Last Wednesday, 20-year-old Notre Dame student Declan Sullivan crashed to his death upon the collapse of the 50-foot hydraulic scissor lift on which he filmed football practices for the team. The primary factor causing the fall of the tower was high winds, which were gusting higher than 50 mph. Sullivan was instructed to film despite the manufacturer’s warning that the lifts should be used in winds no higher than 25 mph, according to the South Bend Tribune.
The tragedy has broached issues of safety for filming on towers across the country, as students go up on similar lifts every day to film practice, including at Duke. The football team typically uses three or four lifts to capture the practice at different angles and to observe the team’s different units. The film is integral to Duke’s preparation every week.
“[Watching the practice film] is the first thing [the coaches] do when they come in,” said Tom Long, Director of Football Video Operations. “They will spend a good two to three hours analyzing it. We shoot everything from the start of practice to the end of practice.”
With this extensive use of the lifts, there seems to exist the potential for tragedies such as the one at Notre Dame. Duke’s football staff, however, said they make every effort to ensure that such an accident does not occur on their watch.
“We use, for lack of a better term, common sense,” Long said.
In addition to intuition, Long said that a key component of the process are the constant updates the team receives from a weather risk management service called WeatherData. Duke uses these updates for both the safety of their players and knowledge of whether or not it is appropriate to send videographers up to the towers.
Another crucial aspect is communication between the various parties on the team. Head coach David Cutcliffe said in his Sunday teleconference that he works closely with the film crews and personally looks out for their safety. Long verified this, noting that there have been times in the past three years when Cutcliffe personally has called people down from the towers due to what he perceived as unsafe weather conditions.
“The Thursday before the Miami game [this season], it was raining pretty bad and they tried to get an hour’s worth of practice in,” said Adam Barkley, an assistant video coordinator who works full-time for the department and regularly films on the lifts. “But before we even went up in the air, Coach Cut told us that in no uncertain terms we were not to go up.”
The close working relationship between Cutcliffe and the videographers includes having coaches on the lifts. Barkley noted that, in addition to Cutcliffe, safeties coach Jim Knowles and offensive coordinator Kurt Roper have spent time on the towers.
“I’ve never been worried that it might happen to me,” said Bryan Fox, a senior who works on the film staff. “Coach Cutcliffe, as well as Tom and other support staff, have really been on top of letting us know, even before we set our stuff up.”
Still, despite Duke’s mindfulness regarding the safety of its film staff, the university lacks a standardized policy regarding when exactly the lifts should and should not be used. While the “common sense” reactions have been successful in keeping the staff safe thus far, there is no set of rules in place that states exactly what weather conditions are deemed dangerous enough to prohibit people from being in the towers.
Duke may not get a chance to adapt its own policy, though, as signs point towards the NCAA addressing the issue soon. While Duke athletic director Kevin White declined to comment for the story due to his former role as Notre Dame’s athletic director, Long believes the issue will be resolved universally.
“We [video directors] have a meeting every year called the Collegiate Sports Video Association, and we bring up problems,” Long said. “I’m sure it will be the first thing brought up at the meetings this year, to establish [a policy] not just here at Duke but maybe throughout the entire NCAA.”
This notwithstanding, given the influence of Sullivan’s death and the inherent instability of such lifts, these filming practices may never seem completely safe again.
“You feel the sway every time you go up there,” Barkley said. “You never feel quite normal.”
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