final day of Bluesfest. As always, I’m sad to see it go, but happy to see it go at the same time. I had a hard time with the Gauntlet this year…I caught a cold mid-way through and those late nights did not help much!
I’m heading down later than I wanted to arrive, but at least I let Trish know that she should go without me because I knew she wanted to get there in time for Cheap Trick. As I’m walking down Booth Street, I can see this shadow which can only be described as Sauron descending from Mordor (or the Gatineau Hills…take your pick). It was the most ominous cloud I had ever seen. I had a few choices ahead of me…do I hightail it back to the car? Do I go forward and take shelter along the way? I spied the situation…I was at Lebreton Flats and I could easily stay inside a bus shelter. But how much shelter would that REALLY provide me? So I decided to enter no-man’s land…a kilometer of no shelter between Lebreton bus shelters and the War Museum. Along the way I was texting Trish telling her that she better get out of there…something big was coming. I wasn’t even going to bother entering the fairgrounds. I knew lightning (or something worse!) was on its way down and my only safety net was the War Museum lobby.
When I arrived in front of the museum, I figured I would sit and listen to the music until the rain started.
Then the unthinkable happened.
A gust of wind essentially swooped into the stage area and pushed out the roof. The roof was flapping in the wind and at one point I guess the structure said “Hey wait a minute, the roof is attached to the entire lighting and tarpauline structure…I’m going to go along with it! So then the entire thing collapsed in one fell swoop.
Here is a video taken from basically where I was standing outside the gate. Note that from the video, you can’t really tell if it hits the crowd.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OvjHZNKwMp4
Here is a better video of the entire thing collapsing:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dfqpXNfywT4
So at this moment I go into panic mode. “Where is Trish? Is she alright? Are there other of my friends out there?” I think “Do I go in and look for Trish?” but then the swarms of thousands of people made me realize it was a fool’s errand and I headed into the museum to take shelter from the storm. Interestingly enough, I had not one drop of rain on me. Yes, I consider myself quite smart for hanging out near the museum instead of going inside what can only be described as “Windmageddon ’11”.
Inside the war museum I saw my buddy Wes who was in the beer tent right next to the main stage and figured he owed his life to the fact that the wind had knocked the entire structure backwards and not sideways into the beer tent. I frantically started texting my friends and found out that Mike, Rachel, Andre and Karilee were all offsite at the time which was great news. My favourite text from Andre is “heading down now. Looks like poncho time!!!” not realizing the extent of the storm clouds! Texts slowly trickled in…here’s some news for new cellular phone owners…with thousands of people using their phones in the same area, sometimes nothing works for you. Trish finally found me and recounted the harrowing tale.
Essentially Cheap Trick was finishing up a song and then all of a sudden left the stage. They must have seen the storm wind coming. Two seconds later Trish is caught up in a windstorm so fierce that when I see her, there is dirt in all her clothes and hair! She then said the stage collapsed before her eyes and she hightailed it out of there looking for shelter. There were fears of other structures falling down…namely the videographer scaffolds (turns out the Mayor Jim Watson was up on the scaffold at the time!) and the speaker stacks. She made the smart move by entering the museum from the North side where all the people weren’t heading towards and eventually found me and told me the tale.
It was storming pretty bad for awhile we stuck around for an hour after texting our friends to let them know that Bluesfest was effectively cancelled and there was no use in coming down. I was quite scared that there may be fatalities but it sounds like a few people ended up in the hospital and are out of the hospital 12 hours later. Whew!
Trish and I managed to share a poncho (sweet!) and walked back to our cars (where I managed to get soaked feet while avoiding every puddle…damn you Pumas!) and along the way Trish swerved out of the way of something and then I realized there was a tree in the middle of the road! In fact, there were three along the way and I’m sure a dozen more in the downtown core.
I recommend reading the articles up on the Ottawa Citizen for more information on the crazy, crazy end of Bluesfest. I’m just glad that no one was killed and I commend the staff on site that maintained order and informed us (well those of us inside of the museum) of what was going on.