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GOP Governor Mitch Daniels in cover-up
Emergency responders nationwide know what a National Weather Service warning means: Take cover. Immediately.
But that wasn’t the message fair officials delivered to concertgoers at the Indiana State Fair when they received that warning — the most serious alarm the National Weather Service can sound — at 8:39 p.m. Saturday. 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.
An Indianapolis Star review of documents and 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 an investigation and bringing in a New York-based engineering firm to investigate the structural collapse.
Gov. Mitch Daniels referred to the wind gust that upset the stage as a “fluke.”
“This is in no way a fluke or freak or unforeseeable,” said Mike Smith, senior vice president of AccuWeather Enterprise Solutions in Wichita, Kan.
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.
http://www.suntimes.com/news/nation/7125980-418/indiana-state-fair-stage-collapse-no-fluke.html