Phil Collins carnage: 13 broken limbs
So how did more than a dozen people end up in hospital with broken bones at an open-air concert featuring a 68-year-old pop star?
Hawke’s Bay St John Ambulance reported it had a busy Waitangi Day ferrying people to hospital from the Mission Estate Winery concert that featured Phil Collins. Seven ankle fractures and one thighbone fracture required surgery, with a number of women over the age of 50 and a St John ambulance officer among the casualties.
All but one of the 13 people transported by ambulance as a result of fractured lower limbs spent the night at Hawke’s Bay Hospital, St John Hawke’s Bay territory manager Brendon Hutchinson told Stuff on Thursday.
On Friday, Hawke’s Bay District Health Board’s Orthopaedic Service head of department Stephen Andrews said the influx of patients from the concert placed a significant increased demand on their service, but hospital staff arranged additional acute operating time to ‘‘get all the patients through as quickly as possible’’.
Because quite a few of those injured were from out of town, some had left the area in just a cast and would require further treatment from their home DHB, Andrews added.
Most were ‘‘moderate level injuries’’, with a common cause ‘‘slipping on the wet ground while trying either to get to the bathroom or leave,’’ he said.
Hutchinson put the injuries down to wet weather making the venue’s bank ‘‘very slippery, poor choice of footwear, and the large crowd’’, backed on Friday by the concert’s event manager Gary Craft.
Admitting that the number of injuries was ‘‘higher than what we wanted’’, Craft said the number of trips to hospital was probably no more than 25 per cent higher than average from the annual event, which has been running since 1993.
A broken ankle in 2012, a few ‘‘broken bones’’ in 2010 and a man knocked unconscious after a brawl in 2006 are among the previous incidents reported by
Every year, the on-site medical team of around 20 to 30 (including a trauma doctor who on Wednesday helped save a man who went into cardiac arrest) are ‘‘kept busy with cut fingers, cut toes and bruised things’’, Craft said, ‘‘it’s just we had more transports than usual’’.
‘‘That just happens from time to time. We also had no arrests this year and we normally have two or three – the crowd of 27,000 were fantastic and very happy.’’
He confirmed that ankle injuries were the most common problem this year and that women over 50 were over-represented among those who had to be assisted.
‘‘In one case, it was one of the St John officers.
‘‘She had a bit of a slide, put her other foot down and stepped into a bit of a hole.’’
Weather was definitely a big factor. ‘‘The ground became slippery due to the rain. The topography of the Mission site is reasonably steep in parts and, whilst we lay out pathways, people don’t always follow those pathways.
‘‘If there’s been a particular area that’s had a lot of traffic through it the grass gets worn down and there’s quite a bit of clay in our soil so the clay gets damp and becomes slippery.’’
Looking at the hilled area on Friday morning, Craft said the grass cover was still very good (‘‘there are no noticeably bad muddy patches’’) so the ground had held up well.
Some of the crowd’s choice of footwear was ‘‘less-than-practical’’ given the conditions, Craft said, despite warnings posted on both the website and at the venue. ‘‘A lot of them turn up in jandals, which as soon as it gets a little bit wet become slippery. It’s not really practical footwear to wear to an open-air concert when it’s raining, but people do.’’
That was an observation backed up by Hutchinson’s comments on Thursday. ‘‘The organisers worked really hard in advising patrons about footwear, but we still see people coming along in the wrong type of footwear.’’
Craft speculated that concert-goers may also have been caught by surprise by how slippery it was given the overhead conditions.
‘‘When it’s really raining heavily people are probably a bit more careful,’’ Craft said, adding that conditions were nowhere near bad enough to call the concert off, as was the case in 2009 when Lionel Ritchie was due to perform.
With Elton John scheduled to grace the same venue in 2020, Craft said Wednesday’s events would be assessed during debriefs with St John and the police.
‘‘And if they have concerns about any particular areas, we’ll get their feedback and action that.’’
He said they would look into whether anything could be done to make the site’s topography safer. ‘‘It has been an ongoing thing. I’ve been running this event for almost 17 years and we’ve done a considerable amount of earthworks since then to try to flatten out particular areas, but things can always be better.’’