T.S. Gopalakrishnan, who is a staff instructor at InfoComm International and one of the few CTS holders in India, outlined the basic precautions to be taken during event management to ensure safety, and highlighted the points to look out for, in a presentation that took place at Infocomm India Summit on the 12th of September.
Given that the planning phase often takes a long tenure, while the real construction phase is squeezed into a few sleepless nights, the safety checklist is often forgotten. It is the duty and requirement of every professional present at the site, therefore to do his bit. For that, the Audio-Visual professionals should be engaged, alert, equipped and trained.
As Krishnan elaborated, most safety mishaps tend to happen at the end. “Transportation and loading is taken care of as the equipment is usually expensive. Set-up is also done carefully by experts in the supervision of experienced personnel. It is mostly during dismantling and packing that majority of undesirable incidents happen. Therefore, special care and attention should be given in that context.”
Assuring safety measures can be categorized into two major checklists:
safety of workers, and proper handling of equipment.Workers must be provided with protective working gear like helmets, hard hats to safeguard against falling objects, and fall arrest systems for projects that require working in heights.
“There should be no tangled cables lying around to trip the unwary visitor. All equipment must be steadily mounted. Wiring and electrical loads are to be intricately designed to prevent fire hazards,” were some of the points Gopalakrisnan recited off his fingers. As an example of unforeseen catastrophes, he sited events where dynamic conditions in presence of people had not been considered, and what seemed steady and safe in static became tottering and collapsed under the pulsing energy of a moving crowd. Also, metal objects may sometimes create voltage differences that culminate in an electric shock to an unsuspecting person.
The talk gave an comprehensive sense of the effort and involvement of the personnel who have to run the show, and an insight into the best practices formulated by the speaker in lieu of his long-term experience.
BW Reporters
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