News

2 May 2012

Indiana story – feedback

Nice work on the Indiana piece. We posted a link to your digital edition on our social media pages. Glad someone had the balls to finally use words like “screwup” and “dumb.”

Couple of small things. The word “court” was used a few times. This case has not actually been to court. All of the info we have is either from the OSHA report, the indie engineering and safety reports or from various depositions conducted by attorneys for the victims and various parties being sued (Mid-America, IATSE, etc.) Whatever info we get from the depositions has a slant. This is being tried in the media at this point and lawyers are releasing stuff selectively. i.e., The are leaking stuff that is favorable to their client.

Also, our sources tell us that the spot operators did not go into the truss for the show. They were never given clearance to come down after the opening act finished.

The big one that no one is talking about is that al of this. EVERYTHING since the actual collapse has been about money. I don’t know anything about the Aussie civil tort system but here, the idea is to go after the at-fault entity with the deepest pockets. In other words, it is possible for two parties to be at fault–one 80% and one only 20%, say–and the legal eagles will go after the 20% at fault entity for as much money as they can get if that entity has more money to sue for.  In this case everything is screwed up. According to the EPD from 2010, Mid-America carries between $1 million and $3 million in insurance. Our sources place it at $1 million.

But the biggest monkey wrench here is that the State of Indiana is shielded by law from legal judgements higher than $5 million. If not for that legal protection, the State would be the deep pockets. But they have paid everything they are going to pay. Mid-America has limited insurance which makes it hard to sue them for a ton of money. That leaves IATSE and their pension fund and the band as the deep pockets.

That whole legal mess is driving all of this.

Again, great work, really appreciate that you put it together. We have been covering it closely with SoundProLive but have seen pretty much zero about it after the initial event by any of the US-based print publications. Good job, dude.

Oh, please check out our digital edition format at Live2PlayeZines.com  It is tablet friendly, totally browser based (which makes it easy to put on a restricted site for subscription purposes) and incorporates video and other media while eliminating the need to zoom in on a page to read it. Oh,and ALL of the ads have video embedded as well. We are looking for a couple of other publishers to adopt the format as we try to “dread the word” that there is more to digital editions than the pdf-based stuff out there now.

Thanks for all you do.

– Bill Evans

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