Fabric structures sector prepares for in tents training
As the fabric venues sector faces higher wind speeds, increased regulation and the loss of Grandfather Rights, its workforce must sign up to newly developed courses, tent pioneer Rudi Enos tells me.
Clockwise from left: The Chevron structure in action at Leeds Festival; Rudi Enos; a Tensile Fabric Roofed Structure at Latitude Festival; Alex Prideaux.
The designer of the live music sector’s largest and most spectacular tents for over 45 years, Rudi Enos is widely viewed as one of the world’s leading authorities on fabric structures. He and his company Special Structures Lab (SSL) are the brains behind those spectacular canopies under which festivalgoers have partied in their millions since last century.
From the modular Kayam tent developed in the late 1980s and the Tensile 1 or Valhalla a decade later, to today’s 50,000 capacity Chevron structure, his designs have graced festivals and events including Glastonbury, Reading and Leeds, Roskilde Festival, Soul Survivor, Disney on Ice, MTV and hundreds of others, as well as a host of corporate and sporting events.
Now he and his colleagues in the Guild of Tentmasters are addressing a remarkable gap in the provision of training in his industry: until very recently, the professionals with the skills and disciplines needed to design, erect and manage these structures have required few if any vocational qualifications, dependent instead on experience acquired through years of traditional practice in the outdoor event sector, including the erection of marquees and circus big tops.
While tented structures at events have an impressive safety record, the well-documented collapse of a tent at the 60,000 capacity Pukkelpop Festival, Belgium, in 2011, killing five people and injuring over 100 others, highlights the tragic consequences when something goes wrong.
The tent sector faces other pressures, too, as the construction industry regulations CDM, which have long applied to stages and other “temporary demountable structures (TDSs)”, are increasingly rolled out to tented or fabric-covered structures. Under CDM the quaintly named Grandfathers’ Rights, which allowed senior tradespeople with a lifetime of experience to continue working without qualifications, were phased out on 31 December last year.
Consequently, the guild, which Enos founded in 1992, has joined forces with the specialist training and accreditation agency ESITS to devise three new courses for tent builders.
“Now, if you don’t have an NVQ or a recognised trade qualification, you're not allowed on a construction site,” says Enos. “Where construction goes, so does the event industry. Soon, if you haven't got some kind of a ticket [certificate], you won't be allowed to put a tent up. With ESITS, we’re helping to create the curriculum and the courses offering the specialist knowledge that tentmasters need.”
According to SSL’s technical director, Alex Prideaux, who’s marketing and promoting the courses, “A lot of people out there have a great deal of experience, but don't necessarily have the [academic] knowhow. People operating at height, leading teams and building these multi-million-pound structures really need to take responsibility and be qualified.
“There are three qualifications, the entry level Tent GECO [General Events Crew Operative, the standard ESITS qualification adapted for tents]. That covers induction, site awareness, general health and safety, allows you to operate on site, and demonstrates you're familiar with certain equipment. The Tent Technician courses are for the advanced individual, learning about components, build methodologies, build sequences, including basic engineering, wind loading, anchors and counter weighting. One completes the course with comprehensive learning, as well as practical experience. Finally, the Tentmaster qualification is about team management, planning, health and safety, designing, and more comprehensive engineering information.”
Enos and Prideaux flag up an additional challenge facing the tent structure industry, the increasing speed and unpredictability of winds as climate changes. Although most UK events plan for constant wind speeds of up to 28 metres per second, or 62mph, they believe the standard should be raised to 33 metres per second (76mph), to allow for gusts of over 80mph, which one UK festival experienced last year.
Enos explains that tented structures present additional challenges to the temporary demountable structures already governed by CDM regulations. “A TDS can be a cabin, a stage, a portable toilet block or a seating grandstand,” he says. “But the minute you add the fabric roof, in any way, on a stage, or even on a dodgems track at the fairground, the whole dynamic of the loadings changes. If you don't have the specialist knowledge of those changes and the impact on the structure, you can't put it up safely.”
Prideaux adds, “As weather patterns are changing, we are under pressure in the UK to raise the wind code so that these structures will withstand high gust speeds. Festival and event organisers are responsible enough to either evacuate structures or to make them safe. But, as engineers, designers and architects, we need to make sure that we are operating within those parameters.
“We hope this [initiative] gains critical mass. Once that happens, a lot of large festival organisers and large parts of the events industry will make it mandatory for [certificated] personnel to operate on their sites. ESITS qualifications prove to a festival organiser, or to insurance, that they are competent and qualified. Individual guild members with a Tentmaster qualification are much more attractive to an employer because they have their own insurance. And they are up to speed with all the latest compliance.”
For those wishing to sign up to courses, he explains, there will be dedicated syllabuses for different types of structure at both Tentmaster and Tent Technician level. These include marquees, stretch tents, big top and festival structures, saddle span structures and smaller tents (tipis, yurts and glamping). The guild is working to ensure its qualifications will be recognised as equivalent to CSCS qualifications in the construction sector. The first Frame Tent course is due to start this spring, with other courses following in the coming months.
