Safety First! Bad weather & injuries out on the road

In this week’s video I head back out to the midwest for the third year in a row on a two week trip to the biggest air show on earth. Our crew provides an outdoor movie theater experience for thousands of campers, showing aviation themed movies each night after the daytime activities have wrapped up.

While this trip was a success overall, with good movies and great interviews each night, we experienced some pretty extreme weather. Between the seemingly constant bouts of rain, and the unusually gusty and unpredictable winds, we had our hands full on this one, and I came away from the trip a bit banged up.

It seems that each summer we are seeing more and more extreme weather. Especially in the midwest where winds seem to come from no where, and have more power than anything we see at home on a regular basis. Even here in the city last night, we had a storm roll through that caused flash flooding within minutes, and similar situations earlier in the week.

With these events becoming more common, it’s more important than ever to be aware of the limitations of your gear, and more importantly yourself & your crew. Putting yourself or your crew in harms way to prevent damage to gear in the face of weather is never going to work out well. When you’re up against high winds and flooding, sometimes you’ve simply got to step back and wait it out. Know when to call off a show, and you’ll be able to get back at it when things dry out.

Stay safe out there, there is a lot of summer & I suspect a lot more storms ahead of us yet this year.

During this trip, I found myself upside down and mostly submerged in a two foot or so deep puddle of mud, rainwater and nasty run-off from surrounding camp-sights. On a whim days earlier, I had purchased this rain jacket from Frogg Toggs, as it claimed to be the most breathable rain-jacket, and working in a sweaty rain jacket is worse than getting rained on.

At the time of my unfortunate meeting with the puddle, I had zipped in my left jacket pocket, my iPhone 6s… in my right pocket, I had a $300 SDI distribution amplifier I had just picked up out of the rain.

Not only is this jacket ridiculously breathable, but both of the pockets stayed completely dry even though I was fully submerged. I pulled grass and mud out of my underwear that night, but my phone was perfectly safe. Frogg Toggs for the win!