Coachella and SXSW Production Companies are Building Coronavirus Triage Tents
Amidst the complete collapse of the live entertainment industry due to the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, some businesses have shifted their strategies to make lemonade out of lemons, among them production companies who have adapted tents intended to house festivalgoers into triage facilities for COVID-19 patients.
With flooded hospitals and local governments in dire need of expanded facilities to treat COVID-19 patients, Choura Events, which had been preparing to builds tents and staging for tens of thousands of fans at Coachella, South by Southwest and the BNP Paribas Open tennis tournament, has been working overtime to build temporary medical facilities in Southern California using that same infrastructure. The company has built four medical facilities in the L.A. area so far, according to The Los Angeles Times.
The company’s founder, Ryan Choura, explained the urgency to help out in any way possible:
“We pivoted so fast to being a rapid-response disaster relief team. If I didn’t know how to do Coachella, I couldn’t do this hospital. I saw patients coming in here and saw what they looked like. This is real, and we’ve got to move.”
Gallagher Staging, another L.A. firm who had been charged with building the main stage at Coachella, has been extremely busy building tented patient facilities and other structures for hospitals around L.A. and the Bay Area. Chief executive Joey Gallagher explained how the entertainment industry was gutted practically overnight, and how he’s been able to keep employees working on medical projects instead:
“The entertainment industry was maybe the first to be impacted by this. Even before all the news articles, we started hearing things would be canceled. Over a week it became an absolute standstill and all of our crew had absolutely no work,”
Gallagher elaborated on how the unique expertise of companies like his is well-suited to the situation:
“We’re an industry that moves faster than anyone. We’ll install an entire city on a blank slate. We have everything available: Wi-Fi, radios, generators, lighting, restrooms and wash stations. We can build a small city in a day or two, and that’s a need right now.”
Another company, Upstaging, which manufacturers metal sets, has re-tooled to start producing face shields for medical workers. Robin Shaw, a co-founder of the company, said:
“We deal with an industry where if we’re not fixing things ahead of the curve, the concert’s not happening. So we figured we had a lot to offer in this emergency.”
You can read the rest of the report over at The Los Angeles Times.
