A five year old child was killed at today’s Huntsville Air Show when a freakishly powerful “microburst” of wind toppled a number of tents. The child’s name has not been released yet.

Details are still a bit sketchy at this time. I have read that the child was killed by either a portable air conditioner unit or a generator. WHNT is reporting that the event coordinators would not allow tents to be staked into the pavement. Instead they had to be restrained with water barrels. I’m not sure if that is standard for these types of events. I wouldn’t be too excited about a bunch of tent pegs being nailed into the pavement at my facility so I can’t blame the decision from that perspective. But you can guarantee that if a lawyer can show that the barrels provided less tie down force than pegs and that injuries could have been avoided if the tents were anchored more securely that there will be some serious lawsuits.

It goes without saying that this is a terrible tragedy. It’s hard to even think about such an event tearing apart your life.

Update: The family understandably wants the victim’s ID withheld overnight so that they can notify family. I just saw a news clip on WAAY about the story. The camera was surveying the damage and briefly focused on a woman, visibly wailing and crying, on her hands and knees in the grass. The anchor stated that they understand that she is the mother of the boy who died. Maybe it’s just me, but I thought it was unbelievably tacky to show a clip of her grieving for her son who just died in a freak accident and point her out during the broadcast.

Update x 2: I thought WAAY was classless by looping the video of the grieving mother until I switched over to WAFF. They led off their newscast by releasing the name and hometown of the boy who died despite the family’s request for that information to be withheld overnight. Twelve hours - is that too much to ask? I hope that WAFF producers are happy with themselves if some of the kid’s relatives learn about his death from the evening news instead of family. Jerks. Absolute jerks.

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This entry was posted by Brian on Sunday, June 29th, 2008 at 9:51 pm and is filed under Huntsville. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site. Please note the copyright policy.