[look 171]

Originally Posted by Hugh R

My work isn't just production safety like stunts and special effects. Its also about logistics. Case in point, we filmed the movies "Deja Vu" and The Guardian in NOLA, before Katrina. "Deja Vu" is a pretty good Sc-Fi move if you haven't seen it.

We planned for Katrina, knew hurricanes could be a factor, maybe we shouldn't have filmed there, but not my call. You may recall the hundreds of yellow school buses that got flooded. We had hundreds of production and personal vehicles between those two show. We lost exactly one pickup truck, one trailer and one really large photocopy machine, that is it. My fault, I was there and didn't check the automatic garage openers, and their manual over-rides, which failed in a power loss, the manual over-rides were rusted and trashed, I should have known better, but won't make that mistake again. Lesson learned.

We had an evacuation plan, nothing elaborate, but we had a plan.

I can tell you for a fact that the NOLA police didn't have one case of bottled water for emergency supplies. NOLA like most cities got millions after 9/11, that money "disappeared"

We evacuated 750 people from those two shows on chartered flights, and by car, a day or two before because we watched the weather and had a plan.

You have the best job in the world. Just enough headache to keep you busy but you really have to know your job and know enough about every aspect of specialty type construction, fabrication, rigging, safety, and logistics. Problem solving is the most fun, but I reckon that a lot of red tape gets in the way.