Massive Effort Gets Nashville's Bridgestone Arena Quickly Back in Operation After Flood Broadcast infrastructure faces a year's worth of restoration after water-main break By Dan Daley, Audio Editor
Friday, December 9, 2022 - 10:31 am
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Black Friday lived up to its moniker this year for the NHL's Nashville Predators. About 5 a.m. on Nov. 25, an estimated 2 million-plus gallons of water poured into the production and event levels of the team's Bridgestone Arena home, the result of a water-main break. The disaster inundated the venue's broadcast-control room and TOC spaces, damaging broadcast and live AV systems and equipment.
One of the main points of water intrusion was directly above the DiGiCo S31 console used to mix broadcast audio and live sound. Water sat 3 ft. deep in some spots and caused some melt damage to the ice.
The arena had already experienced the effects of a 100-year catastrophic flood in Nashville: a 19-in. rainfall over two days in May 2010 brought the Cumberland River literally inside.
My chief engineer, Stephen Hart, was on his way in when [the main] broke, recalls Jacob Lutz, director, technical operations, Nashville Predators. He called me to say we had 3-6 ft. of standing water in the control room and operations center. I knew we were in trouble.
The day after Thanksgiving became a mad scramble to save what broadcast- and event-production components could be salvaged and immediately returned to use and to find substitutes and alternatives for everything that couldn't be saved at a venue that Pollstar described as the busiest arena in the world. Fortunately, Nashville's experience with dealing efficiently with disasters from floods to tornados and the fact that it takes the Tennessee state motto - The Volunteer State - seriously gave the Preds more than a fighting chance.
Nashville Predators' Jacob Lutz: My chief engineer called me to say we had 3-6 ft. of standing water in the control room and operations center. I knew we were in trouble after that.
An exhaustive and collaborative effort by arena staff, more than 30 public-works agencies, and vendors and other private companies brought 300 people to the arena within hours of the break. As a result, only two games, against Colorado and Columbus on that Friday and Saturday, respectively, were postponed, and the crew was ready for the Tuesday, Nov. 29 match with the Anaheim Ducks.
It would have been easy to shut the building down for 20, 30, 40, 50 days, Nashville Predators CEO Sean Henry told the Tennessean. Relocate the games; work a deal with another city; temporarily cancel or postpone concerts. But we sat together on Friday night, Saturday, and Sunday and said, How do we host all those events?' because it's an important thing that we do.
Much of the immediate restoration work was brute force. For instance, more than 1,000 box fans were brought into the building to vent the moisture, along with temporary duct work put into place. Meanwhile, Lutz's teams had begun to protect what it could from additional water damage, such as sourcing tarps and covering the Forecast workstations that make up many of the work surfaces in the control room and TOC.
It's a hockey arena. We don't have a lot of tarps and things lying around, says Lutz. We're just grabbing whatever we could grasp. We're going with the mindset that we need to save everything we can because this tech center is probably going down.
Virtual Cavalry Arrives Remotely It may have been Thanksgiving in the U.S. but not in Canada, where Evertz, one of the Predators' main technology vendors, is located. According to Lutz, Evertz assembled a reaction team that remoted in within 45 minutes, assessing damage to routers and other platforms and confirming data backups, the latter especially important as the broadcast teams transitioned to external mobile units for production, enabling the team to quickly upload router and other settings.
It was important for us, he says, to have companies like Evertz, Ross, Anthony James Partners, our integrator CTI [the last two having designed and built, respectively, the venue's control rooms], and others able to pick up the phone at that moment and help us out, to be able to get in remotely while the equipment was on because we didn't have any time to waste. Good backup practices, he notes, helped immeasurably in getting production back on track as quickly as it did.
The situation was not completely dire. The venue still had a working video system, and the backup systems for OES scoreboard management and shot clock were undamaged.
With the control room and TOC out of commission, production migrated to a production truck. Live Mobile Group (LMG) sent over locally based TNDV Elevation to handle the first two games post flood. Elevation served as the production-control room for the facility and served as the distribution point for feeds, per NHL requirements.
Thanks to the work of arena staff, public agencies, and vendors, Nashville's Bridgestone Arena postponed only two events after a water-main break flooded the production-control room and TOC.
The venue's Ross Xpression graphics system was ported over to TNDV Elevation, and the show files were loaded into Elevation's onboard platforms. Working directly with Ross and Anthony James Partners, the Predators were able to get the existing Ross Tessera LED system operable for the first game. Although the system was unstable, having a team of engineers on standby and onsite, with multiple redundant backups in place throughout the entire signal flow, allowed the use of all LEDs for clock, score, and in-bowl advertising.
It was a good short-term fix. By Tuesday evening, the crew was ready to produce a game.
We didn't ha
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Massive Effort Gets Nashville's Bridgestone Arena Quickly Back in Operation After Flood Broadcast infrastructure faces a year's worth of restoration after water-main break By Dan Daley, Audio Editor 
