Three trapped in earlier type of Dreamspace
Feb 13 2009 by Gareth Llewellyn, The Journal
A HELPER told Dreamspace jurors of the terrifying moment an earlier Maurice Agis creation was ripped skywards in a freak storm.
Kathryn Mommolotti had been signed up when Agis toured Germany with a giant inflatable art tent in 1986.
The installation – called Colourspace and weighing 1500kg – was shown without incident in Cologne and Hamburg. But disaster struck when the 30m by 30m tent was opened close to the promenade in the Northern coastal town of Travermunde, Newcastle Crown Court head. Ms Mommolotti, left in charge while Agis had a day off, told how a wild ‘tornado’ storm suddenly blew from inland.
Colourspace was whipped in an instant from its moorings with visitors trapped inside, the jury heard. And Ms Mommolotti watched helpless as three fell from the structure when it snagged on flag poles just yards from the sea.
Recalling the incident that left her deeply upset and Agis himself badly shaken, she said: “The weather changed dramatically. It was an ordinary day, I think it was overcast but not windy. Then it started to rain and very suddenly it changed from light rain to heavy rain and the wind got up badly.
“I was conscious at a certain point that the sky got very dark and I saw a tornado like structure in the sky. It all happened very quickly.”
Ms Mommolotti told how the wind was so strong it blew out her contact lenses. And then Colourspace was suddenly whisked away as the storm struck, she said. “From one moment to the next the structure was there and then it wasn’t,” she told jurors.
“It just took off before my very eyes. The tornado was coming from inland towards the sea. The structure lifted up.” Ms Mommolotti told how Colourspace was heading towards the sea when it hit promenade flag poles.
“When the structure hit the flag poles which weren’t too far from where I was standing I actually saw three people fall out of the structure” she said. In a statement to German police investigating the accident, Agis said Colourspace had been properly pegged down, that he always cleared visitors using a loud hailer or microphone if winds began to rise and that the structure had been inspected after he made it in Berlin in 1984.
He said: “You couldn’t anticipate the gale force storm on the day of the accident.”
Agis’s Dreamspace installation blew from its rope moorings on a hot summers day at Riverside Park, Chester-le-Street in July, 2006, killing Elizabeth Collings, 68 from Seaham, County Durham, and Claire Furmedge, 38, from Chester-le-Street. Several others were injured, including three-year-old Rosie Wright.
Agis, 77, from Bethnal Green, East London denies two charges of manslaughter and another of breaching health and safety regulations. The trial continues.
