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INDIANAPOLIS — Emergency responders nationwide know what a National Weather Service warning means: Take cover. Immediately.
By Darron Cummings, AP
But that wasn't the message fair officials delivered to concertgoers when they received that warning — the most serious alarm the National Weather Service can sound — at 8:39 p.m. Saturday night. Instead fair officials waited six minutes and then told 12,000 Sugarland fans assembled under a towering stage a very different message: The show would go on.
That was four minutes before high winds knocked over the stage structure, killing five people and injuring more than 45 others.
STORY: Collapse remains a puzzle
"Wow, that's incredible," weather.com meteorologist Tim Ballisty said of the decision not to immediately evacuate the grandstand. "It pains me to hear that because then the assumption is: Sugarland's about to come on, I don't want to miss this."
An Indianapolis Star review of documents as well as interviews with weather and safety experts suggests the choice not to evacuate was just the last in a series of decisions by fair officials and state police to ignore meteorologists' recommendations, nationally accepted safety practices, and even the fair's own severe weather emergency plan.
And, contrary to the way state officials have characterized the wind gust that brought down the stage, those weather experts insist the high winds were neither unpredictable, nor unforeseen.
State officials are launching their own investigation and bringing in a New York-based engineering firm to investigate the structural collapse, but they continue to portray it as an unforeseeable accident.
"It was a freakish act of God," fair spokesman Andy Klotz said at a news conference Tuesday afternoon, "and I don't know how it could have been prevented."
Gov. Mitch Daniels referred to the powerful wind gust that upset the stage as a "fluke."
Others strongly disagree.
"This is in no way a fluke or freak or unforeseeable," said Mike Smith, senior vice president of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions in Wichita, Kan. His firm provides weather information to a variety of public and private clients, including the Texas State Fair.
Smith said AccuWeather issued a warning to a client near the Indiana fairgrounds at 8:23 p.m. advising of 60 mph winds. Smith used the same radar systems as the National Weather Service — the same information available to fair officials.
That was 26 minutes before the collapse
"When you get a warning, you should act immediately," said Smith, a board certified consulting meteorologist and fellow of the American Meteorological Society. "You should not be second-guessing. … You need to act immediately. And in a case like that, it means take shelter."
But that was one of several warnings state fair officials and state police apparently failed to heed.
The first indication of potentially dangerous weather came well before Saturday evening. The National Weather Service had been sending notifications since Thursday morning about the possibility of high winds Saturday night.
There were other, more frequent warnings.
Daniel McCarthy, the meteorologist-in-charge at the National Weather Service in Indianapolis, told the Star that a forecaster alerted state fair officials in a 1 p.m. conference call Saturday about the possibility of a storm — including up to 60 mph winds — in Indianapolis between 8 and 9 p.m.
Moreover, meteorologist Ballisty said, strong winds almost always arrive ahead of a storm.
By the time of that conference call Saturday, state fair officials had received three days of notifications — called outlooks — about the storm, which are a signal to prepare a plan for shelter and remain on alert.
Then, at 5:57 p.m., the weather service notified fair officials they were issuing a "severe thunderstorm watch," the second highest alert level — and just one step below a warning that recommends immediate evacuation. It's about that time, Ballisty said, that fair officials should have "perhaps" rescheduled the concert.
Instead, fair officials acknowledge they waited until 8:30 to prepare for an evacuation. Nine minutes later the National Weather Service issued its strongest alarm — the "severe thunderstorm warning" that carries a recommendation to take shelter immediately. In other words, evacuate.
McCarthy has been training emergency responders and others in the weather service's "outlook-watch-warning" sequence for 13 years.
"It's a ready, set, go type of concept," McCarthy said. "When a warning is issued its time to go. Go to safety."
That's not what happened.
Instead, the fair's executive director Cindy Hoye, who had been monitoring the approaching storm with State Police Special Operations Commander Brad Weaver, turned to an old friend for help. That person was Bob Richards, 49, operations manager of the four Emmis radio stations in Indianapolis and program director from Hank FM, one of the concert's sponsors.
Richards said Hoye asked him to make an announcement to the audience waiting for Sugarland to take the stage. He said Hoye told him exactly what to say and he transcribed it on his cellphone.
"As you can see to the west, there are some clouds," Richards recited. "We are all hoping for the best — that the weather is going to bypass us. But there is a very good chance that it won't. So just a quick heads-up before the show starts: If there is a point during the show where we have to stop the show onstage, what we'd like to have you do is calmly move toward the exits and then head across the street to either the Champions Pavilion, the Blue Ribbon Pavilion or the Pepsi Coliseum.
"And then, once the storm passes and everything's safe, we're going to try our best to come back and resume the show — which we have every belief that that's going to happen."
The crowd cheered.
"So please get ready," Richards continued, "because in just a couple of minutes we're going to try to get Sugarland onstage. Have a great show."
In the aftermath of the tragedy, Richards said the timing of his announcement and his role were mischaracterized. The Star and some other news outlets reported that his announcement was made after fair officials had decided they would proceed with an evacuation.
"I was never told or knew of an evacuation notice," Richards said. "I was not a part of those decisions and I don't know the timeline for those decisions. … I was just doing what I was asked to do."
Klotz said fair officials were in the process of trying to make an evacuation announcement when the roof collapsed.
Fair officials had no reason to think the storm would cause the extent of damage that it did, Klotz said. Just a week earlier, the fairground had three thunderstorms that he called "very similar," without the same punishing results.
When asked why fair officials didn't prepare an evacuation plan hours earlier, when the National Weather Service issued a watch, Klotz said: "I was not aware of other security and emergency personnel, what they know about that in relation to earlier National Weather Service warnings."
He said the only thing damaged by the winds was the stage roof. Even a large catering tent nearby "didn't have a flap out of place," he said.
Klotz insisted fair officials followed protocol in warning fairgoers throughout the evening, as information became available. But the Star's review of the fair's one-page severe thunderstorm policy suggests otherwise.
That policy says fair workers are supposed to announce severe thunderstorm warnings and direct fairgoers to safety. Numerous concertgoers said they were never told of the National Weather Service warning — information that would have helped them make an informed decision about whether to leave their seats — and it was not mentioned in Richards' announcement from the stage.
While fair officials did not order an evacuation, a few hundred yards to the west the fair's amusement operator took a different approach as the storm raced toward the packed midway. Officials of North American Midway Entertainment shut down several of the company's tall rides before the deadly winds arrived.
The company may close rides at its discretion in the event of bad weather, said company spokesman David Sease. For example, Sease said, under a written emergency action plan the company can — and typically does — close rides in the event of lightning.
And that's what they did just minutes before high winds hit the fairgrounds. Sease said managers were monitoring the skies as the storm approached and noticed lightning.
Other fairs seem to take fewer liberties with interpreting National Weather Service instructions.
At the Iowa State Fair, where Sugarland was supposed to perform Sunday, marketing director Lori Chappell said safety officials adhere closely to the recommendations put out by the weather service and the level of seriousness of its notifications.
"Depending on the level it is," Chappell said, "our actions are in accordance with that."
Contributing: David Lindquist of The Indianpolis Star
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