Between the audience and the production personnel, security and the artists were 240m of Mojo Aluminium Barrier incorporating 120m of back stands. Mojo Barriers director Jim Gaffney has supplied crowd barriers to Oasis for many years and while Oasis fans have always been exuberant audiences, there have never been any problems. So no-one expected the surge that swept through the crowd in Manchester Stadium in July 2nd during the band's summer tour, causing the front of stage barrier to move as the show was about to start.
There were no injuries, but the show has delayed by 20 minutes while the barrier was re-positioned back to its safe configuration and the rest of the show carried on without any problems.
Subsequent analysis of the incident left everyone happy that the Pitstop barriers had performed exactly as they were designed to. Subsequent discussions led the collective production team of Risks Contained, SJM, Oasis and Mojo Barriers working on the Cardiff show to implement a new, secondary barrier configuration.
The effect of this barrier design is that it splits the pressure excerpted by the audience, with the larger curved secondary barrier spreading the load of the main bulk of the fans in-front of the stage. The front area was filled on a 'first-come, first-in' basis, with 2,500 fans in front and a further 25,000 fans behind the secondary curved barrier.
Mojo Barriers installed 45 of their Barrier Load Monitor Sensors into the two sections of barrier to record the pressures applied by the crowd throughout the day. Also present at the show were researchers from the Centre for Crowd Management and Security Studies, who have been working with Mojo Barriers for a year, as part of their ongoing studies to correlate the relationships between pressures excerpted, the kind of music, the barrier design and the effect on the well-being of the audience.
Mojo Barriers managing director Patrick Jordan commented: "We are now starting to build a library of information that we hope will lead us to be able to give scientific advice to promoters, production managers and licensing officials with regards to them choosing the most appropriate barrier design for their particular event. Everyone was happy that this secondary barrier design achieved exactly the desired effect for this concert."
(Lee Baldock)
